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Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture PDF

320 Pages·2014·1.574 MB·English
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making england western making england western Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture saree makdisi the university of chicago press chicago and london saree makdisi is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of three books, including William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2014 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2014. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 isbn- 13: 978-0-226-92313-0 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-92314-7 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-92315-4 (e- book) doi: 10.7208/ chicago/ 9780226923154.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Makdisi, Saree. Making England western : occidentalism, race, and imperial culture / Saree Makdisi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-92313-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-92314-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-92315-4 (e-book) 1. Great Britain—Colonies. 2. Civilization, Western. 3. Imperialism. 4. Great Britain—Foreign relations. 5. Great Britain—Ethnic relations. I. Title. jv1035.m35 2014 303.48'241—dc23 2013014447 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/ niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). for samir and maissa, my beautiful children Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. —William Blake contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: Occidentalism, Race, Imperial Culture 1 Part One: Preparing the Way 1. Making London Western 39 2. Civilizing the Ballad 87 Part Two: Episodes of Occidentalism 3. Domineering over Others: Occidentalism, Empire, Moral Virtue 133 4. Occidentalism and the Erotics of the Self 151 5. The Occidental Imperative 174 Part Three: Occidentalism in Crisis 6. “Irregular Modernization”: Charles Dickens and the Crisis of Occidentalism 195 Conclusion 233 Notes 243 Index 283 vii preface England in the years around 1800 was not what would today be called a Western country, nor was it possible to neatly and cleanly distinguish it as a metropolitan space from the various colonial sites—both near and far—over which it sought to project political, economic, and cultural power. Those, at least, are the claims that mark this book’s point of departure, and I’d like briefl y to elaborate on each of them before more fully articulating my argument in the Introduction and in the chapters that follow. To begin with, we too often take for granted just how settled the impe- rial metropolis was in the moment of revolutionary crisis and transition at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and hence how sharply England and the English could, at that time, be con- trasted with spaces and populations subject to British colonial violence in a patchwork of territories stretching from Ireland and the Highlands of Scot- land to the Caribbean, India, and southern Africa. For it’s not as though En- gland (and I want to emphasize that this book is specifi cally interested in England, rather than Britain more generally) were always already a metro- politan center in the fullest sense of that term; that is, a center of empire whose people and spaces could be uniformly distinguished as such from those of its peripheries (distinguished, for example, by virtue of a claim to greater civilization, advancement, progress, or to various forms of cultural, civilizational, or racial superiority). Indeed, the Romantic period constituting the decades straddling the turn of the nineteenth century was the moment in which England really started to become a metropolitan center in a broadly consolidated social, economic, and cultural sense, on terms that would involve weaving together more and more people, and ultimately the national population, into a pu- tatively homogeneous “we,” a collectivity that could claim to possess—or ix

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