Source overview: Wolf: "Peopling Eastern Europe", Gersdorf: The Poetics and Politics of the Desert

Extremely briefly, both are excellent in discussing the transposition of the "Orient" (however defined) onto domestic borderlands.

In the case of Wolf's work on German and American travellers to the very near east (or, in other words, Poland), the spectre of the Orient allows local peoples, including ethnic Germans, to be re-cast as "Oriental" and thereby uncivilized, "sunken", "degenerated", or as Georg Forster put it, "cattle in human form." Wolf discusses geographically defined racism, with Western Europe as civilized and Eastern Europe as barbaric, and for Russian colonialists, with Occidental Russia as civilized and Oriental Russia as barbaric, etc. He also discusses the increasing association with race, skin colour, and civilization. He goes into the association between Cossacks ("Cossacs") and "Tartars", and between "Tartars" and "Negroes" or, for that matter, the "Tartars" as "white Savages" by western European/American travellers and theorists. On page 348-349, there's a rather large section, which is obviously most pertinent for my research, on a letter from John Ledyard to Thomas Jefferson in which the former defines Native Americans as "American tartars" and lazily/confidently conflates housing, "personal ornaments", etc. "No matter if in Nova Zmbla, Mongul in Greenland, or the banks of the Mississippi, they are all the same."

Chapter 2 of Gersdorf's book describes American Orientalist art and literature focusing on the deserts of the newly annexed southwest in considerable detail. While Gersdorf surmises that Orientalist allusions to Egypt, the Sahara, etc. allowed the deserts -- thought to be uninhabitable by WASPs/unassimilable into American civilization -- to become "Americanized" as part of the cultural space of the United States, and in the process, generate difference between the United States and Europe, the author says very little about settler colonialism or actual Indigenous peoples inhabiting these territories. This is in no small part because the media which he analyzes largely renders them invisible (or, if not, quickly vanishing). But, the characterization of these lands as Oriental does more, I would argue: it does not only "indigenize" America; it de-indigenizes those Indigenous peoples living there. Much like Columbus' own perscription of the Indian onto the Indigenous peoples of the lands he surveyed and claimed, the characterization of the southwest into a Sahara like wasteland with little more than Zuni ruins transformed it into an assimilable no man's land. Needless to say, characterizing the Hopi, Navajo, etc. as vanishing naturalized the violence inflicted upon them by Spanish, Mexicans, and Americans alike. At any rate, Gersdorf intoduces the term "domestic Orient," which seems to fit this phenomenon rather nicely.