ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the oriental-observer tale took hold in America in the years before the Revolution as a way of helping its readers reflect on new ways of thinking about themselves as individuals and as a collective people. In an examination of Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s and Philip Freneau’s Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (1770), the oriental-observer tale provides the means to express the true strangeness of that sentimental ego whose pursuit of its own self-interest contradicted the more contingent, spiritual notion of subjectivity of the colonies’ own homiletic traditions. The oriental genre also helps the authors paint a disorienting picture of the world constructed by such an ego, one dominated by print, but also by a feverish mobility, appetite, and aggression. Father Bombo thus expresses Americans’ shock at the first-person epistemology and morality of the English novel and Scottish Common-Sense philosophy just beginning to gain traction in American universities, under such leaders as Princeton’s John Witherspoon, at the end of America’s first crest of dramatic economic growth. What emerges from that engagement, Father Bombo shows, are new notions of theology but also of liberty, which, in turn, will help shape in surprising ways the colonies’ revolutionary confrontation of Britain.
