Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture

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

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

MAKING ENGLAND WESTERN

Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture

SAREE MAKDISI

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

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

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Occidentalism, Race, Imperial Culture

Part One: Preparing the Way

1. Making London Western

2. Civilizing the Ballad

Part Two: Episodes of Occidentalism

3. Domineering over Others: Occidentalism, Empire, Moral Virtue

4. Occidentalism and the Erotics of the Self

5. The Occidental Imperative

Part Three: Occidentalism in Crisis

6. Irregular Modernization: Charles Dickens and the Crisis of Occidentalism

Conclusion

Notes

Index

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 briefly 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 imperial 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 contrasted with spaces and populations subject to British colonial violence in a patchwork of territories stretching from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland to the Caribbean, India, and southern Africa. For it’s not as though England (and I want to emphasize that this book is specifically interested in England, rather than Britain more generally) were always already a metropolitan 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 putatively homogeneous we, a collectivity that could claim to possess—or rather, one whose proponents and champions claimed it possessed—cultural and racial homogeneity.¹ Extending over several decades well into the nineteenth century, this fraught process involved the decomposition and recomposition of a whole range of racial, national, and cultural logics, along with the emergence and development of an entirely new understanding of a national imagined community, one that was far more inclusive than earlier such understandings, even while it was also more specific in its acts of exclusion as well. Indeed, the simultaneity and reciprocity of these processes and acts of inclusion and of exclusion will be central to the story I want to tell in this book.²

As a result, nineteenth-century conceptions of nationalism in Britain (and particularly in England) were very different from their eighteenth-century predecessors: a difference marked in part by increasing literacy and the emergence of broad-based political participation beginning in the 1790s and persisting—despite various forms of government repression—through the tumult of 1819 and on through Chartism and beyond. (This is why many of the lessons we can derive from Suvir Kaul’s meticulous and incisive readings of nationalist poetry from the eighteenth century can’t so easily be extended into the later period.)³

To be more precise, these new conceptions of race and nation were made all the more necessary by two momentous and related developments. First, there was the appearance on the national stage of popular organizations speaking in the name of the people and demanding their political enfranchisement. This altogether altered the stakes of class relations on a national scale and made it quite impossible to take the people as much for granted as earlier eighteenth-century versions of nationalism had been able to do. For it is one thing to have made claims on behalf of the disenfranchised multitude when they were not yet speaking for themselves in an organized and sustained manner (that is, before the 1790s)—and quite another to do so in the wake of sustained popular challenges to the monopoly on both political and verbal representation claimed by the established elite.⁴

Second, there was a thickening of England’s colonial relationships: an ever-greater interpenetration of peoples and spaces tying all the more closely the metropolis with the colonial realm, including the arrival in London of some fifteen thousand black soldiers who had fought with the British during the American war of independence, augmenting London’s already considerable black population, as well as sailors, merchants, and various other travelers from the colonial realm, many of whom settled in London.⁵ This in turn made it all the more urgent (for some) to begin to be able to differentiate spaces and peoples, to draw lines of distinction and separation distinguishing us from them. This was especially true in a period in which, as Lauren Benton has argued, nations and empires did not cover space evenly but composed a fabric that was full of holes, stitched together out of pieces, a tangle of strings, an unevenness that extended to the metropolis itself.⁶ And it was all the more true given that, as Ian Baucom points out, all the individuals born in the diverse places over which England claimed sovereignty could, legally speaking, be considered identically and interchangeably British.⁷

What I want to emphasize, however, is that the us/them distinction that began to emerge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century did not operate simply along native/foreigner or native/immigrant axes: it cut across and among native, indigenous English people as well, some of whom came to be seen from a certain privileged standpoint as culturally and racially separate and inferior, as not fit members of the race or nation, as alien and other (savage, Arab, both unsettled and unsettling) compared to an emergent notion of those of us who were seen to be more appropriately at home in England. Under such circumstances, distinguishing where exactly our domain and our population begin and end, and who exactly we are, became matters of both cultural and political urgency.

This raises the question of just how, in cultural and ideological terms, the formation of the metropolitan center was related to the opposing formation of the colonial realm: was the relationship one of more or less instantaneous binary opposition (we are here and they are there)? Or was there a set of processes at work that took time to develop and work their way through a period of muddied confusion, as imperial and cultural dynamics changed in this period; as what Stuart Hall calls the articulated structure of race and class was comprehensively altered and recomposed; as the metropolitan center was itself also gradually brought under control; as what came to be called the civilizing process was carried out both overseas and at home in England?⁸

The latter line of inquiry is the one I follow in this book. I argue that for a considerable period the two spaces, the would-be metropolitan and the colonial, have to be thought in overlapping and intermixed relation, not in structural—much less binary—opposition, to one another, and that the dynamics at work in one sphere can also be seen at work in the other. The borders between here and there, us and them, were for some time rather more amorphous, even porous, than we might have imagined.

This brief account will, I hope, have given at least a sense of the first of the claims marking this book’s point of departure, which will be elaborated at greater length in the chapters that follow. The second claim is that the process of transforming England into a metropolitan center of empire also involved the emergence and development of a new cultural and civilizational notion of a West, an Occident, to which England could claim to belong, in opposition to an Orient lying somewhere out there to the East (though where exactly remained an open question for much longer than we generally imagine). For England at the turn of the nineteenth century was not Western in two senses; first, in that the notion of the West as opposed to the East—as a cultural or civilizational opposition framed along a very specific moral and temporal or developmental matrix—was still very much in the process of formation (indeed, it is a notion that has never really stabilized, even though its incoherence as a category has never stopped it from being put to all kinds of cultural and political uses); and, second, in that, whatever one intends by the designation Western, neither all of England nor all of the English (let alone the Welsh, the Irish, or the Highlanders of Scotland) would have been seen to conform to it at the turn of the nineteenth century.

This is an argument that I will develop more fully in the chapters to follow, but I’d like to anticipate a couple of points here. The idea of some kind of Western/Eastern opposition was of course not new at the turn of the nineteenth century, and in many ways the conceptualization that emerged in that moment involved drawing on and partially reframing earlier variants of such an opposition (for example, the Western vs. the Eastern Roman empire, Western vs. Eastern churches, Christendom vs. Islam). This reframing was inseparable from, really coextensive with, the transformation of an Orientalist discourse that was similarly drawing on an ancient lineage (going back to the classical period) even while transforming it, adapting it for new purposes and a new era into what Edward Said identifies as a specifically modern form of Orientalism.⁹

My account differs somewhat from Said’s, however, in that I am more interested in the ways in which an emergent Orientalist discourse was directed against internal rather than primarily external targets: that is, sites or populations within the space of the nation that would be designated as other in specifically Oriental terms. Just as the radicalism of the 1790s had Orientalized the national aristocracy, seeing it as a foreign form of tyranny that needed to be expunged from the social body, other internal populations, which would later come to be considered white and English, were also Orientalized as the ideological ethos of 1790s radicalism—above all its obsessive, single-minded, almost pathological Orientalism¹⁰—took hold in the nineteenth century, among many conservatives as well as radicals themselves (with notable exceptions, to be sure).

The complication here is that, although from the 1790s onward, especially but not only in the work of radicalism, there emerged a very clear set of binary oppositions identifying a normative self (productive, modern, sober, unadorned, disciplined, rational, frank, fair-minded, moderate, regulated, democratic, hardworking, honest, natural, scientific, virtuous, manly, masculine, etc.) as opposed to a degenerate other (vain, retrograde, obsessed with appearances, irrational, unproductive, undisciplined, lazy, unnatural, licentious, capricious, deceitful, emotional, fanatical, tyrannical, violent, indulgent, voluptuous, sensual, feminine, effeminate, etc.), and although it was considered clear that the negative traits associated with the other were characteristically Oriental, the specifically Occidental nature of the self defined in opposition to the Oriental other remained implicit rather than explicit until somewhat later in the nineteenth century. That is, the idea of the West as the site of a culture or civilization defined specifically as democratic, modern, fair, progressive, scientific, secular, rational, productive and so on—an idea that began to be consolidated precisely in the moment to which this book is devoted—was at the turn of the nineteenth century still very much in process, not yet fully articulated, and certainly not named as such, even when it was articulated in opposition to a very specifically designated Orient. In designating the set of cultural and political discourses underlying and sustaining the emergence of this new conception of the West as Occidentalism, I am, as it were, filling in a blank, naming an absence.

In ways that will I hope become clearer in the Introduction and the chapters to follow, then, this book is interested in a particular moment, an episode in the formation of a civilizational category—the West—that has always been, and will always be, variable and unstable, even though it has also been deployed with such confidence, as though it could convey a transhistorical essence, by certain would-be authorities (Bernard Lewis comes to mind) right up to our own time.

What I will argue in this book is that the space that would eventually come to be established as the Occident had to be Occidentalized—that England, among other sites, had to be made Western. What I call Occidentalism was the set of discourses articulating the process that made England Western.

It ought to go without saying that I do not mean here to deny the specificity and violence of the work of empire overseas, or to say that binary oppositions such as Occident/Orient don’t eventually come to function very powerfully, or that they can be undermined by simply trying to recover an in-between in the way that a magician pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Sometimes there really is no in-between, and Frantz Fanon was surely right to describe the colonial world persisting into our era as a world cut in two, as the merest glance at our contemporary Jerusalem reminds us.¹¹ At the particular period (spanning the late eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century) in which I am interested in this book, however, a set of cultural, political and racial dynamics unfolded relationally both in England and in the colonial realm. This, for a while, allowed the two spaces (or parts of them) and their respective populations (or parts of them) to be thought of not merely in parallel or analogous terms, but actually in identical and interchangeable ones. Strategies and tactics of discipline, surveillance, and control were often shifted back and forth between explicitly colonial sites (such as Ireland and India) and domestic ones inside England, precisely because the targeted populations were thought of in the same terms—above all as being in need of discipline, surveillance, and control in the first place.¹² Thus, for instance, many of the practices that David Lloyd argues were designed to discipline Irish bodies, body parts, and organs, beginning with the mouth, were also mobilized in the regulation of certain English bodies, desires, and oral functions (including a thriving plebeian oral culture which was seen as just as subversively dangerous to the settled order of colonial modernity as various acts of resistance in Ireland itself).¹³

What all this meant was that, in the years around 1800, it was quite impossible to contrast here versus there or us versus them or Occident versus Orient in any clean or neat way—least of all along national lines—because we, in this period, were not yet really all we, and our space was not yet one that we could inhabit with an equal sense of homeliness or belonging. For there were sites within England that might as well have been in Arabia, and there were English people living there who, from a certain perspective, might as well have been Arabs, to whom the myth of the freeborn Englishman, or the narrative of racial Anglo-Saxonism explored by Laura Doyle, simply did not extend.¹⁴

I am not stretching the point. Let me give a quick couple of examples to help illustrate it and also rescue it from abstraction (though the fuller elaboration of these examples will have to wait until we get to the chapter from which I have borrowed them). We have now a new term, that recognizes emphatically an evil too long ignored. I mean, ‘The City Arabs,’ the Reverend James Pycroft recalls being told by a fellow church man in the second third of the nineteenth century. This is one step towards realising the truth that a veritable heathen mission is as much wanted in the interior of London as in the interior of Africa. As to heathen ignorance, he adds, in London we have a darkness that may be felt; as to the gross and debasing habits of the brutes that perish, we have hovels and savages not surpassed in Timbuctoo; and as to poisonous malaria, I can show you veritable patches of Sierra Leone no further off than Spitalfields.¹⁵ As I discuss at length in chapter 1, from the early nineteenth century on, it became quite common to speak of a whole segment of the population of London (again, people who would today be thought of as white and English) in terms of racial and civilizational otherness. And the point is that these wretched people were not merely being compared to other races and civilizations, as though really we knew all along that they were our people, but rather that they really were not our people; they were not us. The language of race here ceases to work simply on a comparative basis and becomes more genuinely descriptive: from a polite or refined perspective, these wretches are not merely being compared to savages; they were savages, pure and simple.

Of all the dark and dismal thoroughfares in the parish of St. Giles’s, or, indeed, in the great wilderness of London, few, we think, will compare with that known as Church Lane, which runs between High Street and New Oxford Street, writes Walter Thornbury several decades later, in the 1870s. "During the last half century, while the metropolis has been undergoing the pressure of progress consequent upon the quick march of civilisation, what remains of the Church Lane of our early days has been left with its little colony of Arabs as completely sequestered from London society as if it was part of Arabia Petræa. Few pass through Church Lane who are not members of its own select society. None else have any business there; and if they had, they would find it to their interest to get out of it as soon as possible. Its condition is a disgrace to the great city, and to the parish to which it belongs."¹⁶ Under such circumstances, the sense of alienation that some English people felt toward others—and it is important to emphasize one last time that Thornbury is, like Pycroft, referring to people who would today be considered white and English whom he is Arabizing, not to real Arabs—was not any less profound than what they felt toward real foreigners.

And that is the point: who is the foreigner in such a situation? The real Arab or the City Arab? Or both? But how can an English Arab be a foreigner in her own land? Maybe, from a certain perspective, it wasn’t really her land after all; maybe she did not belong there any more than the real Arab does, certainly not if one wants to imagine—as an increasing number of people at the time did—an Occident cleansed of the last traces of Oriental contamination. Given that, within the span of a few decades, around a hundred thousand such Arabs were forcibly displaced from their homes during the material reinvention—the Westernization, the Occidentalization—of the space of London in the nineteenth century, as what Thornbury calls the quick march of civilisation was extended both inside England and outside it, this does not seem such a far-fetched proposition after all.

While the literary scholarship on the eighteenth century, Romantic, and Victorian periods has for some time embraced the exploration of the sense of otherness within Britain (particularly with reference to London, but also on a national scale),¹⁷ part of what I want to propose in this book is that that sense of otherness was far more profound and more unsettling than has previously been allowed and also far more analytically challenging. Much of our understanding of the sense of otherness within Britain or England in this long period specifically rests on a contrast with what is taken to be an already stabilized national or racial sense of self. Indeed, some of the recent scholarly interest in the awareness or presence of cultural or racial others—Irish, West Indian, African, Arab, Indian, Chinese, so-called Lascars—within the imperial metropolis runs the risk of unintentionally reinforcing the very sense of normative sameness and identity that it seeks to decenter. For the underlying theme in some of that scholarship (to which I will return in the chapters that follow) is a recurring set of oppositions to an understanding of Englishness or whiteness whose status is taken for granted as defining a kind of norm, a stable standard of self in contrast to which otherness can be measured.

What I will be arguing in this book is that there was no dominant, secured, normative form—much less space—of racial and cultural identity in England in the years around 1800: rather, there was a struggle to locate and secure the space in which such an identity might be consolidated. Rather than being read against a normative sense of British or English or white or Occidental identity whose establishment and sense of self can be taken for granted, then, the sense of otherness that emerged in this period needs to be seen as posing far more of a challenge to the apparent security and normality of those identities. For that otherness and those forms of identity emerged together: it is in the same moment that, on the one hand, Africans, Arabs, Scottish Highlanders, and the wretched poor of London are reviled—in the same ways and with the same words—as being little better than beasts, while, on the other hand, a distinctly new English, white, Occidental form of identity begins to emerge. The kind of horror that gripped polite observers at the sight of the wretches of St. Giles’s was, then, not quite the horror one feels in the face of otherness. Rather, it was the horror one feels in the face of that undifferentiated, amorphous, abject primal soup out of which the very self/other divide emerges in the first place. For it is only through the racial configuration of the other that the self becomes racially defined in turn.¹⁸ Such acts of configuration were slow and complicated, however, and at certain moments overlapped and intertwined with other forms of configuration, including those of sexuality and class. This helps explain why there is such mobility and fluidity of terms of reference in describing encounters with otherness in this period: given the lack of familiar or reliable registers or discourses in which to frame the horror of such encounters, certain categories that might otherwise (earlier or later) be kept distinct are here collapsed into one another.

This collapse of categories helps us understand the highly charged, but also highly unstable, relationship of race and class in this period. Even while drawing our attention to the ways in which class and race categories were deployed with or against each other in the early to mid-nineteenth century, much of the recent scholarship has, perhaps inadvertently, taken for granted the status of either or both of these categories. It has become quite common, for instance, to see scholarly references to the racialization of the working class in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. However, such readings not only assume the distinctness of race and class, they invariably assert the ontological priority of the latter over the former: first they are the working class, then they are racialized. In fact, class structures were in enormous flux in this period, and the working class, as such (that is, as a class with its own internal sense of coherence and identity and a distinct set of relations to its exploitation by capital), did not yet exist; not to mention that a whole range of occupations, from mudlarks and costermongers to engravers and other artisans, could not precisely be made to fit into the class structures—which is to say, the structural relations of exploitation—of industrial capitalism.¹⁹

To this I would add not simply that racial categories were also in flux, but that the point is that these structures were in flux in relationship to—and, as Stuart Hall argues, as articulated with—one another. Hall’s reading of Gramsci is especially productive in this context. He reminds us that Gramsci refuses to think of class identities, and hence class relationships, in a static or homogeneous way, and that he insists on thinking of the subject as a composite amalgamation, a complex plurality of at times contradictory identities rather than a unified force.²⁰ Hall uses Gramsci’s insistence on the amalgamated nature of identity to develop his own notion of the articulation of race and class: given the nonhomogeneous nature of the subject, one can see multiple and overlapping elements of both racial and class formations within the subject and hence in relations between groups which might assume the form of either class or race dynamics or both. Certainly in the case of early to mid-nineteenth century London, the categories of race and class were interpenetrating, bound up with each other, and to a certain extent inseparable, even indistinguishable, from one another. Forms of alienation or resentment that might at a later moment be expressed more specifically in class terms could at this moment be identified in vituperative racial terms, just as forms of racist exclusion or derogation might be driven by what might later be isolated more specifically as class dynamics. Forms of identity that it might be tempting to think of in class terms, in other words, also have racial logics immediately built into them.

It is for this reason that although those who were regarded (and came to regard themselves) as the swinish multitude were seen to be different from what was once called polite society in terms that either alternated between or simultaneously bound together the logics and languages of both race and class, it took much longer for the swinish multitude to be seen as having their own internal sense of homogeneity. Thus, for instance, what would today be regarded as mixed marriages between black and white people within what Douglas Lorimer calls the cosmopolitan world of the London poor in the early nineteenth century were not only not particularly unusual. They were, more importantly, not seen to be problematic in the way that they would come to be later on. Only in a later era would racial and class logics be somewhat more cleanly distinguished, allowing the emergence of, among other things, forms of working-class racism that would have been unthinkable in the years around 1800, as well as of the acts of racial exclusion to which Paul Gilroy has drawn our attention, which would ultimately enable a sense of differentiation all the more neatly preserving from racial and cultural contamination a putatively homogeneous we, supposedly transcending class differences.²¹ It was more difficult to mobilize such clean acts of separation earlier in the nineteenth century. The instability of racial and class categories can be seen at work, for example, in Carlyle’s Discourse on the Nigger Question, in which he at times seeks to contrast beautiful Blacks sitting there [in the West Indies] up to the ears in pumpkins with our own English labourers who pay high sugar duties and are starving for want of work, while at other times collapsing the lazy blacks of the West Indies with the ought-to-be white underclass of England, for they also have long sat Negro-like up to the ears in pumpkin, regardless of ‘work,’ and of a world going to waste for their idleness!²² At times, then, our own English labourers are truly ours; that is, members of what Carlyle identifies as a Saxon British race known for its manfulness and work ethic; at times, they are not ours—not us—at all.²³

At a minimum, then, given the absence of a clearly identifiable set of terms to make such distinctions, we were not quite yet really we in a national sense in this period. In establishing such lines of demarcation, simply being English or British is not the point: what counts far more is being one of us in a racial or civilizational sense. In this context, it is, at best, misleading or confusing to speak of a single national culture, as some scholars of nationalism have done; or of a wider racial or civilizational identity that might locate all English people (never mind all Britons) on one side of a clearly delineated divide; or even simply to seek to disarticulate racism and nationalism, even with the best intentions.²⁴

I want to emphasize that scholarly accounts of nationalism and national identity (whether English or British more generally) read in isolation from broader racial or civilizational dynamics cannot possibly provide an adequate framework for understanding the nature and the stakes of the political and cultural transformation that began to take place at the turn of the nineteenth century. Some parts of the English population could be captured or woven into the racial, the civilizational, the Occidental, or perhaps the national us, and others simply had to go, be eliminated in one way or another, though in ways that I think also productively complicate Gilroy’s account of the cultures of British racism.²⁵ Such acts of erasure or destruction remain invisible to some histories of British nationalism and imperialism, even if they are not seeking to deny the significance of race,²⁶ or to celebrate the empire, or to resort to unreconstructed forms of Orientalism themselves.²⁷ Moreover, the instability of these forms of identity was directly bound up with the instability, indeed, the absence, of a clear line separating the metropolitan from the colonial realm, the inside and the domestic from the foreign and the imperial.

It took decades for these lines to be established, in a process that was never seamless or straightforward. For it was consistently resisted, and, for all the texts that celebrate this process there were plenty of others that were far more ambivalent or adamantly critical. The chapters that follow will trace the arc of celebration, ambivalence, and criticism from the late 1790s through the middle of the nineteenth century to 1870, the year Dickens died, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. Edwin Drood, as we will see in the final chapter of this book, offers a profound and highly critical meditation on the failure of the process and very logic of Occidentalism.

The book unfolds in three parts. The first part, comprising the first two chapters, develops the ground on which the rest of the book will build, in the first chapter by taking us to the extraordinary confrontation between the civilizing process and the unstable realities of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London, which offers us a kind of palimpsest to sketch out some of the overall arguments the book will be proposing. We will then rewind, so to speak, and return in the second chapter to Wordsworth, and his own specific sense of ambivalence about the process of narrating and representing the transformation and civilization of England.

The second part of the book consists of three relatively brief and localized discussions of particular episodes in the formation of Occidentalism: chapter 3 explores Jane Austen’s sense of the continuity of the civilizing mission both at home and overseas; chapter 4 turns to the very different engagements with Occidentalism and Orientalism in the work of Byron and of Charlotte Dacre; and chapter 5 treats the bitter dispute between Southey and Macaulay at the end of the Romantic and the dawn of the Victorian age.

The final section of the book, comprising the chapter on Dickens, turns to the sense of a crisis in Occidentalism that we find in Dickens’s last novel. What we will be left with, I hope, is a deeper appreciation not only of the relentless unfolding project of Occidentalism through the nineteenth century but also of the dogged resistance to it and the broader imperial logics of development, improvement, and triumphant moral virtue with which it was always bound up.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would have been impossible for me to write this book without the help and support of friends, colleagues, and my family.

Patrick Wolfe, Iain McCalman, David Bromwich, James Buzard, Pablo Mukherjee, Denise Gigante, Michael Hardt, and David Lloyd patiently read and offered invaluable comments and criticisms on drafts of sections or chapters; I am very grateful for their feedback. My colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, especially Jenny Sharpe, Felicity Nussbaum, Jonathan Grossman, and Anne Mellor, also read and commented extensively on chapter drafts. I am especially grateful to Helen Deutsch and Michael Meranze, who not only read chapters but also gracefully tolerated a stream of e-mailed paragraphs and sentences; they are the very models of collegiality.

Speaking of which, the sense of collegiality fostered by the English department at UCLA has been a major source of support over the years. In his capacity as department chair, Ali Behdad has always combined encouragement with judicious guidance, and in his capacity as friend and fellow scholar, he has helped me think through different approaches to the question of Occidentalism and its forms of representation.

The English department staff, past and present, make everything possible, and I am indebted to the support of Jeanette Gilkinson, Elizabeth Paray, Elizabeth Krown Spellman, Janet Bishop, Rick Fagin, Nora Elias, Lynda Tolly, Bronson Tran, Clinton Lam, Caleb Na, Nicole Liang, and Ivonne Nelson, to all of whom I am very thankful.

I must also acknowledge the students in my graduate seminars at UCLA over the past three years, who have helped me think through and articulate many of the readings and lines of argument that appear in this book. I am especially grateful to Katie Charles, Taylor Walle, Mike Nicholson, Sina Rahmani, Kate Bergren, Alexandra Milsom, and Lauren Dembowitz for reading chapters and providing invaluable feedback and criticism. Ian Newman not only read chapters but offered many suggestions, tips, and leads as we sifted through many of the same archival sources, and his groundbreaking work on the spaces and texts of radical culture in the Romantic period will undoubtedly go on to inform other scholarship as much as it has my own.

I am also grateful to the scholars, colleagues, and friends new and old at universities around the world at which I have been fortunate to present versions of chapters or strands of the argument that runs through this book. These include the University of Warwick, the American University of Beirut, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Essex, Brigham Young University, the University of Sydney, the University of Missouri at Columbia, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Nottingham, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Roehampton, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Vanderbilt University, Rice University, Stanford University, and Cornell University. Among the many conversations that followed from those presentations, I would especially like to acknowledge those with Peter Hulme, Marjorie Levinson, Sean Silver, Helena Michie, and Alexander Regier, and a set of conversations with Walter Cohen, Salah Hassan, Fouad Makki, Barry Maxwell, Viranjini Munasinghe, Natalie Melas, and others at Cornell University that helped me tie up various loose strands of the argument.

Jon Mee and Kevin Gilmartin helped me shape this project, especially in its early stages, and I owe much not only to their judicious feedback and criticism but to their comradeship in the field of Romanticism.

David Theo Goldberg has been an invaluable source of assistance, especially on questions of race, and he too has been very patient in fielding endless phone calls and e-mail queries and helping me along.

I also want to acknowledge the friendship of Ghassan Hage and Cesare Casarino, with both of whom even a few minutes of conversation provide a long-burning source of inspiration; in particular, a series of long conversations with Cesare, going all the way back to our graduate school days, quite literally brought home to me a very different way of understanding what it means to be included or excluded from the category of the European, and in a sense this book, among other things, is a belated outcome of those formative conversations.

Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press has also helped me shape a bag of ideas into a book, and I am grateful to his keen editorial eye, as well as to Randolph Petilos, Erik Carlson, and Jo Ann Kiser for helping transform a manuscript into an actual book.

My parents, Samir and Jean Makdisi, and my brothers, Ussama and Karim, are always among my main sources of support and illumination, and I am lucky to be able to count on them for reading passages or chapters or talking through various arguments and approaches. Ussama in particular took the time to help me work through the overall argument and locate it in the world of historical scholarship. Wissam and Shermine Boustany have over the years provided me with the most welcoming and supportive base of operations in London that anyone could ever ask for, and I am very grateful to them for sustaining the indispensable logistical side of research.

More than anyone else, however, Christina and our children, Samir and Maissa, have had to endure the constant ebb and flow of work and pressure associated with this book; beyond thanking them, I can only hope that they think the final product worth the effort. I owe Samir and Maissa, in particular, much more than a backlog of bedtime stories and playtime with Daddy, and it is to them that I dedicate this book.

.   .   .

An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as Austen, Empire, and Moral Virtue in Recognizing the Romantic Novel, edited by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and Charlotte Sussman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).

INTRODUCTION

Occidentalism, Race, Imperial Culture

I would like to introduce the broader stakes of the argument I will be making in the chapters that follow with a brief discussion of two important scholarly projects that have sought to define and explore the relationship between metropolis and empire, namely, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists. What is significant in the juxtaposition of Said and Porter, and what has made the juxtaposition productive for the work in which I am presently engaged, is that, while each makes a vital contribution that is missed by the other—so that they in some sense complement and are necessary to each other—both also share in common a problematic taking-for-granted of a separation of the domestic from the imperial