Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism: Culture as Migration

215 Pages·2018·2.4 MB·English

by  Robert Fraser (auth.)

Literature, Music
and Cosmopolitanism
Culture As Migration
ROBERT FRASER
Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism
Robert Fraser
Literature, Music and
Cosmopolitanism
Culture as Migration
Robert Fraser
Open University
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-68479-6 ISBN 978-3-319-68480-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959345
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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IN EUROPE, AND FOR EUROPE
C
ontents
1 C ulture as Migration 1
2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,
Post- nationality and the Fall and Rise of Europe 17
3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth 31
4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia
the Philosopher from Gibbon to Black Athena 51
5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British
Listeners in Italy 65
6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,
Ruskin and Religious Longing 79
7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,
the Popish Plot and the Politics of Latin 85
8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles
Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising 97
vii
viii CONTENTS
9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson
and the Bengal Emergency of 1905–06 125
10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161
11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy
and Literature in India and Africa, 1930–1965 173
12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening
to Africa; Listening to György Ligeti Listening to Reich 185
13 A Cultural Cosmopolis 195
Acknowledgements 205
Index 207
...alas, alas, say now the King...
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus us’d? This is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
From the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene iv, believed to
be by William Shakespeare, and in his own handwriting
British Library Harley Manuscript 7368
ix
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia
(2nd ed., Basel, 1588), B.L.Ac.3838/45 34
Fig. 7.1 “Jehova, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei”. Henry Purcell’s
fair copy holograph from B.L.Add.Ms, 30930, The Works of
Henry Purcell (Dom, 1680) 90
Fig. 10.1 John Constable, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s
Grounds”, 1823 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 162
Fig. 12.1 Ewe Nyayito Dance. Robert Fraser, West African Poetry:
A Critical History (Cambridge University Press, 1986),
11, reproducing Jones (1959), Volume Two, 32–33 188
Fig. 12.2 Ewe Agbaza Dance, Steve Reich, Writings on Music
1965–2000. Edited with an introduction by Paul Hillier
(Oxford University Press, 2002), 62 189
xi
CHAPTER 1
Culture as Migration
The theme of this book is a response to that of a far more famous one,
published in 1869 by the English poet, educator and visionary, Matthew
Arnold. Until comparatively recently Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was
read by students of British society as among the most trenchant—certainly
the most influential—of those high-minded works of exhortation and
prophecy to which mid-to-late Victorian authors liked to treat their read-
ers. For much of the twentieth century it also fed into current social and
educational debate, influencing at a subliminal level generations of critics,
social commentators and teachers. Subtitled “An Essay in Political and
Social Criticism”, it portrays culture as a homogeneous and desirable qual-
ity. Culture for Arnold is “a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also
of the moral and social passion for doing good.”1 More straightforwardly,
in a later book, Literature and Dogma (1876), Arnold defined culture as
“the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in
the world”.2
“Mass culture”, “popular culture”, let alone “pop culture”, would have
been incomprehensible to Arnold. Indeed, though admirable in the
abstract, culture was not, he reluctantly conceded, very popular in
England. In reality the British people distrusted culture, since they associ-
ated it with intellectuality, which they hated in principle, and with what
Arnold called “curiosity”. Not merely did curiosity kill the cat; according
to Arnold it offended the average Briton’s sense of decency and moderation.
© The Author(s) 2018 1
R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_1