Interrogating Orientalism
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Interrogating Orientalism H&C_book4print.indb 1 9/22/2006 12:01:55 PM H&C_book4print.indb 2 9/22/2006 12:01:55 PM INTERROGATING ORIENTALISM Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices Edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass THE OHIO STAte UNIVERSITY PRess Columbus H&C_book4print.indb 3 9/22/2006 12:01:56 PM Copyright © 2006 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Interrogating orientalism : contextual approaches and pedagogical practices / edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1032-1 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1032-5 (alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9109-2 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9109-0 (cd-rom) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Orientalism in literature. 3. Orient—In literature. 4. Orientalism—Study and teaching. 5. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 6. Travelers’ writings, English—Ori- ent—History and criticism. I. Hoeveler, Diane Long. II. Cass, Jeffrey, 1949. PR468.O74I58 2006 820.9'325—dc22 2006009989 Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas. Text design and typesetting by Jennifer Shoffey Forsythe. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri- can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 H&C_book4print.indb 4 9/22/2006 12:01:56 PM co NTENTS List of Illustrations vii INTRODUCTION: Mapping Orientalism: Representations and Pedagogies Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass 1 PART ONE. Contextual Approaches 1. Interrogating Orientalism: Theories and Practices Jeffrey Cass 25 2. The Female Captivity Narrative: Blood, Water, and Orientalism Diane Long Hoeveler 46 3. “Better than the Reality”: The Egyptian Market in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Writing Emily A. Haddad 72 4. Colonial Counterflow: From Orientalism to Buddhism Mark Lussier 90 5. Homoerotics and Orientalism in William Beckford’s Vathek: Liberalism and the Problem of Pederasty Jeffrey Cass 107 6. Orientalism in Disraeli’s Alroy Sheila A. Spector 121 PART TWO. Pedagogic Practices 7. Teaching the Quintessential Turkish Tale: Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters Jeanne Dubino 139 8. Representing India in Drawing-Room and Classroom; or, Miss Owenson and “Those Gay Gentlemen, Brahma, Vishnu, and Co.” Michael J. Franklin 159 9. “Unlettered Tartars” and “Torpid Barbarians”: Teaching the Figure of the Turk in Shelley and De Quincey Filiz Turhan 182 H&C_book4print.indb 5 9/22/2006 12:01:56 PM vi / Contents 10. “Boundless Thoughts and Free Souls”: Teaching Byron’s Sardanapalus, Lara, and The Corsair G. Todd Davis 198 11. Byron’s The Giaour: Teaching Orientalism in the Wake of September 11 Alan Richardson 213 12. Teaching Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Entertainments Edward Ziter 224 Works Cited 245 Notes on Contributors 265 Index 269 H&C_book4print.indb 6 9/22/2006 12:01:57 PM Li S T O F ILLUSTRAT io NS Figure 1: Portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Jonathan Richardson, ca. 1726 4 Figure 2: Map of travels by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 5 Figure 3: Portrait of Lord Byron in Oriental costume by Thomas Phillips, ca. 1835 6 Figure 4: Map of travels by Byron 7 Figure 5: Photograph of Sir Richard Burton as pilgrim 9 Figure 6: Map of travels by Burton 10 Figure 7: French postcard of Algerian woman 53 Figure 8: Flyleaf from The Female Captive 60 Figure 9: William Musgrave’s annotations to The Female Captive 61 Figure 10: Snake charmers at Regent’s Park Zoo, from the Illustrated London News, June 15, 1850 230 Figure 11: Visitors to the Crystal Palace, from Henry Mayhew–George Cruikshank’s 1851, or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys and Family 232 Figure 12: Tunisian court, from the Illustrated London News, May 21, 1851 233 Figure 13: Algerian family at Vauxhall Gardens, from the Illustrated London News, July 12, 1851 235 H&C_book4print.indb 7 9/22/2006 12:01:57 PM H&C_book4print.indb 8 9/22/2006 12:01:57 PM INTRODUCTION Mapping Orientalism Representations and Pedagogies DIANE LONG HOEVELER AND JEFFREY CASS I. Mapping Orientalism: Three Case Histories In order to understand Orientalism it is necessary to realize, as Vincent T. Harlow has noted, that there were “two British empires.” The first empire consisted of the colonies in America and the West Indies and was established in the seventeenth century, with the explorations in the Pacific, and the trading networks that developed with Asia and Africa. The “second British empire” dates from 1783 and resulted from the loss of America, which in turn forced Britain to formulate new ideas about and approaches to its empire. The Colonial Office was set up in 1801, and, as Harlow observed, Britain experienced a “Swing to the East,” to India and the Asian colonies (Harlow, 2:1–11). The conquests of India (1798–1804) expanded Britain’s empire to such an extent that the losses of America and the old West Indian colonies were not felt economically (Johnson, 13–14), and given the success of the British Raj after 1813 and especially 1857, it seems clear that the imperial desire was to keep the profits of the East while maintaining as strict a social and intellectual distance as possible from its cultures and peoples. Although the nature and continuously changing shape of the British Empire has been subject to a fair amount of debate and is still a controversial topic, we begin this volume with an attempt to map the rough contours of the shifting Brit- ish Empire in order to historically situate this collection of essays. We also begin with a premise: literature written about or out of an awareness of this empire participated in an ongoing, complex attempt to understand what it meant for the British to come into contact with other alien (both attractive and repellent) societies, languages, cultures, and religions. Or, as the bishop of Avila so succinctly observed to Queen Isabella in 1492, “Language is the perfect instrument of empire” (quoted in Hulme, 1). 1 HH&C_intro_3rd.indd&C_intro_3rd.indd 1 110/4/20060/4/2006 44:24:55:24:55 PPMM / Introduction We begin this volume, therefore, by mapping three exemplars of Oriental pleasure travel as tropes for the readers of this book. By situating three par- ticular individuals in three Orientalist costumes and then positioning those costumed bodies against the journeys that they undertook throughout what they understood as the “Oriental” world, we intend to suggest the topics that will be addressed in this volume. We also intend by selecting these three case studies to map the Oriental social body and body politic, with three different gendered states represented (female, bisexual, and male), and three differ- ent realms (the private, the spectacularly public, and the private within the public space). Finally, our three case studies represent the most acceptable types of travelers to the Orient (the elite lady, the potentate, and the religious devotee). We might also add that the travels of these three individuals cover most of the recognized areas of the “Oriental” world during the time period that we are addressing (from Spain, to the Levant, Turkey, Albania and the Ottoman Empire, and finally India). As James Clifford has noted in Routes, “travels and contacts are crucial sites for an unfinished modernity,” while it is more accurate to understand the “human location as constituted by displacement rather than stasis” (1). Europe, as he observes, has been “constantly remade, and traversed, by influ- ences beyond its borders” (3). The travels undertaken during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by a number of Europeans can be seen as mani- festations of Clifford’s observation. British citizens traveling throughout the Oriental world did so not simply because they were motivated by adventure, economic exploitation, or cultural objectification, but actually for much more complex and reciprocal reasons. They were not seeking some “Oriental Other” to appropriate or control (as Edward Said has claimed in Oriental- ism). They were doing something much more interesting and complex: they were hybridizing (as Homi Bhabha has defined the concept) and moderniz- ing. In fact, to understand where critical approaches to Orientalism are now, one needs to consider the valuable observation made by Timothy Powell: It has become clear in recent years . that a binary form of analysis that collapses a myriad of distinct culture voices into the overly simplistic cat- egory of “Other” defined in relationship to a European “Self” is theoretically problematic. The time has come, therefore, to initiate a new critical epoch, a period of cultural reconstruction in which “identity” is reconfigured in the midst of a multiplicity of cultural influences that more closely resembles what Homi Bhabha has called the “lived perplexity” of people’s lives. (1; original emphasis) The donning of indigenous garb by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord H&C_book4print.indb 2 9/22/2006 12:01:57 PM Mapping Orientalism / Byron, and Sir Richard Burton suggests for us one of the ways that the “lived perplexity” of Orientalism can be approached. The stories that recount their adoption of native dress—as well as the maps of their journeys—become what we will identify as fitting sites for analyzing the emerging representa- tional strategies that are to be found in British Orientalist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, their examples concretely illus- trate the ongoing importance of and critical interest in British Orientalism as a more complex, nondualistic paradigm. As Daniel Carey has demonstrated about early modern cultural exchange, English writers consistently stressed “the potential interchangeability of self and other rather than the radical opposition between the two” (34).