Desert Passions

<p><i>The Sheik</i>-E. M. Hull's best-selling novel that became a wildly popular film starring Rudolph Valentino-kindled sheik fever across the Western world in the 1920s. A craze for all things romantically Oriental swept through fashion film and literature spawning imitations and parodies without number. While that fervor has largely subsided tales of passion between Western women and Arab men continue to enthrall readers of today's mass-market romance novels. In this groundbreaking cultural history Hsu-Ming Teo traces the literary lineage of these desert romances and historical bodice rippers from the twelfth to the twenty-first century and explores the gendered cultural and political purposes that they have served at various historical moments.</p> <p>Drawing on high literature erotica and popular romance fiction and films Teo examines the changing meanings of Orientalist tropes such as crusades and conversion abduction by Barbary pirates sexual slavery the fear of renegades the Oriental despot and his harem the figure of the powerful Western concubine and fantasies of escape from the harem. She analyzes the impact of imperialism decolonization sexual liberation feminism and American involvement in the Middle East on women's Orientalist fiction. Teo suggests that the rise of female-authored romance novels dramatically transformed the nature of Orientalism because it feminized the discourse; made white women central as producers consumers and imagined actors; and revised reversed or collapsed the binaries inherent in traditional analyses of Orientalism.</p>