Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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a postmodern culture with increasingly sophisticated capacities for self-consciously reinventing aesthetics. What epistemological ends does this tenacity serve?
This study addresses these questions by analyzing the ways xenophobia has historically created and sustained the belief in an essential authorial subjectivity. How xenophobia disarticulates and rearticulates this need, I argue, is crucially connected to the strategic and complex understanding and definition of orientalism and imperialism in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain. I am especially concerned with the ways the idea of containment—most often figured as containment of the literal mass of territories that constitute Britain’s ideological imperial identity—is prominently represented in romantic literature. That is, to contain something—to draw boundaries around that “thing”—is to give it definition, whether this definition is produced discursively (lexicography), economically (commerce), or ideologically (nationality).23
Definitions, especially as they emerge as representations of containment, are critical to the ways in which colonial relations operate. Britain’s relation to India seems to offer a particularly convincing example of how containment works. The relation India has had to Britain has been understood as politically, culturally, and aesthetically subordinate. However, India was crucial to the production of British identity: one has only to remember Gauri Viswanathan’s crucial contribution to postcolonial studies when she argued that the solidification of a canon of literature marking English cultural identity was principally invented in India before it was deployed in Great Britain.24 According to this model, there are no independent freestanding nations of “Britain” and “India” because their political, aesthetic, and cultural identities are mutually constitutive. It is not possible to “have” an India free from the cultural signification with which Britain has endowed it, or the reverse.
The popular dualism between “England” and “India,” often postulated as the binary relation between “self” and “other,” has conventionally situated these locales as utterly distinct from one another, sharing only a colonialist relation based on dominance and subordination. If we think of these territories, however, not as endpoints or fixed modular units but only as spaces for cultural negotiation—as intermediary planes occupying “in-between” spaces, in which neither place is automatically endowed with a natural(ized) authority over its own meaning—then the ideological structures sustaining beliefs about dominance and subordination become more transparent. The same insecurities defining the subaltern space for the British also delineate their own domestic space. Thus, from a British standpoint, what connects the “home” country, the domestic habitat (in the sense of native) to its fantasy of the East (an India that is continually being reinvented as ever more foreign), also subjects the domestic to a need for continual recontainment.25 The ideological circuits that attach far-flung colonies to their “mother” country entangle those faraway places with the home base; foreign colonies, therefore, may not always be figured as outlandishly different from the mother country. These circuits also problematize the material things that identify the domestic space (the incorporation of tea, for example, as a signifier of Englishness); in short, they deterritorialize the domestic. While it is true that the national identity displayed by both colonial and postcolonial “India” is constructed within a European discourse, it is also true that British national identity is absolutely dependent on those “Indias” for its articulation. I argue that any British insistence on its own domestic interiority—or at least on the independence of that interiority from the colonial exterior—requires a disavowal or repression of the material practices that define Englishness.
As an academic discipline, romanticism is no longer understood as the self-referential celebration of art and the dehistoricized artist. Rather, romanticism provides us with ways of making things outside the scope of that nucleus, outside our domesticated space, “safe” for our consumption. Xenophobia similarly operates as a crucial ideological force in the task of organizing a space, of making and remaking the territories that, among other things, demarcate what is and what is not “home.”
I am arguing, however, that xenophobia is not a free-standing entity, out of which is produced imperialism. As I’ve suggested earlier, xenophobia also depends on an economy with another less familiar term, xenodochy. Articulations of xenophobia—such as those occurring in imperialism—thus crucially depend on inviting the “foreign” to inhabit domestic grounds. Nigel Leask and John Barrell both argue that the consumption of the other is a form of maintenance; in Leask’s terms, sporting “the sign of the Other in order to disengage the signifier from any semantic substance, to parody it, and also to innoculate himself and his culture from the threat which it poses” accounts for the sustained interest in and often excessive consumption of Oriental artifacts in tandem with a continual abjection of Oriental identity.26 The difference my argument brings to their important formulations is in thinking through and historicizing the psychic impulses that drive such forms of consumption and vilification.
Slavoj Žižek argues that fantasy “constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates … teaches us how to desire.”27 What one incorporates or introjects within one’s desire is always going to be articulated in the context of phobic markers. Crusoe’s desires to resituate himself within a foreign signifying system take shape as the intense phobias that mark his difference. For example, Friday’s habits, particularly his predilection for cannibalism—a practice that for his people is a way of negotiating political power—need to be instantly and radically relearned because of the threat they pose to Crusoe. Despite the fact that Friday willingly learns Crusoe’s lessons and is an admirable companion to him, Crusoe remains skeptical, fearing the return of other savages even while admitting to the pleasantness of his life.
But to return to my new companion: I was greatly delighted with him and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper…. now my life began to be so easy that I began to say to myself that could I but have been safe from more savages, I cared not if I was never to remove from the place while I lived. (188–89)
Such fears remain as the introjected phobic markers that critically mark the difference between Crusoe and Friday despite Crusoe’s desires for assimilation.
The two parts of this book examine the ways xenophobia informs the relations between colony and mother country through the reification of romantic authorship. British romantic ideology, I argue, is first codified in the heart of the Enlightenment.28 Later, during the period customarily understood as romantic, this ideology may have been more dramatically exemplified by its “outcasts” than by the main characters themselves. In other words, while Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Byron, for example, write about the relation between romanticism and orientalism, more marginal figures like De Quincey, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley demonstrate the incorporation of oriental exoticism within English intellectualism. Foucault’s injunction to seek history (genealogy) in “the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history” suggests that a field’s central texts are not the only persuasive representations of literary movements.29 The authors and texts I choose to examine, therefore, do not belong to a conventional roster of romantic writers; in fact, because I am situating the “origin” of romanticism well within the Enlightenment, I spend a good deal of time discussing the eighteenth century. I am arguing that the initial codification of romantic ideology as an articulation of xenophobic/xenodochial drives occurs within eighteenth-century documents. I am not examining literary texts that self-consciously raise the specter of the Orient (for example, Johnson’s Rasselas or Byron’s Eastern Tales), but, rather, am interested in the unselfconscious invocation of Oriental metaphor.
The first chapter situates the beginnings of a romantic ideology in the mid-eighteenth century with attention to Johnson’s corpus. Although there have been many compelling arguments about eighteenth-century imperialism in Johnson’s work, I argue that his imperialism informs romantic ideology and the shifting strategic deployments of imperial identity. Chapter One uncovers the ways in which his Preface to the Dictionary, London, and the Life of Savage institutionalize Englishness in its most invisibly authoritative form—the reference work—as well as in the more visible (works with identifiable authors) genres of poetry and biography through a self-consciously strategic xenophobic apology. These genres radically