In the recent Itinerario interview “Are We All Global Historians Now?” (vol. 36, no. 2, 2012, pp. 7–28), David Armitage begins by describing his transition from Atlantic to global history, and ends by predicting an especially promising future for transoceanic approaches to global studies. Jim Egan's Oriental Shadows provides—from within literary studies—a strong example of how such a globalized framework might produce a compelling reimagination of American literature. Oriental Shadows argues that an “American” identity emerges not so much from looking eastward—across the Atlantic, toward a British empire and culture—but from looking to the East—across the globe itself to an empire and culture in the Middle East and Asia whose history and accomplishments were seen to eclipse those of Britain. American identity therefore took early shape within this global triangulation of America, Europe, and Asia, rather than in a national, continental, or even transatlantic context.

Egan's four central chapters focus on four writers—Puritan New England poet Anne Bradstreet, colonial Georgia poet James Kirkpatrick, Pennsylvania writer and statesman Benjamin Franklin, and Baltimorean fiction writer and essayist Edgar Allan Poe—each of whom “offered the East as a solution to America's inferior civilized status by suggesting that America become more civilized . . . by adopting aesthetic styles and standards long associated with an East cast as superior aesthetically to both America and Europe” (p. 4). The book's introduction positions these writers and their texts, however, within a much larger American literary field, such that the presence of the East in early American writing, once it is noticed, seems to be everywhere. That presence speaks to the global dimensions of both colonial American writing and colonial identity formation.

The East engaged by these writers is largely the world of the Ottoman Empire, India, Turkey, and Arabia. Bradstreet's poem “The Four Monarchies,” for example, uses the figure of Alexander to ground “colonial British American claims to be civilized on classical figures associated with the East” (p. 23) rather than by looking either to Europe or the Americas. Likewise, Kirkpatrick's 1732 poem “An Address to James Oglethorpe, Esq.” suggests that “America helps Britain look more civilized by allowing it to look more ‘Eastern’” (p. 46). In three Oriental tales, Franklin turns to the East to help define the category of the human, while Poe's story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” nominates a “superior, Eastern model of literature” as a prototype for the emerging literature of the United States (p. 119).

One of the most exciting and unexpected results of Egan's framework is that the regional identities that have so often separated pockets of scholarly focus within early American literary studies—the South, New England, the Caribbean—are brought into dialogue and coherence without eclipsing their differences. Writers in locations as diverse and far away as Georgia, Jamaica, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Philadelphia all looked to the East in the process of positioning themselves in relation to England. And we find references to the East across an astonishing range of genres, as well: in poetry and travel writing, in essays and promotional literature, in tales and short stories. The central insight of Oriental Shadows therefore proves to be astonishingly portable across a wide geographical, historical, and aesthetic terrain.

Oriental Shadows identifies and recuperates early American writers' engagement with Asia and the East, engagements that have in some cases been edited out by later anthologists or literary historians. The story told here is really not one of early Americans seeking to understand the East on its own terms, but instead one of early Americans making use of the East as they imagined it in order to reposition colonial American identity on a global stage, by associating America with (while also taking care to distinguish it from) the Orient. One crucial effect of this analysis is nonetheless to make it clear that scholars have tended to provincialize colonial British Americans (in addition to regionalizing and/or nationalizing them). Far more cosmopolitan than has been assumed, British American colonists did engage—both materially and representationally—with the rest of the world in the process of imagining themselves.

If I have one disappointment with Oriental Shadows, it is that the project is so much larger than the book's relatively few chapters. Egan does acknowledge this fact, however, and explicitly positions his volume as an effort to launch a larger initiative to which other scholars might add. That is a promising prospect indeed, and in the end, the circumscribed scope of Oriental Shadows may well make it an especially useable model for literary scholars, especially those interested in providing sustained, close readings of individual literary texts in the context of global historical and cultural forces.