Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain [Unabridged] 9781443815222, 1443815225

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Before Windrush

Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain

Edited by

Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain, Edited by Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-413-8, ISBN (13): 9781847184139

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Fenton Stitt Chapter One............................................................................................... 15 Gender in the Contact Zone: West Indian Creoles, Marriage, and Money in British Women’s Writing, 1786-1848 Jocelyn Fenton Stitt Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 49 Maiden Voyage: Slavery, Domesticity, and Trans-Atlantic Resistance in The History of Mary Prince Michelle Taylor Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 72 A Virtuous Nurse and a Pícara: Mary Seacole’s SelfCharacterization in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands Stoyan Tchaprazov Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 88 Transposing Travel Narrative: Irony, Ethnography, and the Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Writing Julie F. Codell Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 117 An Easterner in the East End: Unsettling Metropolitan Discourses in Olive Christian Malvery’s The Soul Market Pallavi Rastogi Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 141 Limehouse, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly: A Chinese Sojourn in the Twenties Anne Witchard

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 179 The Noble Savage and the Savage Noble: Mulk Raj Anand’s Deconstruction of Identity in Conversations in Bloomsbury Margaret Lucille Trenta Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 198 C. L. R. James: Knowing England Better Than the English W. F. Santiago-Valles Contributors............................................................................................. 223 Index........................................................................................................ 227

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Tina Rae Dozier for initial help with editing and proofreading. David Chapman of Minnesota State University’s Center for Scholarship and Research assisted us in the final months of this project with his excellent editing, formatting, and proofreading skills. Christal Lustig helped with the tedious but very important task of compiling the index. Our thanks also go to Amanda Millar and Carol Koulikourdi at Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their assistance and advice and to Elsie Michie, Daniel Novak, and Sharon Weltman for their instructive suggestions. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for their collective effort to bring about new understandings of Britain’s literary past.

INTRODUCTION PALLAVI RASTOGI AND JOCELYN FENTON STITT

In 1948, the Empire Windrush landed in Tilbury Docks, bringing to labor-scarce England 492 immigrants from its West Indian colonies. Postcolonial criticism has marked this as the primary scene of black migration to Britain.1 Thus, the contentious history of multiracial citizenship and British national identity has been largely understood as a post-war phenomenon. Yet, non-white people of Caribbean, African, and Asian descent have been sojourning through and settling in England since at least the Elizabethan period, if not earlier. It is only recently that scholars have begun to excavate the presence of Asian and black immigrants in England prior to the arrival of Windrush.2 This collection of essays, Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain, fills a crucial gap in literary studies by providing critical responses to the forgotten voices of non-white writers witnessing and participating in British life before the post-WW II wave of immigration. The writers discussed here create testaments not only to travel and diaspora, but also to the formation of Britain as a racially diverse nation. In the wake of the numerous anthologies of contemporary multicultural British literature published during the fiftieth anniversary of Windrush, recovering the prehistory of that event becomes more crucial than ever for a country trying to understand the process through which it became a postcolonial nation state. Meditating on J. M. W. Turner’s mid-nineteenthcentury painting, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying— Typhoons Coming On, Paul Gilroy notes that the picture deploys the imagery of wrathful nature and of dying slaves as a powerful means to highlight the degenerate and irrational nature of English civil society as it entered the 1840s. This work can provide a small illustration both of the extent to which race has become tacitly erased from discussion of English culture and how a “racial” theme, relocated at the heart of

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Introduction national self-understanding, can contribute to a more pluralistic conceptualization of both England and Britain.3

The texts examined in this anthology cast a similar light on a forgotten aspect of pre-war Britain: its racial and ethnic complexity, especially in metropolitan centers. To see Britain as culturally and racially heterogeneous in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries is to understand the contemporary multiracial populations within Britain as existing in a continuum, perhaps even in a conversation, with earlier diasporas. The chant of disenfranchised immigrants in the 1970s, “we are here because you were there,” reminding native British subjects of colonialism, might be changed to, “we have been here all along.” This idea of the heterogeneity of colonial Britain drives a stake into the heart of modern exclusionary British nationalism. In short, recovering the history of African, Asian, and Caribbean writers before 1948 changes our ideas of British nationality and literary culture in remarkable ways. While trans-Atlantic and transnational approaches have stirred a great deal of critical interest and have produced important contributions to African and Asian diaspora studies, Before Windrush follows the lead of its primary texts, which foreground the diversity of Britishness as a category, and their relationship to the British literary canon, as well as emphasize a complex web of international allegiances. We note two areas of concern in this developing field of black British and Asian studies. First: a lack of critical attention to the literary nature of these early Black British texts in monographs and collections of essays.4 “Literary,” as used here, signifies work within a genre containing aesthetic components: poetry, fiction, travel narrative, and autobiography. Early writing taking place within Britain, but not by white British authors, when discussed at all, has been anthologized and incorporated into scholarly work as examples of sociological or historical issues, rather than as literary texts in and of themselves. We, of course, recognize that anti-slavery speeches, anti-imperialist essays, and testimony before magistrates are worthy of literary analysis. Instead, we chose to focus on the inspired intrusion by these writers into a traditional source of pride for Britons, what Matthew Arnold said made Britain great: its literature. A second issue facing the field is the exclusion of writings by Asian authors from consideration, even though early writings by diasporic subjects of different races often share many similar themes and concerns.5 Two central texts treating pre-war black writing, David Dabydeen and Paul Edward’s Black Writers in Britain 1760-1890 and Vincent Carretta’s Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the EnglishSpeaking World of the 18th Century, chronicle archival materials that are

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not necessarily literary and focus solely on writers of African and AfroCaribbean descent.6 Surprisingly, no similar anthologies devoted to AsianBritish writers exist. Given the increased scholarly interest in the presence of racially marked immigrants, we feel the need for an anthology consisting of critical essays discussing African, Caribbean, and Asian writers before Windrush. Almost all the anthologies currently in circulation survey “Black British” literature in the post-Windrush period, and understand that term not in the sense of all racially marked immigrants to the United Kingdom, but as referring specifically to the African diaspora. Indeed, anthologies such as IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2001) are not meant to provide a literary perspective on the tradition of Black British literature or history, but instead to compile personal essays, poems, and short stories about the issues facing Caribbean and African people today.7 The critical impetus for Before Windrush stems from our knowledge that the story of Britain as a crossroad traveled by people from all over the world is, in fact, an ancient tale. The relative erasure of Asian writers in anthologies of multicultural Britain is a literary oversight that we hope to redress by giving equal weight to Asian and Afro-Caribbean writers in our book. The issue of canon-making plays out uniquely in Before Windrush’s collection of critical essays. Black British studies do not have the clout or the institutionalization that related fields, such as postcolonial literature or African-American studies, have in the United States.8 To be a scholar of Black British literature, especially that written before 1948, is to work in a borderland that is not usually recognized as part of the British literary tradition or, for reasons of hybridity and periodization, remains disconnected from postcolonial literatures in the twentieth century. Maria Helena Lima writes of the marginalization of Black British literature within the American and British academies, citing the lack of institutionalization of courses on the subject in the United States, as well as the prevalent attitude of “the majority of critics in Britain [who] continue to categorize Black British literature as ‘minority writing,’ ‘postcolonial,’ and/or ‘marginal’” rather than as belonging to Britain.9 Before Windrush aims to change the marginalization of early Asian and black writers in multiple ways: one, by arguing for the interconnectedness of Black British writing and the canon; two, showing the intricate links within Black British writing itself; three, recognizing Black British literature as creating its own frameworks of interpretations even as it challenges the insularity of “the great tradition”; four, foregrounding the dense system of international allegiances that underpin

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these texts; and five, challenging binary postcolonial rubrics that seek to categorize literary productions as part of a ‘“complicity/resistance’ dialectic.”10 Writers such as Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Behramji Malabari, R. C. Dutt, Olive Christian Malvery, Mulk Raj Anand, Lao She, and C. L. R. James are not readily recognized as British literary figures, but the texts they produce in and about England, and very often the writers themselves, cannot be completely assimilated into literary traditions in their countries of origin either. When Seacole and Malvery proclaim themselves to be British subjects, their autobiographical self-fashionings do not fit easily into postcolonial paradigms of identity formation. We hope that the essays in this anthology will provide an interpretive lens that incorporates the plural affiliations of these writers. Further, while the writers discussed here both “passed through” as well as “settled down” in Britain, we claim that the effect of these texts— whether composed by traveler or émigré—is the same: their specular qualities compel British culture to recognize its internal diversity. The work produced by these writers demonstrates that Caribbean, African, and Asian subjects were not passive entities while resident in Britain but were actively engaged with British culture. However, it must be emphasized that our anthology is not representative of all Asian and black writing before 1948, neither is it claiming to be so. Instead, we are interested in mapping broad trends and similar thematic interests over an extended period of time. The anthology is structured chronologically in order to foreground the literary interventions that Asian and black writers have undertaken against the historical flow of colonial travel to Britain. Indians only began to visit England in significant numbers in the middle/later part of the nineteenth century, when rigid caste laws were relaxed. Before Windrush thus begins with essays on emblematic Afro-Caribbean writers such as Mary Prince and Mary Seacole and then discusses the writings of Indian students and reformers. Readers might note that the concentration of texts by Africans and Caribbean writers in the first part of the book reflects the relative importance of the West Indies during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. India, of course, from the mid-nineteenth century on became the jewel in the Imperial crown, replacing the Caribbean in terms of economic importance and cultural connections. The last essay in the collection brings together these streams of literary and intellectual activity, focusing on London in the 1930s as an activist hub for Caribbean-born C. L. R. James and his anti-imperialist colleagues drawn from all corners of the globe. Ending with an essay on James also shows the steady stream of travel and residence by Afro-Caribbean authors over an extended period of

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time. While the anthology’s organization reflects the historical parameters of the Asian and black journey to the “Mother Country,” the essays also engage with British literary aesthetics, such as the picaresque, travel writing, and reform rhetoric, in order to critique British imperial and cultural norms from within. Our purpose then is to trace the various movements in Black British literary discourse over two centuries as well as the thematic similarities that emerge in different texts across genres, cultures, time, and ethnicities. We place the authors in our anthology in conversation with one another, thus highlighting shared themes, political goals, and literary approaches to representation, both of Self and Other. The essays also reveal how debates over racial and political authenticity in the colonial period reflect contemporary anxieties over ethnic difference and national belonging. Many of the essays demonstrate that the presence of Asian and black writers within Britain internationalizes British literature, connecting it to various parts of its far-flung empire. While the centrality of themes of empire in canonical British literature has been explored in postcolonial criticism, the texts discussed here show a different view of Britain and indeed British literature as being produced, critiqued, and shaped by writing from outside the mainstream literary establishment. Peripheral because of nationality, race, and gender, the authors considered in Before Windrush have their own stories to tell about just what constitutes eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth century literature. In addition, we hope readers find the centrality of women writers in many of these essays to be a provocative challenge to notions of who counts as a British writer. Before Windrush opens with Jocelyn Stitt’s essay, “Gender in the Contact Zone: West Indian Creoles, Marriage, and Money in British Women’s Writing, 1786-1848.” Stitt looks at a long line of Romantic-era novels which pre-figure Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in their use of Caribbean characters within Britain and through their fear of the contamination of colonialism and slavery in the domestic sphere. She argues that “West Indian Creoles become central to the plot, creating fictional contact zones where women authors explore the effects of colonization within the English domestic space.” The claims of this essay need to be distinguished from the now commonplace assertion in postcolonial studies that the English canon is fundamentally underpinned by Empire. Instead, Stitt asserts that colonial British culture was not only underpinned by Empire but was always already aware of the racially marked other in its inner sanctum, a presence that was carefully noted and recorded in its literature.

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Thus, Stitt’s original archival research finds that the works of largely forgotten women writers such as Helena Wells and Lucy Peacock, as well as those of more canonical writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, share an interest in the effects of Caribbean slavery on the British family. Their fictional works testify to the contaminating influence of money earned through slave profits and the circulation of the figure of the West Indian Creole within Britain. As important, these texts acknowledge the presence of Caribbean colonial subjects within Britain during the eighteenth century. Like Stitt, Michelle Taylor also focuses specifically on the topic of Caribbean slavery through a discussion of the well-known History of Mary Prince. Entitled “Maiden Voyage: Slavery, Domesticity, and TransAtlantic Resistance in The History of Mary Prince,” Taylor’s essay examines The History of Mary Prince as the intersection of representational politics, “racialized geographies,” and resistance within the context of the trans-Atlantic slave past. Taylor argues that Prince uses both the trope of labor to acquire freedom and “work to demand citizenship.” Prince’s text represents a consuming interest in dramatizing the relationship between the common woman and the British West Indies as a site of black liberation. As a common woman, Prince constructs a narrative of resistance by manipulating her position in the slave economy. The oppositional practices associated with slavery in the British West Indies—“physical and verbal resistance, huckstering,” and migration—are the modes through which Prince attempts to acquire bodily and psychological power over her oppressors. Ultimately, this reading of the text leads to a restructuring of the way in which we think about the literature of the diasporic slave past. Taylor also links Prince’s narrative with the African-American literary canon in order to show how PanAfricanism critiques the exclusionary aspects of British national identity. Taylor concludes that travel to England is empowering for Prince as it gives her the ability “to speak, to act, and finally to leave her owners.” The anthology then shifts to the 1850s with Stoyan Tchaprazov’s essay, “A Virtuous Nurse and a Pícara: Mary Seacole’s SelfCharacterization in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Tchaprazov reads the work of the Jamaican nurse and heroine of the Crimean War through the lens of the picaresque genre, showing the aesthetic choices Seacole makes in her narrative, which is often analyzed as a self-evident piece of autobiographical writing. Very often, presentday scholars depict Mary Seacole in highly idealized light—as a “virtuous” and “heroic Creole woman, who not only distinguished herself as a … nurse during the Crimean War, but also managed to break the

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chains of color and gender prejudices that ruled the nineteenth century.” Tchaprazov argues that though Seacole performed heroic deeds and achieved what very few in her time and situation did, it would be misleading to portray her only as a hero, to idealize her, for she also did not forget to improve her own situation, whether financially or otherwise. Tchaprazov’s articulation of Seacole’s complicated identity echoes Stitt’s analysis of the insider/outsider position of the figure of the West Indian Creole within British literature. Seacole’s use of the picaresque allows her to inhabit several subject positions at once: feminine and adventurous, refined but coarse, modest and yet professionally driven to reveal her accomplishments. Like many other colonial subjects in England, Seacole also reveals plural, conflicted allegiances that are both Anglophilic and anti-British. The essay concludes that unless we understand Seacole as much a strategic writer as a battlefield nurse, we will come away with a naïve impression of her life and work. The 1880s and 1890s saw a proliferation of travel writing by Indian men who came to England as students, tourists, and social reformers. Julie Codell’s essay, “Transposing Travel Narrative: Irony, Ethnography, and the Guest Discourse in Indian Travel Writing,” analyzes this important group of texts. Like Tchaprazov, Codell emphasizes the literariness of apparently non-literary work. Her essay traces a pattern of subcontinentals reversing Western travel narrative conventions and deploying a “guest discourse” to endow themselves with agency, similar to Olive Christian Malvery, whose writing is explored in the following essay. Indian authors took on Victorian travelers’ ethnographic personae, focused on London poverty and crowded streets, cited radical British authors’ criticism of Britain, and described the metropole in Orientalist terms used by Western travelers to characterize the “East.” Acknowledging their hybrid subjectivities created by travel itself, these authors exaggerated their “guest” relationship to Britain with such irony that, as Codell claims, their gratitude, instead of being subordinate, gave Indians an authority and a virtual space wherein to fashion themselves as authors, ethnographers, native informants, and cultural critics, bearers of knowledge and advocates of change.

Codell explores how this guest discourse built on generic reversals and literary tropes—self-conscious irony, utopian-dystopian dichotomies, cultural intersections, and cross-criticisms—anticipated a postcolonial discourse that challenged the literary, cultural, and racial hierarchies of the imperial encounter. Codell also deploys Derrida’s reflections on

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hospitality to suggest this “guest discourse” foreshadowed current debates on immigration. Pallavi Rastogi’s essay, entitled “An Easterner in the East End: Unsettling Metropolitan Discourses in Olive Christian Malvery’s The Soul Market,” reflects the themes of inversion, hybridity, inter-cultural exchange, and the boundaries between host and guest that are discussed in Codell’s work. Rastogi’s essay focuses on ethnic representation in the writings of an Indian woman who lived and worked as a photo-journalist in Edwardian London. In analyzing how Olive Christian Malvery uses her Indian identity to make herself more British not less, Rastogi argues that Malvery’s projection of ethnicity calls for an expansion of the category of Britishness to include the overt Indianness of Indians. More problematically, Malvery also uses her Indianness as a foil against Eastern European Jews who, unlike her, are not assimilable British subjects. Britishness can accommodate Indianness, in Malvery’s scheme of national identity, but not Jewishness. Rastogi further analyzes how Malvery uses three important discourses of her time, namely Orientalism, the racialization of the working class, and the Jewish question, in order to unsettle these literary modes of representation in deeply subversive ways, thereby acquiring voice, power, and authority for herself. In an expansion of the constitutive parameters of Asian British studies, Anne Witchard’s essay, “Limehouse, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly: A Chinese Sojourn in the Twenties,” deftly reworks British literary modernism in a Chinese image. Witchard argues that the writings of Chinese writers in London in the early part of the twentieth century “construct a ‘hybrid subjectivity’ from their encounter with the imperial metropolis that accords with the values of modernism.” Focusing on Er Ma, or Mr. Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (1929) by Lao She, a Chinese writer who taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies and lived in Bloomsbury in the 1920s, the essay examines Chinese life in modernist England. Lao She’s work gives a Chinese perspective on English life; yet he also observed the impact of Sinophobia on the Chinese student body resident in England. Witchard marks the dialectic relationship between China and England, emphasizing that Lao She’s writing “was at once an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call.” Like many of the writers before him, Lao She uses the social encounter between the British and the Chinese in London in order to combat prejudicial stereotypes about the Chinese. Witchard thus shows how the anxieties about the racial other—usually marked by the presence of Africans and Asian Indians—were presaged by the Chinese in

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England who did not share the familiarizing direct colonial relationship with England that these groups did. As Witchard points out, what is striking about the newspaper stories and government reports about “coloured British subjects” involved in pimping, gaming and drugtrafficking, is how precisely they replicate the early twentieth-century rhetoric of a Yellow Peril, which sensationally fixed Britain’s Chinese community in exactly the same discursive matrix of urban squalor, transgressive sexuality and drugs.

The importance of Bloomsbury in the Asian British imagination is reinforced by Margaret Trenta’s essay, “The Noble Savage and the Savage Noble: Mulk Raj Anand’s Deconstruction of Identity in Conversations in Bloomsbury.” Trenta explores the interactions between Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand and the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot, in the 1930s. In a Derridean analysis of identity, she argues that, even though colonialism attempted to create grounded identities based on the position of the person—colonizer or colonized—in the imperial encounter, Conversations in Bloomsbury “suggests otherwise, presenting more than one image of both the colonized and the colonizer, and giving authority to no one, specific image.” Anand achieves this obfuscation of colonial hierarchies through an oppositional image of Noble Savage and Savage Noble that paradoxically undermines binaries: With such a move, it is Anand and not the colonizing British who sets the standards and takes an active role in British culture. Thus Anand himself becomes the educator of both his peers at school and the members of the Bloomsbury group in terms of “what India is” and in terms of “who an Indian is.”

Conversations in Bloomsbury also questions the demarcations between terms such as colonial and postcolonial. While the memoir is based in the imperial period, it was composed in the post-colonial era. Conversations in Bloomsbury thus “cannot be neatly placed in either the colonial or postcolonial category.” Both the book and the identities carved in the narrative suggest the fluidity of selfhood, the impossibility of absolute hermeneutic distinctions as well as the subtle ways in which powerless groups gain voice. Finally, W. F. Santiago-Valles looks at the early days of the PanAfrican movement in London. C. L. R. James, Santiago-Valles argues, is one of the major proponents of the connection between the struggles against colonial slavery and those against exploitation in the twentieth

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century. During the 1930s, after being involved in the pro-independence Trinidad labor movement, James spent years working as a journalist in England and publishing several history books and a novel. During his time at the center of the Empire, James was able to both translate and verify the most advanced ideas of his day with the analysis of Caribbean and African history placed at the heart of world events. Santiago-Valles’ essay examines the intersection of those interests during the writing of The Black Jacobins, a text that not only explains the defeat of the French, British, and Spanish empires by the Africans in Haiti but also identifies lessons for the Africans and Antilleans fighting colonialism in the period between the world wars. “C. L. R. James: Knowing England Better Than the English,” explains the history of exiled Caribbean and African intellectuals who studied that narrative of resistance in order to apply its lessons to the independence struggles of the twentieth century. In doing so, Santiago-Valles provides an alternative intellectual history of London in the 1930s, asserting that the groups of activist intellectuals in Britain and the social movements with which they worked also became protagonists of the political history in the metropolis and the colonies both.

As our summary of the essays indicates, Before Windrush explores the complexity and diversity of subcontinental and Afro-Caribbean identity in imperial Britain as well as joins a new conversation in literary studies— that of writers contributing to as well as internationalizing metropolitan culture from within. While the project performs an important act of recovery as far as the Asian writers are concerned, the Afro-Caribbean writers discussed in these essays—Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, and C. L. R. James—stand as central figures in Black British studies through their textual creations of hybrid African and European genres and identities. The circulation of these writers in our contributors’ work affirms the importance and centrality of their place within this emerging field of Black British studies. Each of our contributors further develops the others’ theoretical assertions and methodological innovations; collectively our essayists give us a fuller and richer picture of key figures in Black British studies. Juxtaposing these essays enables an understanding of how colonized selfhood altered over time, even though each essay foregrounds common themes of transnational associations, hybrid identities, agency, and the remaking of imperial culture in an Asian or Afro-Caribbean image. While writing in literary contexts ranging from the Romantic and Victorian to the Modernist periods, all the authors discussed here challenge the assumed

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whiteness of English letters by showing that the Asian and black presence in Britain has left literary traces and that British identity has long been racially complex. Before Windrush illuminates a forgotten aspect of British literary history by providing rich discussion of those writers’ works, each essay also situating these authors in important literary contexts. Many address the relationship of these texts to British culture within the time period. All reveal that Asians and Afro-Caribbeans did not passively receive British culture. Instead, they actively transformed its discourses showing us how the periphery is not just “there” in the heart of the empire but also constituted as well as globalized its very selfhood. The critical essays collected here bear witness to the diversity of literary expression by writers from the colonies in the two hundred years preceding Windrush, as much as to the diversity of their authors. We hope that our anthology will be a significant intervention in postcolonial and British studies, forcing both fields to question their normative assumptions and the politics of literary canonicity.

Selected Bibliography Association of Departments of English. “Report on the 2003-2004 Job Information List.” http://www.ade.org/jil/ JIL_rpt.2003-04.pdf. Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the 18th Century. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Dabydeen, David, and Paul Edward. Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. Fisher, Michael. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1858. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1995. Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, ed. Black Victorians, Black Victoriana. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Cultures of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Gilroy, Paul. “Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England.” Third Text 10 (1990): 45-52. Hasseler, Terri A, and Paula M. Krebs. “Losing Our Way After the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial.” In After

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the Imperial Turn, edited by Antoinette Burton, 90-101. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Innes, C. L. A History of Black and Asian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Johnson, Alan, ed. Early Black British Writing. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Lima, Maria Helena. “The Politics of Teaching Black and British.” In Black British Writing, edited by R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey, 47-62. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Newland, Courttia, and Kadija Sesay, eds. IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain. London: Penguin, 2000. Procter, James, ed. Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Wambu, Onyekachi, ed. Hurricane Hits England: An Anthology of Writing about Black Britain. New York: Continuum, 2000. Woodward, Helena. African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Notes 1 Sukhdev Sandhu comments that “the docking of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948 did not herald the beginning of multi-racial Britain, a foundation myth which became entrenched in the wake of 1998’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations.” Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 113. It should be noted that we use the term black to refer to people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin as well as an umbrella term to include all non-white people in Britain. The specific meaning of the term in this introduction is clear from the context in which it is deployed. Generally speaking, however, we capitalize the term Black British when we use Black in an expansive sense, including referring to concepts and genres such as Black feminism, Black British literature, Black British Studies. 2 There are four categories of scholarship we will be discussing in this Introduction. One is the work of historical recovery of the presence of nonEuropeans within Britain. Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1995), first published in 1985, was part of the original wave of historical recovery and the new direction in thinking about diasporic populations within Britain as British. Historians Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain

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(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1858 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), have made significant contributions to the field, especially in terms of thinking about agency, authority, multiple identities, and the subversion of imperial hegemony, but their hermeneutic technique is necessarily non-literary. The second category of texts examines literary productions by diasporic writers resident in Britain before 1948, but often does so by looking exclusively at one group of ethnic writers, usually Afro-Caribbean, to the exclusion of Asian writers. The third category anthologizes the work of prewar writers, but often without critical commentary or without linking the writings by peoples of different national origins. The final type catalogues the work of contemporary British writing by Asians, Africans, and Caribbean people, without reference to the past. We discuss these other categories of scholarship later in the essay. 3 Paul Gilroy, “Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England,” Third Text 10 (1990): 45-52. 4 For example, Helena Woodward’s African-British Writings in the Eighteenth Century: The Politics of Race and Reason (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999) treats the textual productions of writers such as Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Ottobah Cugoano as literary, but she looks only at African diaspora texts in order to understand the aesthetics of racial representations. Other recent texts such as Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed., Black Victorians, Black Victoriana (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003) focus either on historical figures, or on the racial fantasies of white Britons, in addition to understanding “Black” to mean only the African diaspora. 5 C. L. Innes’s path-breaking A History of Black and Asian Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is one of the few monographs addressing both Asian and black writing before 1948. Innes’s project, however, differs from ours in that her work is less concerned with “literary” writing, and more concerned with surveying a few authors and a wider variety of textual evidence (journals, letters, journalism, novels, etc.) and their relationship to questions of identity and audience. Literary work such as Sukhdev Sandhu’s London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, while close to ours, focuses primarily on the ways in which black and Asian writers constructed the cityscape. 6 For example, although a New Riverside Edition, Early Black British Writing, states that the aim for the series is to create awareness of the literature created through empire and to “find fresh new contexts and juxtapositions,” it only anthologizes the work of writers of African descent. Alan Johnson, ed., Early Black British Writing (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), vii. 7 Examples include James Procter’s Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) and Onyekachi Wambu’s Hurricane Hits England: Anthology of Writing about Black Britain (New York: Continuum, 2000) as well as anthologies of contemporary writing such as IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (London: Penguin, 2000) edited by Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay.

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8

Introduction

See Terri A. Hasseler and Paula M. Krebs, “Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial,” in After the Imperial Turn, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). “Losing Our Way” examines the institutionalization of postcolonial studies in the U.S. The most recent statistics on the U.S. literature job market demonstrate the established nature of postcolonial literature while showing the marginalization of the study of multicultural British literature. Of all job postings, 12.8% were for “literature in English other than British or American” meaning postcolonial literature. There is no search category for multicultural British literature. Association of Departments of English, “Report on the 2003-2004 Job Information List,” http://www.ade.org/jil/ JIL_rpt.2003-04.pdf. 9 Maria Helena Lima, “The Politics of Teaching Black and British,” in Black British Writing, ed. R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 58. 10 See Simon Gikandi’s summation of these positions within postcolonial scholarship in his chapter on black British writer Mary Seacole in Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Cultures of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 123-125.

CHAPTER ONE GENDER IN THE CONTACT ZONE: WEST INDIAN CREOLES, MARRIAGE, AND MONEY IN BRITISH WOMEN’S WRITING, 1786-1848 JOCELYN FENTON STITT

I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together. It entertains me more than many other things have done— but then I am unlike other people I dare say. —Fanny Price, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

In Jane Austen’s 1814 novel, Mansfield Park, Fanny Price often says things without realizing their full import. Reading Fanny’s comment within the context of Romantic-era print culture gives her statement an unexpected humor that many present-day readers of Austen’s novel may not appreciate. Fanny’s categorization of her desire to hear about the West Indies as being “unlike” other people can read as a small joke made by Austen when read along with the voluminous writings on the West Indies and the slave trade during the Romantic period. While many of the essays in Before Windrush concern themselves with recovering texts written by Asian and black authors present in Britain, this essay takes a different approach. It participates in an act of literary recovery by examining the work of forgotten Romantic-era women writers Helena Wells and Lucy Peacock, and of under-recognized writers, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, and Maria Edgeworth. These women’s novels present a view of Regency Britain as a nation where domestic spaces were intimately tied to the circulation of people and profits from the West Indies. As important, the novels’ portrayal of West Indian Creoles of both African and European descent demonstrates that Britain has long been a multicultural society. Nineteenth-century canonical fiction is usually understood, following Edward Said, as the beginning of the use of colonial themes (a “shadowy

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Gender in the Contact Zone

presence” Said calls them), which will become central to fiction only at the end of that century.1 This hypothesis mirrors notions of the relative absence of colonial subjects within Britain before World War II, which Before Windrush seeks to challenge. Said’s analysis of the politics of West Indian plantation wealth as “both incidental, referred to only in passing, and absolutely critical” to the maintenance of Mansfield Park provides a foundation for my work.2 However, when we venture beyond canonical novels such as Mansfield Park, to the novels discussed in this essay, West Indian characters and the moral uncertainties of the slave economy are central. While Mansfield Park has no West Indian characters, and Jane Eyre has only mad Bertha, Romantic-era novels feature the circulation of West Indian characters within Britain. While it may be true, as Said states, that “there were no appreciable deterrents to the imperialist world-view Kipling held” and “no alternatives to imperialism for Conrad,” domestic writers beginning in the late-eighteenth century recognized the dangers when the values of the colonial world were brought into the British domestic space.3 In the tradition of women’s writing I investigate in this essay, tyranny returned to Britain functions as a deterrent to celebratory narratives of imperialism and at the same time suggests the values of domesticity as an alternative. Colonialism and domesticity co-exist uneasily in Romantic-era novels, and by the time of Conrad and Kipling, the contradictions between imperial rule and domestic harmony are dealt with by male writers by excluding women from the narrative altogether because they “live in a world of their own” and by writing about the metropolitan and colonial spheres as if they were entirely separate.4 Thus, this essay participates in the critical impetus of Before Windrush by showing a nation laboring under anxieties about the social, economic, and moral consequences of imperialism and immigration within British domestic spaces 150 years before the Empire Windrush landed. Many readers will recognize the phenomenon of the fictional circulation of Creole women and their money within Britain from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Indeed, in looking at texts written by English women during the Romantic era, we can see similarities to the West Indian sub-plot in Jane Eyre. These texts represent the colonies as dangerous and disruptive to English property and propriety and ultimately to the English nation. What is intriguing about Jane Eyre and its literary ancestors, beyond their interest as texts in which gender and the West Indies collide, is their insistence on bringing imperialism and slavery home—not only home to Britain, but home to seethe and plot in the ancestral mansion of a ruling class Englishman. If, as Toni Morrison comments on the United States in Beloved, “not a house in the country

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ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” then the “grief” occupying English Thornfield Hall is borne of an “interested” marriage with an ambiguously raced Jamaican Creole wife.5 This secret marriage made in the colonies but brought back to England is central to Brontë’s argument about how colonialism affects English women of the middle class. To return to Austen’s joke, Fanny’s comment plays upon the historical reality of Britain’s involvement in the movement of people and goods in the triangle trade, which were turned into narratives circulated within the English domestic space.6 Indeed, by being entertained by West Indian “talk,” Fanny is very much like her contemporaries, who consumed the many popular novels written by women dealing with the West Indies. In Romantic-era fiction, as in reality, West Indian riches played an instrumental role in restoring the finances of many English houses that were cash poor but rich in ancestry, land, and connections.7 The influx of wealth into English society created instabilities in the English class system, where one had to own a manor estate to be considered a gentleman. While dirty money from the slave plantations washed quite a few indebted manor houses clean, the alliances created by these marriages provoked a startling response in the literature of the Romantic period. The numerous poems, novels, journals, and histories written about the West Indies and the slave trade have not been investigated until recently as bearing on the literature of the British Romantic period (1780-1830). As Wylie Sypher dryly comments on this period: “The cultural contacts between the West Indies and England were closer than one might believe.”8 The Romantic-era novels discussed in the first part of the essay differ, however, from Brontë’s novel in two central ways. West Indian Creoles become central to the plot, creating fictional contact zones where women authors explore the effects of colonization within the English domestic space. I borrow the term “contact zone” from Mary Louise Pratt, who defines it as social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—like colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.9

In these texts, the Creole is the figure in which the economies of slavery and marriage/reproduction collide. The tension produced by the interconnectedness of the white and black family in the West Indies underlies many of these Romantic-era narratives.

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Gender in the Contact Zone

Secondly, Romantic-era critiques of imperialism, the effects of slavery and the triangle trade, and the early stages of globalization are often sharper than their Victorian heirs. The consequences of marriage and property on women’s lives form the center of Romantic-era narratives, not simply the backdrop. This is intensified in the many novels dealing with the relationship between the English domestic space and the profits brought home from West Indian slave plantations. Perhaps because the West Indian colonies, more than any other British imperial possession, existed to make money, the presence of this colonial site signals to the reader the tension between the ideologies of the domestic space and imperial profit. Deirdre Lynch muses: Perhaps a challenge feminist literary history should now take up is to see women’s domestic fiction not solely (as Nancy Armstrong would have it) as an intervention into class politics that secured the dominance of a specific class sexuality, but also as an intervention that contested other ways of conceptualizing the locality of identity—that contested now unimaginable communities that drew differently and disorientingly on the cultural flows of Empire.10

This essay responds to Lynch’s challenge by examining the cultural contexts beyond England found in these Romantic-era novels which are set, nonetheless, within England.11 This context allows me to provide a new reading of Brontë’s Jane Eyre informed by its Romantic-era literary heritage in the last section.

Marriage and West Indian Wealth: From Sub to Main Plot While writers from the Victorian or Edwardian period might champion white women’s role in the British Empire, women writing during the Romantic era expressed the incompatibility of waging a reign of terror abroad and maintaining a peaceful family life at home. Mary Shelley notes, if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece would not have been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.12

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Domesticity and empire might co-exist in the minds of an Edwardian writer like one Ethyl Colquhoun, who argues that English women must do their part in “settling and civilising the Empire” by bringing to bear on her surroundings all those qualities of real refinement, sound tradition and high principle which should be the heritage of the best and best educated type of woman.13

But for many women writers of the Romantic era, imperial concerns represent a threat to family harmony. This is especially the case for the West Indies because it is here under the plantation system that an uncanny double of the English family, the slave family, must be created and sustained in order for sugar to be profitable. When one looks at this body of work as a whole, it becomes clear that Romantic-era women employ a different mode of thinking about the connections between empire, imperial profit, and domesticity than contemporary readers may be used to. These unremembered novels, although popular in their time, have much to teach us about how Romantic-era print culture critiqued the imperial project, specifically in the West Indies, for its exacerbation of the already unequal distribution of resources in the English family. The most widely read novelists during the Romantic period include Maria Edgeworth, Amelia Opie, Jane West, and Jane Austen, all of whom used the West Indies in their plots. Other wellknown writers such as Mary Hays, Fanny Burney, Robert Bage, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith also incorporated slavery and the West Indies in their novels. To begin, one might turn to Lucy Peacock’s “The Creole,” published in 1786. Foreshadowing many of Jane Eyre’s key narrative moves, this novella tells the story of Zemira, a young white West Indian Creole. Zemira disrupts the domestic harmony of the English landed gentry by appearing suddenly into aristocratic Mrs. Sedley’s world of “rational society and rural retirement.”14 While sitting at a window of her country home at “the close of a delightful summer,” Mrs. Sedley views Zemira, “apparently in the agonies of death,” lying in one of the meadows adjacent to her country house (110). When Zemira regains consciousness, she relates a story of West Indian wealth, marriage, and deception. Indeed, it is striking that Zemira’s status as the daughter of slave owners and a colonial subject leads to her conflation with the forces of moral and economic corruption.15 Zemira tells Mrs. Sedley that although she was the heiress of a sizeable West Indian fortune, her desires were the same as articulated by Richardson’s Clarissa: “Like Clarissa, I wished, ‘to pass my life in rational

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Gender in the Contact Zone

tranquility, with a friend whose talents I could admire,’” qualities she believed to be more important than “wealth, titles, or external accomplishments” (115). Zemira articulates feminine Romanticism’s valuation of rational domestic arrangements, using these values of domesticity as a template for societal norms. Using the domestic metaphor of a communal dining space, Zemira frees her slaves, since “they will one day be made partakers with us of an immortality” (125-126). While “The Creole” waxes laudatory about Zemira’s choices, it also reminds the reader that the values of rationality and equality do not extend far beyond its heroine’s home. Zemira’s marriage ends in disaster in spite of the fact that unlike the heroines of many Romantic-era novels she is able to make a choice of husband based on personal accomplishments rather than fortune. “The Creole” suggests that the marriage’s failure is precipitated by Zemira’s overconfidence in her husband’s fiscal honesty. On their wedding day, Zemira gives her husband complete control over her estate by not securing any property in her own name. Her husband then abandons her in the West Indies, Zemira relates, “convert[ing] our estates into cash; all which he had taken with him” (124). Zemira is left impoverished with an infant son, dependent on the generosity of her former slaves. Zemira’s rescue from poverty is achieved years later when she meets Captain Seamore, who embodies a feminine Romanticism through his rejection of the British navy and his focus on his young daughter. Seamore settles in the West Indies “to forget the toils of war in the serene joys of domestic life” and endorses the engagement of Zemira’s son and his daughter despite the difference in their incomes (133-134). Mrs. Sedley’s domestic tranquility is further interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Sedley—fatally wounded from a duel. In a series of coincidences perhaps unequaled in English literature, Mrs. Sedley discovers that her husband and Zemira’s are one and the same. Mr. Sedley, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, uses the wealth garnered through a West Indian marriage to contract a bigamous marriage with an Englishwoman. Both Sedley and Rochester use colonial wealth to achieve a “love match” impossible for a second son or impoverished man. As Mr. Sedley asks: “Could an obscure youth, undistinguished by birth or fortune, dare to aspire to the heiress of Sir Charles Saville? What madness! What presumption!” (164). All of the key ingredients of the West Indian aspects of Jane Eyre were already in circulation sixty-two years before its publication: the wealth of West Indian planters passed on to their children, women’s lack of control over their property after marriage, a hidden marriage made in the colonies, and a bigamous marriage in England made possible by West Indian profits.

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We might consider that the connection between domestic happiness and colonial profits is another “hidden history” that has been displaced along with evidence of colonial subjects living within pre-war Britain. “The Creole” contains the two trans-Atlantic movements crucial to the story of West Indian wealth and the English marriage market. The English man travels to the West Indies to court a Creole bride, thereby changing his class status and disrupting hierarchies of the English marriage system. Mr. Sedley would not have been able to marry his upper-class English wife without the use of colonial money. The second movement involves the Creole woman making the reverse journey to England, disrupting the English domestic space. The trans-Atlantic movements of English and Creole subjects raise disturbing issues for Romantic-era novels invested in the idea of feminine Romanticism. They suggest that the virtues of domesticity may be built on their antithesis—West Indian wealth accumulated through the perversion of the ideals of family and domestic life. The movement of bodies to the West Indies or to England invariably produces disruption in these ideals of family harmony and the goodness of the English nation. As in Jane Eyre, the figure of the wife is doubled, leaving the sanctity of both marriages open to question. Zemira, prefiguring Brontë’s character Bertha, calls into question the ideals of English domesticity when they are based on West Indian wealth. After hearing of Zemira’s trials, Mrs. Sedley exclaims: How ought my heart to dilate with gratitude for the happiness I enjoy, possessed of an affluent fortune, and blessed in the affections of a man whose virtues render him a delight and admiration of all around him! (149-150)

Of course, Mrs. Sedley learns only pages later that the peace of her country house and the reputation of her husband are both built on the false sands of colonial wealth. In Mary Hays’s novel, Emma Courtney (1796), the character of Melmoth fits neatly into the discourse surrounding wealthy West Indian Creoles. Indeed, we might view the anxieties produced by the reappearance of the figure of the wealthy white Creole to be part of the history of the racialization of colonial others within Britain as discussed in essays written by Julie Codell, Pallavi Rastogi, and Anne Witchard in this volume. An instructive example of English anxiety over colonial wealth occurs in Dr. John Fothergill’s alarm over the racial identity, wealth, and gaudy masculine appearance of male white West Indians:

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Gender in the Contact Zone Bred for the most part at the Breast of a Negro Slave; surrounded in the Infancy with a numerous Retinue of these dark Attendants, they are habituated by Precept and Example, to Sensuality, Selfishness, and Despotism. Of those sent over to this country for their Education, few totally emerge from their first Habitudes … Splendor, Dress, Shew, Equipage, every thing that can create an Opinion of their Importance, is exerted to the utmost of their Credit … An opulent West Indian vies in Glare with a Nobleman of the first Distinction.16

Significantly, these displays distinguish a nobleman from other Englishmen, and form a large component of elite men’s success in the marriage market. One suspects that Fothergill’s envy about the creation of an “Opinion of their Importance” may be precipitated by a concern with Englishwomen’s assessment of the “Equipage” of the white West Indian man. Thus the Creole man is portrayed as exotic, virile, and sexualized, in full plumage so to speak, against which the native varieties of gentlemen cannot compete. The novel works hard to return the creolized Melmoth to his proper place, asserting anxiously: “Mr. Melmoth, by his awkward and embarrassed manner, tacitly acknowledged the impotence of wealth, and the real authority of his guest,” who is a nobleman born and bred.17 As in many Romantic-era novels, the introduction of issues of imperialism occurs through a marriage contracted in the West Indies. Melmoth returns from Jamaica a rich man, bringing with him an insipid white Creole wife. Melmoth’s cousin finds herself shocked at the change in her cousin’s character. From a vision of childhood “fraternal affection and intimacy,” the relationship between the two characters shifts as his cousin becomes aware of the changes which time and different situations produce on the character, and, with hearts and minds full of the frank, lively, affectionate youth, from whom we had parted, seven years since, with mutual tears and embraces, shrunk spontaneously, on our arrival at Mr. Melmoth’s elegant house in Bedford square, from the cold salutation, of the haughty, opulent, purseproud, Planter, surrounded by ostentatious luxuries, and evidently valuing himself upon the consequence which he imagined they must give him in our eyes.18

Melmoth’s stay in the Jamaican colonies transforms him from the model English boy, into a stereotypical West Indian slaveholder who is “haughty” and “opulent.” The circulation of the figure of the West Indian Creole in British literature testifies to the anxiety produced as colonial subjects and their

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opulent wealth “return” to the mother country. Opulence, in the discourses of the time, signified an anxiety about the great wealth British and Creole men brought home with them. Descriptions of West Indian figures in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century demonstrate anxieties over gender and class identities of the “returning” children of Empire.19 These representations take place in both literary as well as sociological or historical texts: The West Indian is as important in social as he is in literary history, for the Creole … was “assailing insular and agricultural England” toward the end of the [eighteenth] century, and pushing upward into the ranks of the landed gentry.20

When the English domestic sphere and West Indian wealth collide, instability on both fronts results. Nineteenth-century domestic writings, as Geeta Patel notes, formed a national arena figuring the household as a place of safety (tradition) from colonial incursions, and the household as a place whose practices had to be modernized and secularized or returned to the (constructed) traditions from which they were ostensibly straying.21

While clearly championing domesticity, the domestic novel necessarily presents threats to the sanctity of the home in order to reestablish the boundaries of the English family. While not referring to the specific tropes of anti-colonial discourse I discuss here, Anne Mellor notes that many women writers during the period use the values of domesticity to argue for restructuring the British nation: Invoking the “domestic affections” as the model for all political action, the women writers of the Romantic period proposed a new political program, one that would inexorably change the existing systems of patriarchy and primogeniture … At the level of sexual politics, the trope of the familypolitic entails a democracy in which women and men have equal rights and responsibilities.22

Mellor argues that contrary to perceptions of pre-Victorian women’s writing as colluding with dominant ideologies of domesticity, “women novelists more frequently employed their writing as a vehicle for ideological contestation and subversion,” advocating “a development of subjectivity based on alterity.”23 What Mellor identifies as “feminine Romanticism” corresponds to the Romantic-era novels I examine here, especially with their politicization of the interaction between colonial

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wealth, inheritance, and the female domestic space. Indeed, these novels question the foundations of the English family: patriarchy and primogeniture. I differ from Mellor, however, in my view of Romantic-era women’s attitudes toward race and colonialism. Mellor states that: Women writers of the Romantic era embraced the multi-ethnicity and racial intermixing of the growing British Empire with interested sympathy rather than with horror or dismay, thus introducing a new standpoint into the public debate on how the expanding British nation could best incorporate such hybridities.24

My research, in fact, suggests the exact opposite: that late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century women writers were highly critical of the British colonial project. Anxieties over marriage and colonial wealth are taken up by Maria Edgeworth in her 1801 novel Belinda. Although one could certainly argue that many narratives written by women in the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries concern themselves with the intersecting issues surrounding gender, Englishness, and marriage, it is significant that in Belinda the introduction of a male West Indian Creole (as opposed to the female Creole in Jane Eyre) both heightens anxieties about these subjects and allows the narrative to display the importance of the union of the rational elite Englishman to the rational elite Englishwoman. When Edgeworth’s character Lady Delacour asks the heroine Belinda, “where is your superior? where is your equal?” these questions are not merely another attempt by Lady Delacour to derail Belinda’s engagement to the West Indian Creole Mr. Vincent.25 In a larger sense, her questions reflect some of the colonial anxieties of the day. Peter Fryer notes: “By the 1790s the ‘taint’ of intermarriage had become an obsession with the propagandists of racism.”26 This “taint,” it should be noted, took a particularly gendered form. As the racist and widely-read West Indian plantation owner Edward Long observed: The lower class of women in England, are remarkably fond of the blacks, for reasons too brutal to mention; they would connect themselves with horses and asses if the laws permitted them. By these ladies they generally have a numerous brood. Thus, in the course of a few generations more, the English blood will become so contaminated with this mixture, and from the chances, the ups and downs of life, this alloy may spread so extensively, as even to reach the middle, and then the higher order of the people, till the whole nation resembles the Portuguese and Moriscos in complexion of skin and baseness of mind. This is a venomous and

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dangerous ulcer, that threatens to disperse its malignancy far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.27

In Long’s portrait, it is the Englishwoman who is particularly at fault for the “infection” of English blood. Long places the responsibility for upholding the racial purity, the essential Englishness of the nation, upon the actions of women, when in reality it was white men’s sexual predilection in the West Indies that was mostly responsible for miscegenation. I want to emphasize Long’s elision of white men’s role in producing racially mixed subjects; his focus on white women within England betrays the extent to which Englishwomen in colonial discourse bear the responsibility for maintaining the nation’s purity through the management of their reproductive capabilities in proper marriages. Mr. Vincent, even with the blessing of an aristocratic family, cannot enter the elite gendered category of English gentleman because of his early upbringing. He will always be the son of a West Indian planter rather than an Englishman. Belinda ultimately rejects marriage with Mr. Vincent because “nothing could tempt her to connect herself with a man, who had the fatal taste for play” (450). In marked contrast to Belinda’s faith in other characters’ abilities to change, the novel presents Mr. Vincent’s gambling habit as an essential part of his innate inferiority to English men: When Mr Hervey asked himself, how it was possible that the pupil of Mr Percival could become a gamester, he forgot that Mr Vincent had not been educated by his guardian; that he had lived in the West Indies until he was eighteen; and that he had only been under the care of Mr Percival for a few years, after his habits and character were in a great measure formed. The taste for gambling he had acquired while he was a child … his father used to see him, day after day, playing with eagerness, at games of chance, with his negroes, or with the sons of neighboring planters; yet he was never alarmed; he was too intent upon making a fortune for his family, to consider how they would spend it; and he did not foresee, that this boyish fault might be the means of his son’s losing, in a few hours, the wealth he had been years amassing. (422)

The narrative clearly explains Mr. Vincent’s behavior in terms of an essential quality in his character, implying that Mr. Percival’s intervention came too late: “He had lived in the West Indies until he was eighteen” and that “he had only been under the care of Mr Percival for a few years, after his habits and character were in a great measure formed” (422). The narrative places blame for Mr. Vincent’s vice not only on his West Indian surroundings, but also on his father’s inattention to his son. As the passage above notes, “[Mr. Vincent’s father] was too intent upon making a fortune

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for his family, to consider how they would spend it” (422). The over attention of his father to colonial gain from West Indian plantations and a lack of care about domestic matters leads to the ruin of Mr. Vincent’s character. Romantic-era anxieties about English women’s responsibility to maintain the racial purity of England caused both a public outcry and a private remonstrance in response to Belinda. The Monthly Review responded vehemently to the possibility of Belinda’s union with Mr. Vincent: Old as we are, and cold too, perhaps, as critics ought to be, we have still so much romance within us, as to deem the virgin’s first love an almost sacred bond; to regard with reverence and respect an inviolable constancy to its object … [Belinda] has not called forth in us a great portion of interest in her behalf, nor entitled herself to our highest love and admiration, as a perfect model of the female character.28

Edgeworth de-emphasized the relationship between Belinda and her Creole suitor in the 1810 edition explaining to her editor: My father says that gentlemen have horrors on this subject, and would draw conclusions very unfavourable to a female writer who appeared to recommend such unions.29

Bringing the Creole suitor “home” to the drawing rooms of an English romance clearly caused discomfort for literary critics and within the author’s own family. West Indian Creoles and currency circulated in England, but not without causing anxiety over their origins. On one hand, the wealth produced in the West Indies helped start the industrial revolution and made possible the second wave of Britain’s empire, which included India and later Africa. However, many writers protested the slave trade as inhuman, and worried about the effects of such wealth on social rank and on families. Anthropologist Ann Stoler argues that for colonial societies, control and profits were secured by constantly readjusting the parameters of the European membership thereby limiting those who had access to property and privilege and those who did not.30

While espousing the view that the colonies held dangers for the English domestic space, many characters within Romantic-era novels seem confused about who constitutes a colonial subject. This confusion tends to

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be resolved so that the anxiety-producing figures can be sent back to the colonies, or at least dropped from the narrative. The figure of the Creole embodies the liminality of the colonial space containing within itself whiteness (and thus a similarity to Englishness) as well as troubling foreignness. Helena Wells expresses the insider/outsider status of the Creole in her novel Constantia Neville; or, the West Indian (1800).31 Wells repeatedly calls Constantia “the young exotic” (1:70) or the “fair West Indian” (1:317) who though born under the influence of a vertical sun, the roseate bloom on her cheek, and the fairness of her forehead, would have induced a painter to draw her as the representative of the blooming Hebe. (1:70-71)

Constantia’s foreignness is nowhere more displayed than in her reverence for England. Constantia leaves the West Indies trained to think of England as “home.” The narrator relates: Accustomed to hear Great-Britain talked of as home by all who frequented her father’s house, [Constantia] considered that she was now bound to a place to which she naturally belonged, and that her being born in the West Indies was purely accidental. (1:80)

However, like many colonials arriving in England, Constantia finds that her arrival is not the homecoming she expected. Constantia’s panegyric on England’s “greatness … humanity and charity” earn her the scorn of the English: She discovered, to her infinite mortification, that the people who lived in the midst of such, to her, romantic scenery, felt none of her enthusiasm, some had heard of Thomson’s Seasons, other had read them without emotion, “and yet I am still in England!” (1:85-86)

Ironically, it is Constantia’s very reverence for England and its literature that marks her as a colonial subject, and delineates her as an outsider to Englishness. Constantia’s outsider status leaves her alone and unprotected when her mother dies in the West Indies and her father dies from grief over her brother’s excesses and debt while managing their plantations. The people Constantia encounters do not know how to place her, and as a classless person she is treated horribly. Constantia’s placelessness in English society does not allow her to feel sympathy for two equally placeless people she meets, Mr. and Miss Carleton. These children of interracial liaisons provoke as much anxiety as Constantia herself does, as the novel

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demonstrates. Constantia, a white Creole, finds herself horrified when her lawyer suggests that as a Jamaican “countrywoman,” she might marry the son of a slave and a rich planter, or at the very least tutor his sister. Astounded by the insinuation that she might marry Mr. Carleton, Constantia tartly replies: “The style of living at Nevis must be very different then from what it was at Barbadoes [sic]” (2:267-268). Constantia explains to her astonished English friend, who is related to the Carletons, that all men of fortune, who were not married, had their brown women; but such connections were kept among domestics, the issue of them being brought up as slaves, and not infrequently sold on the death of the master of the estate. We have many Incles and Yaricos in the Leeward Islands. (2:268)

Referring to a popular poem describing the sale of a black woman by her white lover in the Caribbean, Constantia firmly replicates the lessons of social division she learned as a girl. She remembers being told by her father, “on no pretext to converse or associate with mulattoes; they commonly possessed, in his opinion, the predominate [sic] bad qualities of both Europeans and Africans” (2:326). Strikingly, the novel represents Constantia as even more disturbed by the distribution of the Carletons’ white father’s property. Constantia is told that Miss Carleton “has ten thousand pounds to her portion, which is a trifle when compared to her brother’s” (2:318). But more horror is in store: It is hardly possible to do justice to the scene that followed, when the unsuspecting Constantia is informed that Mr. and Miss Carleton were the children of different slaves, the property of their father, whose will expressed this. By it he also bequeathed trifling legacies to several others of his offspring, not any two of which were by the same woman; and what led her still more to execrate the memory of a man who could thus write, or cause to be written, a libel on himself, was his having left the paltry sum of five thousand pounds to a brother, a clergyman in Dorsetshire. (2: 321-322)

Horror over miscegenation underlies but does not overshadow Constantia’s dismay over the displacement of an inheritance from the rightful English heirs to the “illegitimate” West Indian family. This act disturbs the fiction of the separation of the white and black West Indian family by rejecting the white male line of inheritance in favor of illegitimate children. This novel also disturbs the nationalist fiction that

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ordinary Britain and its Empire were separate spaces, geographically, economically, domestically, and within the family. Constantia Neville, like much Romantic-era women’s fiction, concerns itself minutely with fiscal matters. The fiscal is familial and produces Constantia’s sentiment that Mr. Carleton writes “a libel on himself” when he violates the norms of patriarchy and primogeniture, leaving his fortune to his illegitimate son and daughter instead of his brother. Edward Copeland notes that in women’s fiction during this period, no matter what the scenery or the philosophy, the main plot or the subplots, the sound of adding and subtraction makes its way to the surface, the clinking and clanking of arithmetic as each sum finds its way into the projected competence that fate bears in its womb for the deserving heroine.32

Constantia, impoverished by her brother’s actions in the West Indies, becomes outraged by the thought of the illegitimate daughter of a slave living on a generous genteel income of £500 a year and circulating among the gentry in London. The more typical disavowal of black offspring by white fathers, traced most cogently by critic Hortense Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” leads to a set of property relations affecting both white and black families under slavery: “Family,” as we practice and understand it, “in the West”—the vertical transfer of bloodline, of patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of “cold cash,” from fathers to sons . . . becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community.33

Primogeniture and coverture, essential to the maintenance of patriarchal power in English families, turns out to be central to maintaining the division between the black and white family. Romantic-era women writers create narratives that remind their readers of the boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate families without having the power, and perhaps the imagination or the desire, to create a new definition of family. Amelia Opie’s novel Adeline Mowbray (1805) contains a discussion of the corrupting influence of West Indian wealth on British families, but also puts forward a different kind of family through the friendship of the “mulatto” Savannah with the eponymous heroine.34 To be clear, the novel mainly revolves around two heterosexual relationships, one unmarried but happy, and the other legally sanctioned but disrupted by the lure of West Indian wealth. Adeline’s first sexual union, based loosely on the union of

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Gender in the Contact Zone

Mary Wollstonecraft to William Godwin, explores the dangers for women in choosing to live outside of marriage. The novel does not end with Adeline’s conversion to the propriety of marriage, but rather continues with Adeline entering into a legal marriage with her lover’s cousin. Opie takes great pains to show the reader that even within the limited legal protections offered to women within state-sanctioned marriage, all bets are off once the husband goes to the West Indies. Renouncing his marriage to Adeline and declaring their daughter a bastard, her husband, Berrendale, effectively starts domestic life anew in Jamaica, overcome by the “splendor” of the slave plantations owned by a wealthy Creole widow “well versed in the arts of seduction” (199). The novel portrays Berrendale as an indifferent husband in England but one who, when exposed to the temptations of the tropics, descends into immoral and illegal behavior: “Habituated as he was to selfish indulgence, it was impossible that to strong temptation he should not fall an immediate victim” (198). As with Jane Eyre’s Rochester, neither a pre-existing legal marriage contract nor the bounds of English custom prevent Berrendale from attempting to marry again once infected with a greed for West Indian wealth. Opie’s narrative suggests that the marriage contract provides necessary protections to English women but cannot withstand the assaults of the unregulated West Indian colonial space. Rather than seeing the colonies as a chance for the advancement for the English family’s fortunes, Opie portrays the colonial project as the agent of destruction for English domestic happiness as well as her heroine, who dies soon after Berrendale’s abandonment. It is not only British characters who travel to the colonies in this novel: Savannah escapes from slavery in Jamaica with her husband and travels to England. The novel is quite casual in its first reference to the presence of these West Indian Creoles in England, describing them as well known. While Adeline is out on an errand, she beheld a mulatto woman, the picture of sickness and despair, supporting a young man who seemed ready to faint every moment, but whom a roughfeatured man, regardless of his weakness, was trying to force from the grasp of the unhappy woman; while a mulatto boy, known in Richmond as the Tawny Boy, to whom Adeline had often given halfpence in her walks, was crying bitterly. (137)

This family is familiar to the sympathetic crowd who has assembled to verbally protest the arrest of Savannah’s husband for debt. After hearing Savannah called an “ugly black b----h!” by her husband’s creditor, Adeline pays off their debt (138). Racial representation is interesting in

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these passages—people of color are unremarkable inhabitants of Richmond, but also subject to racist abuse. Adeline’s own response to this racist speech is worth quoting here for the convoluted way that Opie deals with racial identity as something recognizable but not obvious: Adeline till then had not recollected that [Savannah] was a mulatto; and this speech, reflecting so brutally on her colour,—a circumstance which made her an object of greater interest. (138)

Witnessing this racist harassment propels Adeline to help the family. Savannah’s identity as a West Indian, in conjunction with testimonials from the crowd as “hard working,” make her worthy of Adeline’s rescue (138). In return, Savannah becomes the one person who does not betray or desert Adeline. Adeline’s sole comfort during her life is Savannah, who comes and lives with her. When asked by Savannah if Adeline loves her, Adeline proclaims: “Love you! Indeed I do, next to my child, and, and my mother” (195). In spite of the fact that both women are married, their primary allegiance is to each other, and as such they create an alternative domestic space within England while their husbands are in Jamaica. Although Opie’s portrayal of Savannah does not grant her the center stage given to Adeline, and, indeed, Savannah’s devotion to Adeline over members of her own family reflects a form of racist wishful thinking, Savannah and her family’s presence in Britain is not rendered as exceptional. As a character, Savannah is allowed agency and resistance denied to Adeline, particularly in her verbal responses to Berrendale’s immoral behavior. This duality of a white character who is saintly and resigned and a black character with backbone may have racist undertones, but it is worth remembering as Michelle Taylor does in her essay in this volume, that black women’s “back talk” or “sass” constituted a form of protest in the nineteenth century. The circum-Atlantic movement of West Indian Creoles in Romanticera discourse calls to mind Joseph Roach’s notion of surrogation. A culture’s repeated use of an effigy, object, or figure stands for the formation of a cultural memory, occurring in order to deal with loss and return. Roach argues that each cultural act involving a surrogate raise[s] the possibility of the replacement of the authors of the representations by those whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites . . . candidates for surrogation must be tested at the margins of a culture to bolster the fiction that it has a core. That is why the

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Gender in the Contact Zone surrogated double so often appears as alien to the culture that reproduces it and that it reproduces.35

The cultural narrative being constructed in these Romantic-era novels turns upon an anxiety and displacement similar to that theorized by Roach, as West Indian wealth returns to England and threatens to replace the existing class order. As West Indian subjects “return” and offer the possibility of another social system in which primogeniture is subverted, the fiction of a double-wife is created, placing the Creole and the English wife in the same domestic sphere—sometimes as competitors, and sometimes as in Adeline Mowbray as allies. This doubling creates a fictional contact zone, where colonialism and slavery are recognized as destructive foreign policies, at the same time they are destructive to the English colonial space.

Back to England: Jane Eyre, The Blighted House, and Colonial Wealth The methodology of much postcolonial literary studies has been to use contemporary writings in order to understand the past. This essay has instituted a different critical approach, looking at the foundations of the literary construction of the West Indies in which Jane Eyre is not an originator of narratives of the Creole wife, but instead is read as the inheritor of fifty years of English women’s writings on the subject. My reading inverts another commonplace within postcolonial theory: that it is only in the late-Victorian period that imperialism became central in some English novels, and that this imperial rhetoric was unchallenged. From Virginia Woolf’s discussion of Brontë’s anger, to Elaine Showalter’s inscription of Jane Eyre as an important moment in a tradition of female aesthetics, to Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s well-known paradigm of the madwoman in the attic, Jane Eyre and Brontë have been central to the creation of a female literary canon by Anglo-American feminists in the twentieth century. At the same time, postcolonial feminist critics such as Gayatri Spivak have been quick to argue that the racial and colonial politics in this novel are complicit in the project of feminist individualism.36 The degree to which Brontë’s appropriation of the tropes of empire within a purely domestic English space are both exceeded and contained by Jane Eyre point to some of the fault lines around the anxiety about imperialism and domesticity found within all of the novels considered in this essay.

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In contrast to Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of nineteenth-century women’s writing as consolidating the white English female subject through juxtaposition with colonial others, my reading of Jane Eyre through the lens of its Romantic-era forebears suggests that white women’s subjectivities depend on excluding the colonial from their domestic world in order to maintain their limited control over their status as respectable women. Their subjectivities are not consolidated through exposure to colonialism, but in fact are profoundly troubled by it. In the celebration of Jane Eyre as the model text of white feminism or as exemplar of fraught relations between white and colonized women, what gets lost is that this novel, like its Romantic-era predecessors, expresses a repeated belief that men’s behavior in the colonies can come back and haunt English domestic harmony. While there is no question that women of color are marginalized and silenced in Jane Eyre, as in Constantia Neville’s portrayal of Miss Carleton, these narratives do not feature the consolidation of English subjectivity through contact with the colonized other. Indeed, the economics of colonialism and the economics of the marriage market work in Jane Eyre as in Romantic-era novels, causing profound anxiety about Jane’s position as a potential wife of a man schooled in colonial tyranny abroad. Why should Brontë write about the subject of West Indian slavery in 1848? After all, Emancipation for West Indian slaves was completed almost ten years before the publication of Jane Eyre. The novel gives clues that Jane’s childhood and Rochester’s first marriage take place in the 1790s, primarily through a reference by Jane as an adult to a “new publication,” Scott’s poem “Marmion” published in 1808. Although this would place the action of the novel as taking place before Emancipation, why choose this colonial context and time period at all? Susan L. Meyer notes that “indeed, in 1846 it was evident that the British West Indian colonies were failing rapidly, and the focus of British colonial attention was shifting to India.”37 In order to answer this question, we need to examine another feature of Brontë’s narrative, her use of biblical allusions and metaphors throughout the novel. It seems plausible that in the aftermath of Emancipation and the ruin of the planter class the excesses of cruelty, fortune making, and fortune breaking in the West Indies would be coming home to haunt and disturb national and domestic communities in England. From an aesthetic standpoint, why does Brontë engage with the West Indian debate through biblical metaphors, and with the imperial project in India through the figure of the missionary St. John Rivers?

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Critics such as Raymond Williams suggest that the years 1847 and 1848 mark pivotal changes in English society and literature. In The English Novel, Williams points to the “major generation” of English writers for whom the years 1847 and 1848 were a period in which what it means to live in a community is more uncertain, more critical, more disturbing as a question put both to societies and to persons than ever before in history.38

The years 1847 and 1848, according to Williams, mark a break with the past by creating a new kind of fiction dealing with the crises created by the “very rapidly increasing size and scale and complexity of communities” where “any assumption of a knowable community—a whole community, wholly knowable—becomes harder and harder to sustain.”39 For Williams the crises of community and knowing one’s place in community that are found in the texts of the late 1840s constitute a different form of narrative than anything written before. Considering Brontë’s life as the daughter of a minister, living in the middle of Yorkshire, one might surmise that she would be quite isolated from colonial concerns. In fact, for more than ten years before Jane Eyre’s publication a storm raged in English print culture over the connections between religion, race, and domesticity in the West Indies. Evangelical discourse during the 1830s and 1840s focused on missionary work in the West Indies. Protestant sects of all kinds were active in the Emancipation movement in the 1830s and the evangelical sects such as the Baptists and Methodists were especially active during the years of apprenticeship that followed Emancipation in 1834. As Catherine Hall’s research demonstrates: Between the public campaign of 1832-3 and the late 1840s there was a never-ending flow of words and people between England and Jamaica, attempting to secure the on-going politics of emancipation. Reports in the missionary press and in the anti-slavery press, public meetings, lecture tours, fund-raising campaigns, books, pamphlets, private letters designed to be read in part at missionary prayer meeting or abolitionist gatherings, all fuelled the fires of the emancipatory public and kept the issue of Jamaica at the forefront of the public conscience.40

Colonial, religious, and domestic discourses meet in this debate, as in Jane Eyre. In large part, the missionaries were concerned with reconstructing the West Indian family into a middle-class ideal. They felt that the solution to slavery’s ills was to reassemble the Afro-Caribbean family into

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a mirror image of the English middle-class family, with the husband as public worker, the wife as domestic manager, and the children in school. Such plans for the freed slaves horrified the plantocracy. In one of the leading Jamaican newspapers, an editorial commented on the speeches of several missionaries: We understand, that throughout the island, the expression of Sir Lionel’s “spare your wives from heavy field work, as much as you can”—has been construed so literally, that the foolish people consider it would “shame Queen Victoria,” if one of their women was again to be seen in the field.41

Sounding almost like twentieth-century feminist rhetoric, the Jamaican newspaper Royal Gazette in 1838 ridicules the idea of turning half the labor force into housewives: Unless the labourer in Jamaica be allowed to be very superior to that of any other country, it cannot be supposed that the women of a family could be exempted from this species of labour, and that the provision for a family, should altogether be thrown upon the shoulders of the men. If this is the case, one half of the effective strength of the labour of this island is at once destroyed; and what is the idea of the negro? That “him wife for tap an boil him pot, so hab clean napkin on table for him to n’yam off, an wash him shirt, and hab water for make him kin clean, and work in a negro ground, and go to market.”42

Planters, missionaries, and the public back in England fought a spirited print debate over the future of the West Indian family, each with their own interests in the role of freed slaves as workers, family members, and parents.43 Rather than seeing Jane Eyre as a radical break with literary forms and themes from the past, or as dealing with crises new to the 1840s, I suggest that it participates in this well-publicized debate about the future of the West Indies through biblical language. Indeed, Brontë’s novel is both the inheritor of the numerous narratives warning middle-class women of the dangers of West Indian colonialism and of its time in its engagement with public anxieties over marriage, domesticity, and colonialism in the West Indies and India. In one of her most intricate metaphors, Brontë has Rochester speak of Thornfield Hall as a “tent of Achan.”44 This biblical allusion to Achan’s theft and burial under his tent of spoils not rightfully belonging to him demonstrates the corrupt foundation of the house of Rochester:

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Gender in the Contact Zone This accursed place—this tent of Achan—this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to the light of the open sky—this narrow stone hell, with its one real fiend. (304)

By exploring Rochester’s own naming of his home as the “tent of Achan,” we can push further an analysis of the conjunction of the familial, the colonial, and the fiscal in Jane Eyre (304). The answer to why Brontë foregrounds the West Indian colonial context in a novel published after the demise of slavery and during the area’s declining economic importance, can be explicated through posing the question of why the allusion to Achan appears at that moment in the narrative. Rochester refers to Thornfield Hall as the tent of Achan in the context of trying to convince Jane of the morality of his actions in marrying and finally imprisoning his wife, Bertha Mason. Forced to marry the Creole heiress by his father, Rochester exchanges his “good race” for her “possessions real and vast” (309). He argues that his father as well as Bertha’s family formed “a plot against [him]” by not revealing the insanity of her mother and brother (310). In trying to exonerate himself, Rochester states that these were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife: even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine. (310)

His protestations of innocence do not ring true, for as Rochester previously admits, he also practiced deception, albeit self-deception, in allowing himself to be duped into marrying: Her relatives encouraged me; competitors piqued me; she allured me: a marriage was achieved almost before I knew it . . . I have no respect for myself when I think of that act! . . . I never loved, never esteemed, I did not even know her. (309)

In being sent to the West Indies to marry “a bride already courted for me” Rochester is placed in the feminized position of being told whom and when to marry (309). The details of the marriage (“my father said nothing about her money”) are kept from Rochester, as are crucial details about Bertha’s family background (309). The marriage then, is undermined from the start by three competing agendas: Rochester’s father’s greed, Bertha’s family’s wish to “secure” an alliance with a man of “good race,” and Rochester’s vanity and desire “flattered . . . dazzled and stimulated” by Bertha (309). Along with Rochester’s gender ambiguity in his feminized

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position, the very racial ambiguity of Bertha, her “blackened . . . lineaments” (286) and Creole characteristics of licentiousness and intemperance mark her as the descendant of slave owners and possibly slaves (310). As with the descriptions of Creoles in previous texts by British women, Bertha is racialized and dehumanized by virtue of her West Indian identity. Bertha’s Creole identity contaminates the English family of the Rochesters by linking it to a type of imperialism that was not only about political control and economic exploitation, but also about industrializing reproduction in the form of hereditary slavery. Brontë then uses this particular type of West Indian imperialism to make connections with oppression experienced by English women in the patriarchal family. As Diane Roberts writes: The sub rosa truth, the skeleton in the South’s closet, was that the black family and the white family were often the same family; slavery created criminal situations where the powerful members of the family betrayed the weak.45

In both the slave holding American states and the West Indies, unlike other forms of colonization, the family of the colonizers became purposefully interwoven with the colonized through miscegenation (many times a euphemism for the rape of slave women). This “incarnate crime” comes about through the intersection of the colonial family and the English family. It is only in the context of West Indian slavery, rather than in other colonies such as India, Australia, or Africa, that the normative English family can be so disrupted. The Rochester family itself and their ancestral home become a contact zone where England and the West Indies meet with disastrous effects. Jane Eyre and its Romantic-era predecessors demonstrate that imperialism is not something that happens abroad with no ramifications at home, but is tied up rather intimately with the familial and domestic spaces of nineteenth-century England. Thus the racial figuration used by Brontë is not simply about relating the power dynamic between black slaves and white masters to white women and white men, but is explicitly about marriage and familial configurations spiraling out of control in the West Indian colonies. Just as in “The Creole,” Emma Courney, Belinda, and Constantia Neville, the presence of the West Indian Creole within Britain symbolizes a profound disruption of domestic order. This is reflected in the Achan story told in the book of Joshua. Here Achan’s theft brings shame on his family and then on his nation as a whole.

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Significantly, Achan, his family, and his possessions are all destroyed because of his unlawful appropriation: And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent and all that he had . . . And Joshua said, why hast thou troubled us? the Lord shall trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned them with stones, and burned them with fire . . . And they raised over him a great heap of stones until this day.46

The stoning, burning, and leaving as rubble has its corollary in the public shaming and mutilating of Rochester. Bertha, enacting a strategy of slave revolt, burns his house down, leaving Thornfield Hall a “blackened ruin” (429). Thus, in alluding to Achan, the narrative argues for the impropriety of taking colonial spoils and bringing them home. Just as in the Achan story where it is stated, “for they have even taken the accursed thing and they have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff,” Rochester’s crime is multiple, and deals not only with taking that which does not belong to him and lying about it, but is also bound up with the idea of bringing an “accursed thing” home.47 It is, as the biblical passage states, not only the taking of the colonial wealth, but the bringing it home (“put[ting] it even among their own stuff”) that is at stake here. The intrusion of ill-gotten colonial wealth and the mad Creole wife who comes with it is figured in Jane Eyre as the joining together of an innocent domesticity and a greed-driven imperialism. Importantly for the purposes of this anthology, Jane Eyre, along with its predecessors, shows that both the morally corrupt returns from imperialism and colonial subjects are always already tied up with the British domestic space. It must also be noted that Achan’s crime is figured as a national crime that renders Israel helpless to protect itself against enemies. God says to Joshua: Israel hath sinned, and they have also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them: for they have even taken the accursed thing and they have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff . . . O Israel: thou canst not stand before thine enemies, until ye take away the accursed thing from among you.48

In this biblical story of Achan, the individual transgression of Achan must be punished by destroying his family and acknowledging his actions as a shame on the nation. Similarly, when Rochester’s colonial marriage is

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brought back to Britain it curses his family through the destruction of their ancestral home. It also invites anxieties about the imperial nation by placing Rochester’s authority and right to command as an Englishman in jeopardy. Jane Eyre testifies to the ways in which the sins of the fathers committed abroad come home to haunt the family. The final point to make about Brontë’s use of the West Indies concerns the novel’s insistence on expunging empire from the national domestic space. It does so, I would argue, because when Britain itself becomes a contact zone, English masculinity is threatened. While this might be seen as advantageous to expostulating the narrative’s critique of patriarchy’s ability to control the material circumstances of women, and does indeed work to cripple and humble Rochester enough so that Jane can return to him, the kind of masculinity evinced “abroad” and the kind expected at “home” are very different indeed. One could argue that Rochester’s shifting subject position from Bertha’s cowed bridegroom, to imperious husband, to Continental libertine is constructed by the narrative as undesirable extremes of male behavior abroad. Certainly Rochester’s later arrogance can be attributed to his licentious life in Europe with Continental mistresses. The cuckold and the libertine are positionalities open to the colonizing English subject abroad. The continuation of this behavior (extreme jealousy and/or excessive sexuality) upon returning home, as the text makes clear, is unacceptable to decent English womanhood. Jane asks herself: Whether it is better . . . to be a slave in a fool’s paradise at Marseilles— fevered with delusive bliss one hour—suffocating with the bitterest tears of remorse and shame the next—or to be a village-schoolmistress, free and honest in the breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of England? (364)

Jane automatically links the prospect of being a mistress and a “slave” as taking place abroad, rather than in the “healthy heart of England.” Within this rhetoric lies the same colonial logic as Lord Mansfield’s decision that English air was too pure to admit slavery (although West Indian air apparently had none of these properties).49 Imperial debauchery when brought to England upsets a moral and domestic order in which the novel is highly invested. After marrying the Creole Bertha, living in Jamaica for five years, and taking her fortune made through slave ownership, Rochester authoritatively declares to Jane:

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Gender in the Contact Zone Hiring a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave: both are often by nature, and always by position inferior; and to live familiarly with inferiors is degrading. (316)

Jane realizes at this moment that Rochester’s notions of heterosexual relationships will always be framed by his colonial experience with slavery and mistresses, and their gendered framework of mastery and dominance. Jane tells herself, I felt the truth of [his] words; and I drew from them the certain inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching that had been instilled in me . . . [I] would become the successor of those poor girls. (316)

Jane rightly fears becoming the surrogate of Rochester’s previous mistresses, as his behavior, appropriate in the colonies, comes back to the English domestic space. Before Rochester is humbled by the burning of his ancestral mansion, we have no assurances that Jane will not become another discarded woman, even within respectable marriage. Preparing for their (illegal) nuptials, Jane experiences what she calls “degradation” as Rochester tries to dress her in silks and buy her gems. “I thought his smile,” Jane states, “was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched” (271). Although Brontë does not make an explicit connection between Rochester’s probable sexual access to slaves during his five-year residence in the West Indies, and his sexual exploits in Europe, it is not difficult for the reader to do so. And indeed, the narrative directs the reader to compare Jane to a slave, as Rochester does: “I would not exchange this one little English girl [Jane] for all the grand Turk’s whole seraglio” (271). Thus, gender relationships learned while abroad in the colonies come home to haunt the English domestic space. It is not only values and tainted wealth that return from the colonies in these fictions, but also characters. West Indian Creoles threaten the assumed purity and homogeneity of the British domestic space. In common with mid-twentieth-century British anti-immigration discourses, many of the novels considered here position West Indian characters as contaminants to the nation. Bertha’s ambiguous identity as both white and black, English and West Indian links her with her host of other characters reaching back to the eighteenth century whose very presence within the British nation disturbed the fiction of the separation of the colony/metropole and of the black and white families.

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The Caribbean novelist Jean Rhys re-imagined this story of the circulating Creole woman in Wide Sargasso Sea, her rewriting of Jane Eyre. Rhys wrote of her early difficulties in writing Wide Sargasso Sea as being overcome once she went beyond the Victorian novel, once she began to think of cultural typographies of the Creole within Britain as fictions stemming from the Romantic period: One sentence in your letter to me is significant. You write “Of course it will be a fictitious Mrs. Rochester.” But don’t you see, Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs. Rochester is also fiction. The flash that came, linking up with much that I’d heard and learned and know was that this fiction was founded on fact or rather several facts. At that date and earlier, very wealthy planters did exist, their daughters had large dowries, there was no married women’s property act. So, a young man who was not too scrupulous could do very well for himself and very easily. He would marry the girl, grab her money, bring her to England—a far away place—and in a year she would be an invalid. Or mad. I could see how easily all this could happen. It did happen [and] more than once. So the legend of the mad West Indian was established . . . There were one or two novels about this.50

Rhys’s own knowledge of the circulation of the figure of the Creole, “the legend,” within literature testifies to the presence of Caribbean cultures and peoples within both British fiction and the British nation before World War II. Moreover, Rhys’s comments reflect the critique made by Romantic-era women about the temptations of colonial profits related to slavery, the immorality relating to property and marriage afforded within the colonial space, and the devastation these forces caused to the British home. The narrative arc of the West Indian portions of Jane Eyre, then, should be understood as a part of a larger body of literature extending back to the eighteenth century that bears witness to the presence of West Indians and colonial profits within Britain. Just as Rhys’s reworking of the Bertha Rochester narrative reveals its foundations in colonial fictions, the Romantic-era novels discussed in this essay reveal British narratives of innocence of imperial wrongdoing, the racial homogeneity of its inhabitants, and a lack of culpability for the effects of slavery to be another kind of fiction.

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Selected Bibliography Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. New York and London: Penguin, 1985. Azim, Firdous. The Colonial Rise of the Novel. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Bage, Robert. Man as He Is. 1792. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979. “Belinda.” The Monthly Review 37 (1802): 368-374. Brereton, Bridget. “Family Strategies, Gender and the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean.” In The Colonial Caribbean in Transition, edited by Bridget Brereton and Kevin A. Yelvington, 77107. Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago: The University Press of the West Indies, 1999. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1990. Colquhoun, Ethel. The Vocation of Woman. London: Macmillan and Co., 1913. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness.” In The Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad, 211-292. New York: Penguin, 1967. Copeland, Edward. Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. 1801. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1994. “Free Labour.” Royal Gazette and Jamaica Times, August 18, 1838: 766. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984. Gregg, Veronica. Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Hall, Catherine. White, Male and Middle Class. New York: Routledge, 1988. Hays, Mary. The Memoirs of Emma Courney in Two Volumes. 1796. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995. Heilman, Robert Bechtold. America in English Fiction, 1760-1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1937. Johnson, Claudia L. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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“The Late Apprentices.” Royal Gazette and Jamaica Times, August 18, 1838: 767. Lynch, Deidre. “Domesticating Fictions and Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and the Reproduction of Englishness.” In Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, 40-71. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996. Mellor, Anne K. Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. —.“A Novel of Their Own: Romantic Women’s Fiction, 1790-1830.” In The Columbia History of the British Novel, edited by John Richetti, 327-51. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. —. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993. Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. Opie, Amelia. Adeline Mowbray. 1805. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Patel, Geeta. “Homely Housewives Run Amok, Lesbians in Marital Fixes.” Unpublished Essay, 2000. Peacock, Lucy. “The Creole.” In The Rambles of Fancy; or, Moral and Interesting Tales, 110-177. London: T. Bensley, 1786. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Roberts, Diane. The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region. London: Routledge, 1994. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 1965. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 243-261. Stoler, Ann. “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule.” In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, 319-351. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

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Sypher, Wylie. “The West-Indian as a ‘Character’ in the Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Philology 36 (1939): 504-508. Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. London: Methuen, 1969. Wells, Helena. Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian. London: C. Whittingham, 1800. Williams, Raymond. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.

Notes 1

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), xvi. 2 Ibid., 89. 3 Ibid., 146. 4 Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness,” in The Great Short Works of Joseph Conrad (New York: Penguin, 1967), 221. 5 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988), 5. 6 The “triangle trade” is a term used by scholars of the African diaspora to describe the movement of people and goods from Europe to the West Coast of Africa to the New World. Ships would leave England with various goods to trade for slaves, arrive at the “Gold Coast” of West Africa so named because of the profitability of the slave trade, kidnap or trade for slaves, and then begin the months’ long “Middle Passage” to the Caribbean. Slaves were often held in the Caribbean for a month or two to be “seasoned” for their lives as slaves on the islands or in North America. This slave trade, a multi-national business, began in the late-sixteenth century, and did not fully cease until close to the end of the nineteenth century. Some major British businesses today, such as the sugar company Tate and Lyle and the Bank of England, financed their early ventures through buying and selling enslaved Africans. 7 “The Romantic Novel” is in itself a contested term, since the ideologies of Romanticism, according to most sources, manifest themselves through poetry, and canonical poetry at that. The editors of Re-Visioning Romanticism note that traditional scholars of Romanticism are “hard pressed to think of a novel as Romantic literature.” Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner, “Introduction,” in Revisioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 2. The novels of the Romantic period, with the exceptions of Scott, Austen, Burney, and Edgeworth, constitute a set of literary “dead letters”—unread and unremembered. Even those who study the novel during this period might agree with J. M. S. Tompkins’s observation: “Between the four great novelists of the mid-eighteenth century and Jane Austen and Scott there are no names which

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posterity has consented to call great.” The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (London: Methuen, 1969), v. This has changed somewhat, as feminist literary scholars have worked to include novelists such as Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney into the canon of Romantic-era novelists. See Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). The fact that many of the novels produced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were by women probably contributes to their exclusion from the canon. 8 Wylie Sypher, “The West-Indian as a ‘Character’ in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Philology 36 (1939), 508. 9 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 4. 10 Deidre Lynch, “Domesticating Fictions and Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and the Reproduction of Englishness,” in Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 64. 11 Popular fiction spanned the Atlantic world bringing a cosmopolitan culture home to its readers. As Robert Heilman notes: “It is illuminating, to say the least, to see in the fiction of this period, which one thinks of chiefly in terms of sensibility, medieval history, haunted castles, and later the manners of Austen and Edgeworth, so wide a concern, even if only in isolated passages, with transatlantic scenes and affairs. Here it is that we really learn what was going on in the popular mind—much more clearly than in the works now labeled ‘major.’” America in English Fiction: 1760-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1937), 56. A great proportion of novels written in the latter half of the eighteenth century contain some reference to the West Indies. Out of the 438 novels comprising his sample, Heilman found that 125, or 28.5% of the novels contained some reference, “brief or extended,” to the West Indies (443). Heilman’s main project is to locate and discuss references to the United States, which may explain some of his choice of novels. Heilman makes no reference to any guiding principle other than the catalog of novels, which one gathers was owned by his PhD dissertation supervisor at Harvard. These 438 novels were chosen out of a catalog of titles held at Harvard University of over 2000 novels purported to be written during the period. Of course, many of the novels have not survived into the twentieth century and so one presumes that Heilman’s choice of the 438 novels was largely predicated on the availability of surviving texts. Thus this percentage should not be understood as an accurate count of West Indian references in all novels written during the period, but merely an indication of their popularity within this sample. Indeed, two novels not included in Heilman’s list, but which are mentioned as having West Indian characters by Wiley Sypher in his 1939 essay (indicating that the novels were still in print at that time) are Robert Bage’s Man as He Is (1792) and Mary Hays’s Emma Courtney (1796). Both novels were recognized as important minor works by J. M. S. Tompkins in her influential 1932 monograph, The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800. This would suggest that

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the percentage of novels still in existence that make reference to the West Indies might actually be higher than Heilman suggests. 12 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: Penguin, 1965), 54. 13 Ethel Colquhoun, The Vocation of Woman (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), 316, 311. 14 Lucy Peacock, “The Creole,” in The Rambles of Fancy; or, Moral and Interesting Tales (London: T. Bensley, 1786), 110. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 15 I am grateful to Pallavi Rastogi for pointing out commonalities of Zemira’s racialization with that experienced by other colonial subjects discussed in Before Windrush. 16 As quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People In Britain (London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1984), 19. 17 Mary Hays, The Memoirs of Emma Courney in Two Volumes (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995), 35. 18 Ibid., 35. 19 I have placed both “home” and “returning” in quotes to call attention to the notion that English colonizers of the West Indies, and their children, white West Indian Creoles, are somehow radically disconnected from England and English culture. This notion of the separation of the national and the imperial was central to maintaining Englishness as an uncontaminated category. 20 Sypher, 504. 21 Geeta Patel, “Homely Housewives Run Amok, Lesbians in Marital Fixes.” Unpublished Essay, 2000. 22 Anne K. Mellor, Romanticism and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1993), 66. 23 Anne K. Mellor, “A Novel of Their Own: Romantic Women’s Fiction, 17901830,” in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 328-329. 24 Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 145146. 25 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 347. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 26 Fryer, 163. 27 Quoted in Fryer, 157-158. 28 “Belinda.” The Monthly Review 37 (1802): 369. 29 Quoted in Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1990), 495. Edgeworth completely excised all reference to Mr. Vincent’s slave Juba marrying an English girl. For a publishing history of Belinda see Butler. See also Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick’s and Susan C. Greenfield’s essays for detailed discussions of the colonial and gender politics of the novel. My argument differs substantially from Kirkpatrick’s and Greenfield’s in that I do not see Belinda’s possible marriage to Mr. Vincent as subversive of norms of English patriarchy, but as part of a larger system of male-controlled inheritance. Susan C.

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Greenfield, “‘Abroad and at Home’: Sexual Ambiguity, Miscegenation, and Colonial Boundaries in Edgeworth’s Belinda,” PMLA 112, no. 2 (1997): 214-228. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, “‘Gentlemen Have Horrors Upon This Subject’: West Indian Suitors in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 5, no. 4 (1993): 337-348. 30 Ann Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 340. 31 Helena Wells, Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian, 3 vols. (London: C. Whittingham, 1800), 3:2. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 32 Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23. 33 Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 74. 34 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 115. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 35 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 6. 36 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 244. 37 Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 71. I am indebted to Meyer for posing the question of why Brontë writes about slavery in the 1840s. While Meyer does not answer this question directly, she skillfully points to the use of race as a metaphor for class in Jane Eyre. 38 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), 12. 39 Ibid., 16. 40 Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 1988), 211. 41 “Free Labour,” Royal Gazette and Jamaica Times, August 18, 1838: 766. 42 “The Late Apprentices,” Royal Gazette and Jamaica Times, August 18, 1838: 767. 43 While admitting that women were more likely to withdraw from field labor when they lived in missionary villages, Bridget Brereton makes a convincing argument that the restructuring of the West Indian family after Emancipation was desired by the freed slaves. Brereton acknowledges that although English domestic ideology gave an impetus for women to withdraw from paid labor, she points to the very real considerations of newly freed slaves in wanting to give extra care to their children, to send them to school, and to establish small independent family farms where the unpaid work of women was crucial to success. Bridget Brereton, “Family Strategies, Gender and the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean,” in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition, ed. Bridget Brereton and

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Kevin A. Yelvington (Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago: The University Press of the West Indies, 1999). 44 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 255. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 45 Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (London: Routledge, 1994), 23 (emphasis in original). 46 Joshua. 7:24-25 (Revised Standard Version). 47 Ibid., 7:11. 48 Ibid., 7:11, 7:13. 49 Slaves did, of course, live throughout Britain in the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries. See Fryer. 50 Jean Rhys, Unpublished letter to Selma Vaz Diaz, October 1957, Jean Rhys Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Quoted in Veronica Gregg, Jean Rhys’s Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 84. (ellipses and emphasis in original)

CHAPTER TWO MAIDEN VOYAGE: SLAVERY, DOMESTICITY, AND TRANS-ATLANTIC RESISTANCE IN THE HISTORY OF MARY PRINCE MICHELLE TAYLOR

The genesis of The History of Mary Prince is rooted in a complex web of literary and political interests that speak to the very nature of freedom, equality, and Black British identity. The narrative was published in 1831, three years after Prince, a marginally literate slave, arrived in London with her owners. After years of abuse at the hands of her owners, beatings which became even more brutal in London, Prince sought the help of the Anti-Slavery Society. Prince’s decision to seek the help of the AntiSlavery Society was the first of many moves to establish herself as a speaking subject with an important story to tell. At the urging of her employer, Thomas Pringle, who was then the secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, Prince agreed to narrate the story of her slavery and her freedom to Susanna Strickland, a guest in the Pringles’ household. The resulting document is the first account of a black woman’s experience in slavery. Although the text speaks specifically to the experience of West Indian slavery, it demystifies the brutality of slavery that black women experienced throughout the New World. Even though slavery was illegal in Britain, social equality was a distant reality and as a result Prince did not have public voice or literary authority and her narrative had to be substantiated by a host of authenticating documents that spoke to the veracity of her experience. Such documents became a staple in antislavery literature, but they did not entirely shield Prince’s text from attacks. The publishers were sued by the family she escaped from and though her moral character was questioned, her text nevertheless made an important contribution to the British anti-slavery movement and went through three editions in the year of its publication. After testifying before the London Court of Common Pleas in the suit brought by her former

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owner’s family, Prince disappeared from public record. Given the nature of race and racism in the New World, it is not entirely surprising that Prince disappeared from public life; indeed, her removal speaks to the ongoing quest for citizenship and equality that plagued West Indians and Africans who looked to England as a space for political liberation. Despite her physical absence from the British public sphere, her text remains a tangible testimony to the memories of those who sought refuge in the Empire. However, the publication record is only one part of Prince’s story. It is also important to note the additional literary and political forces that shaped the reception of her narrative. When The History of Mary Prince was published, the military success of the Haitian Revolution helped to establish the Caribbean as a site of historic black liberation, the British abolitionist movement was becoming increasingly vocal in its demands for the abolition of slavery, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was an international abolitionist sensation. The convergence of these three literary and historical moments established an important model of abolitionist politics that would resonate throughout the Atlantic world and impact the critical reception of Prince’s narrative. Indeed, Equiano’s text became the primary site for the dual articulation of the African’s desire for freedom and the English citizen’s need for equality. Although Mary Prince was positioned as a key voice in the anti-slavery movement, her narrative has been relegated to an ancillary status because it is an “as told to” narrative. The quest for literacy first outlined in Equiano’s narrative and later popularized in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, chronicle the fugitive slave’s efforts to attain literacy. In so doing, the attainment of literacy is almost as important as freedom itself. Thus, the phrasing, “Written by Himself” or “Written by Herself” prioritizes the power of the enslaved authors to control the writing and telling of their own story. And for those texts authored by amanuenses, the retelling, or “as told to,” nature of the narrative haunts the text’s critical reception. Although the textual ownership indicated by literacy is indeed essential, we must begin to search for other opportunities for the slaves to evoke control over their story and its subsequent retelling. Despite Prince’s best efforts to articulate her own demands and desires for freedom and equality, the absence that is marked by illiteracy has greatly reduced the resistance potential inherent in her narrative. Years later, across the Atlantic, the publication of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass made famous the relationship between freedom and literacy. The publication of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the

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Life of a Slave Girl further displaced Prince by locating its abolitionist and rhetorical authority in literacy and maternity. I have lingered on this holy trinity of pre-Emancipation literature because their contemporary reception and subsequent critical attention have largely determined the parameters by which we evaluate and examine the experience of the fugitive slave. Thus, literacy, masculine power, and maternity, and to some extent, American-ness, are the normative standards for discussions on the struggle for freedom. And it is precisely what I refer to as the process of privileging that erases the opportunity for non-traditional evocations of freedom. As a result, The History of Mary Prince, as Related by Herself, does not hold the position that it should in preEmancipation literature and culture. This discussion is an effort to recover for Prince’s text a position in trans-Atlantic literary history and culture. Such a critical positioning would reconfigure our thinking about the construction of knowledge, resistance, and most importantly for present purposes, the relationship between England and the African diaspora. Ultimately, new readings of Prince’s text recognize the narrative as the origin of a female-centered fugitive literary aesthetic that actively critiques the nature of slavery, freedom, and British identity. This work has already begun, thanks in large part to Moira Ferguson’s research on Prince’s narrative. Ferguson argues that the text “contributed a pointed anti-slavery message to the fierce agitation both for and against slavery that had already stamped the early years of that decade.”1 Perhaps one of the most important benefits of the attention to Prince’s text is the space it allows for the study of Britain’s connection to the institution of slavery and the processes of freedom. Indeed, as the editors of this collection make clear, recovering the history of African, Asian, and Caribbean writers before 1948 changes our ideas of British nationality and literary culture in remarkable ways.2

Critic Kremena Todorova also emphasizes the British nature of the text in suggesting that the text “manifests cultural anxieties about Britain’s imperial project that became particularly intense by 1831, shortly before slavery was abolished.”3 Todorova continues by stating that Prince appears to be constantly aware that she has a mission and that her story must reach as wide an audience as possible and be as effective as she can make it.4

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Prince’s insistence that her voice be heard results in a call to action for her English audience. And as a result, Prince’s story refuses erasure from the historical record and narrates a slave past that the British would perhaps rather forget. Well before Empire Windrush arrived in London in 1948, the voices and texts of Prince, Equiano, and Ignatious Sancho, among others, are a presence that haunts the memories of a nation that is largely white-identified. To best understand the cultural function of The History of Mary Prince, we have to rethink those parameters by which we examine her text. As opposed to thinking solely in terms of traditional literary frameworks—the written text versus the oral text—we should shift the critical standards we use to examine the fugitive’s experience. I argue that we have to imagine an alternative space for interrogation that calls attention to the multiplicity of possibilities of resistance, while simultaneously foregrounding Prince’s efforts to maintain rhetorical and cultural control of her text via her use of labor. This is not to suggest that we ignore the primacy of the aforementioned standards, but it is to suggest that we analyze the rhetorical deployment of labor as a tool with which slaves attempt to authorize the telling of their story. Indeed, the labor of slaves was perhaps one of the most authentic experiences in the slaves’ lives because it was the primary means by which they were defined. But in realizing the potential for power inherent in labor, it can also provide an affirmative space for slaves. Xiomara Santamarina’s Belabored Professions comments on the primacy of labor in arguing that in prioritizing labor, “working women invoked republican rights rhetoric that emphasized the independence-producing, or character-building potential of their wage labor.”5 Although Prince does not link labor to traditional monetary gain, she does indeed deploy labor as a narrative vehicle through which she can attain freedom. Ultimately, I argue that even though Prince cedes some control of the narrative to her amanuensis and the London Anti-Slavery Society, she is nevertheless able to express opposition to slavery and moral outrage by insisting that her readiness for freedom and personal agency are intrinsically linked to her ability as a laborer. It is through a process that I refer to as insurgent domesticity, a strategy by which Prince manipulates her position in the economy of slavery and thus receives control over her story. Insurgent domesticity is the means through which the female slave can upset pre-Emancipation power relations. She therefore seeks redress not based on maternity or solely on her ability to speak for the race, but instead bases her equality on her position as a laborer. Insurgent domesticity is the mechanism through which female slaves manipulate the

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boundaries of the economy of oppression in an effort to achieve autonomy and redress. Furthermore, insurgent domesticity subverts the civilizing mechanism of traditional domesticity by showing how the strict rules of domesticity often lead to opportunities for radical self-expression. Prince’s realization of her worth as a laborer allows her to make a case for her own humanity. Insofar as she believes her labor to be a commodity for which she should be respected, Prince rejects the notion that she is an unequal pawn in the economy of oppression. Houston Baker acknowledges the importance of labor for enslaved blacks in his discussion of Equiano, and argues that it is only through a process of self-conscious, mercantile, selfevaluation that slaves can begin the process toward physical and economic freedom.6 Ferguson also recognizes Prince’s use of labor in suggesting that “she exaggerated her ill health to assert the only form of power that lay at her dispersal—that of her labor.”7 To fully understand the scope of women’s resistance in a black Atlantic context requires an analysis of the cultural practices of enslaved women throughout the Caribbean. Reading Prince in this way requires that we pay careful attention to the resistance practices engendered by West Indian slavery—physical and verbal resistance, huckstering, and references to the liberatory West Indian past—as the mechanisms through which Prince attempted to maintain physical and psychical victories over her oppressors. The unique nature of Caribbean resistance practices hinges on the heightened visibility of black women as resisting subjects, which is particularly useful for Prince’s text because it underscores the limits of traditional narratives of resistance while also registering the need for a diasporic model of black resistance. Caribbean historians Barbara Bush and Hilary Beckles have been influential in outlining the patterns of Caribbean female slave resistance through the formulation of the rebel woman and the natural rebel, respectively. Bush’s work considers the daily acts of resistance by theorizing instances of work refusal and poisoning as channels of resistance available to Caribbean women. Jenny Sharpe’s Ghosts of Slavery also considers the various articulations of resistance and power available to Caribbean women.8 Further, Beckles’s formulation of the natural rebel focuses less on female icons and more on the quotidian resistance practices among Caribbean women. These representations constructed an important genealogy of Caribbean femalecentered resistance. While these examples differ from my own interpretive framework of insurgent domesticity, they have nevertheless contributed to my thoughts about the multiple articulations of slave resistance. To that end, the intersection of the trans-Atlantic past and racialized geographies serves as important sites in the discussion that foreground the

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unique nature of her resistance, while also situating it within the larger context of trans-Atlantic antebellum writing. Therefore this essay specifically speaks to the editors’ aims of arguing for the interconnectedness of Black British writing and the canon . . . [and] recognizing Black British literature as creating its own frameworks of interpretations.9

Feminizing the West Indies: The History of Mary Prince As I have pointed out, despite the fact that Prince’s text is the first extant woman’s slave narrative to emerge from the Atlantic world, she is largely left out of critical paradigms. Some of the absence is due to the twin issues of literacy and authenticity, but her exclusion is also bound up in issues of geography and gender. Because she lived in the Caribbean and traveled extensively throughout the Caribbean and London, she is essentially dismissed from the tradition of African-American slave narratives that focus primarily on the movement from south to north. Indeed, Joanne Braxton’s study of black female slave narrators only briefly acknowledges a link between Prince and American slave narrator, Harriet Jacobs: This “as-told to” account depicts the separation of families as well as the physical exploitation and sexual abuse of black women from a first-person point of view. Like Linda Brent, Mary Prince enjoys a happy childhood that ends abruptly with the death of a “kind mistress.” Mary is initiated into the suffering of slave womanhood when the family is separated. Not only does Mary Prince prefigure the later Incidents in its criticism of sexual liaisons forced on slave women, but also specifies the uses of language.10

Braxton’s commentary is vital to an initial understanding of the way through which Prince intersects with the African-American literary canon. However, Braxton’s reading downplays the emphasis on the primacy of the Caribbean slave past as a defining component in the narrative. Likewise, Prince is left out of studies of the black Atlantic because she is female and only marginally literate. However, these are precisely the ideological locations that solidify Prince’s place in the canon. The Caribbean revolutionary past is a significant cultural script that underwrites Prince’s desire for freedom in both British and Caribbean

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contexts. Ferguson’s comments on the history of Caribbean liberation are particularly insightful. Ferguson suggests that Mary Prince identified with freed blacks and with the opposition back home in Bermuda that would eventually aid in the defeat of the Woods and their class. Prince’s resistance represented a microcosm of black opposition, an individual expression of the collective consciousness that sought an end to illegitimate domination.11

The West Indian revolutionary past engendered by the Haitian Revolution and the cultural mythologies surrounding female Maroon leaders are the means through which Prince speaks herself into a revolutionary script and self-emancipating position. While Sandra Paquet has made a similar argument that focuses on voice and authority, I am choosing to focus instead on the interrelated issues of verbal defense, movement, and labor as the defining principles of Prince’s pattern of resistance.12 Importantly, two distinct trends emerge from this type of reading of the text. First, Prince’s resistance practices offer her an opportunity to address the lived experiences of a community of slaves. As a result, Prince’s migrations throughout the Caribbean and rejection of traditional maternity facilitate a theme of communal caring at work in the narrative. Second, and perhaps more important, is Prince’s individual use of labor as a resistance mechanism. My argument begins to engage an issue about women’s work raised by Carla Peterson, who is interested in the cultural and resistance possibilities generated by writing about women’s labor. Peterson writes, given the particular social and cultural construction of black women’s lives, such writing differed in significant ways from that of black men in its ability to imagine cultural possibilities specifically engendered by women’s space and women’s work.13

Work then, in The History of Mary Prince, is both a narrative and historical construct that orders her subjectivity by giving her the means with which to attain physical and psychical freedom. Ultimately, Prince is not only a literary precursor to other resisting slave laborers, but also a voice of West Indian female resistance that allows slaves to retain and affirm their heritage in spite of the obvious dangers of the New World. Slave resistance and black freedom were constant sources of frustration for the Empire. In Slave Narratives and the Romantic Imagination, Helen Thomas suggests that the British Romantic public body characterized the Haitian Revolution and African religious practices

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such as obeah as the sites of power that intrigued and frustrated the Empire. Thomas argues that the Romantic (and indeed) British concern with obeah reflected Britain’s anxieties regarding power, most especially the fluctuations of imperial power as Britain, France, and Spain vied for dominance in the Caribbean. Just as importantly, it also registered Britain’s concern over the slaves’ power to determine their own fates, as events in the Caribbean had shown.14

Thus, the text of the former slave served as a constant reminder and potential threat to the cultural and political authority of the Empire. The nature of West Indian slavery was indeed a curious institution, perhaps even more peculiar than its American cousin. The West Indies were a major port in the slave trade and St. Domingue in particular had a high number of slaves from southeast Africa. The transportation of African slaves during the Middle Passage is of utmost importance for resistance practices, because memories of an African homeland and freedom often underwrote efforts to incite rebellion. The image of ships in motion across the sea became an important marker for slaves and slaveholders insofar as it represented both slavery and opportunities for freedom. Consider, for example, historian Michael Craton’s discussion on the relationship between the sea and liberation: The sea remained the common Caribbean element, the essential medium of communication, a symbol of distance, isolation, and danger, but also of escape. The sea not only linked the islands with the metropole, the cousin colonies of the North American seaboard and the heartland-homeland of the African slaves, but was also the means of communicating between individual islands with distances measured in time taken rather than nautical miles, because of the prevailing winds and the vagaries of the weather.15

Prince remarks on the role of the sea in her own experience, and it becomes a barrier of protection between herself and her owner: “My master, however, was a harsh, selfish man; and we always dreaded his return from sea.”16 Later in the narrative, Prince alludes to the opportunities afforded by sea journeys: For I wanted, by all honest means, to earn money to buy my freedom. Sometimes I bought a hog cheap on board ship, and sold it for double the money on shore. (45)

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Prince’s references to the sea should not be taken merely as minor reflections on her life in the Caribbean. Instead, these references confirm her acknowledgment of the seas as a central component of her experience in the system of West Indian slavery. As Craton points out, the sea constituted a source of communication, a phenomenon which Prince refers to as a scene from her memory of a particularly brutal voyage: We were nearly four weeks on the voyage, which was unusually long. Sometimes we had a light breeze, sometimes a great calm, and the ship made no way; so that our provisions ran very low, and we were out upon short allowance. I should almost have been starved had it not been for the kindness of a black man . . . and his wife, who had brought their own victuals, and shared them with me. (37)

Shortly after Prince recounts this scene, she makes another significant reference to the relationship between the sea, movement, and community: I was on the beach with some of the slaves, and we saw a sloop come in loaded with slaves . . . We got a boat and went aboard. When I came upon the deck, I asked the black people, “Is there anyone here for me?” “Yes,” they said, “your mother.” . . . when I saw my poor mammy my joy was turned to sorrow, for she had gone from her senses . . . She began to talk foolishly, and said that she had been under the vessel’s bottom. They had been overtaken by a violent storm at sea. My poor mother had never been on the sea before, and she was so ill. (41)

Prince’s various references to the sea raise a host of issues critical to the nature of Caribbean slavery. Slave ships immediately focus attention on issues of exchange among slaves, which we can see at work in Prince’s exchange with the slave couple. More importantly, in telling the story of her mother’s suffering aboard the slave ship, Prince becomes one of the few narrators to recount the horrors of the slave trade.17 Prince’s memories of the sea further underscore her self-conscious effort to condemn West Indian slavery. Perhaps more important than Prince’s identification with the sea is the role that the Haitian Revolution played in creating a culture of resistance that she was able to appropriate for her own needs. Despite all of the Haitian Revolution’s obvious political implications, there were just as many psycho-social implications that gave birth to a West Indian culture of resistance. The revolution was not only a marker of the slave’s belief in freedom and liberation, but it was also a threat to white power throughout the world that represented the breadth and scope of diasporic rage and

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resistance. This established culture of resistance is precisely the cultural script that Prince uses for herself. And, as Sandra Paquet points out, Prince’s story has a crucial place in West Indian history: Telling her story is a civic and political act that links Prince’s individual quest for freedom as a black West Indian woman to the revolutionary restructuring of West Indian slavery.18

Prince brings forth this revolutionary fervor in a conversation with her editor, Thomas Pringle: I would rather go into my grave than go back as slave to Antigua, though I wish to go back to my husband very much—I am much afraid my owners would separate me from my husband, and use me very hard, or perhaps sell me for a field negro; and slavery is too bad, I would rather go into my grave! (55)

Prince’s statement reveals that liberty is more important than life itself. This same type of revolutionary fervor is reiterated through the narrative, from her impassioned condemnations of slavery to her equally important refusal to shield her readers from the brutal truths of West Indian slavery—the content of her narrative itself is a rebellious act. The rebelliousness of her narratives invokes an important narrative function of Prince’s resistant aesthetic. Obviously unconcerned with what her readers may think of her aggressive exchange with her white editor, Prince instead creates a narrative voice that serves to reaffirm for herself and remind her readers of the revolutionary West Indian past from which she comes. A crucial component of West Indian women’s resistance is verbal defense, and as Prince makes clear, sass provides her with ample opportunities to destabilize the tenor of the master/slave relationship. Prince’s use of sass operates on two levels: as a tool for personal redress and as a tool for critiquing the British slaveholding populations. Consider, for example, her use of verbal resistance to change the scope of her relationship to her owner. Upon returning to her owner after running away, Prince is certain about how she expects to be treated and even acknowledges a change in Captain I’s treatment: I then took courage and said that I could stand the floggings no longer; that I was weary of my life, and therefore I had run away to my mother . . . He told me to hold my tongue and go about my work, or he would find a way to settle me. He did not, however, flog me that day. (37)

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Prince’s verbal defense situates her in a lineage of women who used oral resistance to strike back at their owners. As Joanne Braxton and Harryette Mullen have pointed out, “sass” or talking back was one of the most common modes of resistance available to black women.19 But well before literary critics acknowledged the use of sass, verbal assaults by slaves were a problem for West Indian slave owners. In response to a proposal made by the British government to abolish the use of the whip, one leading official argued against it because of women’s personal weaponry—“that powerful instrument of the attack and defense, their tongue.”20 A second and perhaps more important use of sass allows Prince to politicize the plight of the enslaved by severely critiquing British slaveholders, an action that has important implications for Prince’s position in the slave narrative genre. Even though Prince is writing primarily for a white audience, she risks alienating her audience by repeatedly condemning members of the white community who refuse to call an end to slavery. Consider, for example, her reaction to being sold to Turks Island without being able to see her family: “Oh the Buckra people who keep slaves think that black people are like cattle, without natural affection. But my heart tells me otherwise” (37). Framing this overt assertion of black humanity and subjectivity is an outright condemnation of whites. Prince frequently decries the actions of slave owners and British citizens, and perhaps her most damning indictment appears near the end of her narrative once she is living as a “free” woman in England: Since I have been here I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feelings of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. They tie slaves up like hogs . . . and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged; and yet they come home and say, and make some good people believe that slaves don’t want to get out of slavery . . . All slaves want to be free . . . The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery . . . is either ignorant or a lying person. (54, emphasis mine)

While such condemnations serve the narrative well, William Andrews views narrative outburst as a textual liability: A few ex-slaves, however, in seeming ignorance or defiance of the rhetorical risk, made much of their despair and unassuaged outrage, their transgressions of Christian morality, and their unheroic behavior. Nor did these narrators always apologize for their breaches or use them as pretexts for grand reversals of the character at climactic moments in their lives. Ex-

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Although Andrews attributes such assertiveness to a narrative lapse, I argue that Prince’s emboldened stance is an indication of her freedom to challenge established boundaries of expected slave behavior. Prince is not hindered by the constant need for approval or economic compensation from her white audience. Therefore, free from issues of propriety enforced by abolitionists or amanuenses, she is able to come to terms with her lived condition as a slave. Her critique of British national identity politicizes her verbal resistance. In this case, verbal resistance is a matter of politicized resistance to institutionalized injustice rather than only a matter of personal vindication. In so doing, she authenticates the slave’s voice within the institution of slavery and thus excavates the truth of the situation. As we have seen, Prince’s sass places her in an important tradition of black female confrontation; however, her emphasis on movement and migrations disrupts received notions of women’s enslavement. Prince navigates both the physical and psychical dangers of the New World by embarking on a series of migrations throughout the Caribbean that ultimately lead to freedom and a renewed sense of herself as a resisting subject. Unlike other female slave narrators who remained stationary in an effort to maintain family ties, Prince’s narrative makes clear that she moved in search of increased labor and freedom opportunities. Prince traveled extensively throughout the region, and her project becomes one of liberation through migration. Each stop that she makes has its one specific history of resistance, and it is her mobility that allows her to forge her own plan of resistance. Reading Prince in terms of movement forces readers to acknowledge her multiple positions during which she develops what Carol Boyce Davies refers to as “migratory subjectivity” in which women’s lives and work cross various boundaries, thus situating them in various locations. Davies writes:

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The category of Black women, or woman of color, exists as multiple performances of gender and race and sexuality based on the particular cultural, historical, geopolitical, class communities in which Black women exist.22

The relationship between black women and community is especially important for Prince insofar as the frequent migrations throughout the Caribbean facilitate a greater understanding of her individual enslavement, as well as the experiences of her fellow slaves. The relationship between resistance and movement at work in the text can be traced to Prince’s separation from her rather insulated community to a moment when she is thrust into recognition of her condition that she recognizes as indicative of the harsh realities of slave life. Not surprisingly, this forced move considerably alters Prince’s conception of self: My heart throbbed with grief and terror so violently that I pressed my hands quite tightly across my breast, but I could not keep still, and it continued to leap as though it would burst out of my body. But who cared for that? Did one of the many bystanders, who were looking at us so carelessly, think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the negro woman and her young ones? No, no! They were not all bad, I dare say, but slavery hardens white people’s hearts toward the blacks; and many of them were not slow to make their remarks upon us aloud without regard to our grief. (30)

She continues: “Oh those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves” (31). Prince’s condemnation is a significant one, for though it is not her first assault on slavery, it is her first verbal attack on those slaveholding whites themselves. Here Prince deploys the narrative freedom associated with the laboring body of the common woman who is not bound by the ideology of conciliation and therefore does not have to negotiate for white approval and assistance in the abolitionist cause. Prince is asserting that her experiences alone, not the willing assistance of white sponsors, will suffice for her condemnation of slavery. Further, that she does not invoke white women’s assistance during a moment of potential cross-cultural coalition also has important implications for black women’s experience in slavery. Unlike Harriet Jacobs who frequently appeals for white women’s assistance in her struggle for freedom, Prince makes no such entreaties. At this particular moment, Prince’s resistance is based on an individual and physical rejection of the inhumanity of slavery. In doing so, she reaffirms her own humanity by suggesting that she does not need anyone to speak for her.

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Prince’s sale to Spanish Point marks the development of her consciousness regarding the group dynamics of slavery. When Prince arrives in Spanish Point she is immediately initiated into a group of slaves from varying backgrounds who form a resisting community. Even before she reaches her owner’s house, she is warned of the coming trials: Slave women hired from another owner, who were at work in the yard, spoke to me, and asked who I belonged to? I replied, “I am come to live here.” “Poor child, poor child,” they both said; “you must keep a good heart if you are to live here.” (32)

The variations of slave life provide an important narrative function insofar as they allow Prince to quietly critique West Indian slavery. Shortly thereafter, Prince recounts her meeting with the French slave Hetty and Jack, an “African from the coast of Guinea” (34). Not only is she warned by other slaves of her owner’s brutality, but she also witnesses Hetty’s treatment who “led a miserable life” and on the mistreatment of Jack and another child, Prince remarks, “seldom a day passed without these boys receiving the most ill treatment, and often for no fault at all” (24). Through these descriptions, Prince critiques the indiscriminate brutality of West Indian slavery, but also marks her process of communal selfcreation. According to Sterling Stuckey, the community building process is a crucial element in a slave’s ability to survive the horrors of slavery: Their very effort to bridge ethnic differences and to form themselves into a single people to meet the challenge of a common foe proceeded from an impulse that was pan-African—that grew out of a concern for all Africans—as what was useful was appropriated from a multiplicity of African groups even as an effort was made to eliminate distinctions among them.23

For Prince, then, the detribalization process forces her to identify with other slaves and thus to recognize that theirs is a shared plight. After Hetty’s death, Prince assumes her chores, but refuses to relive Hetty’s sufferings. Prince responds quite differently and chooses escape as a means of retaliation to a particularly brutal beating from her owner: He came to me and without any more ado, stooped down and taking off his heavy boot, he struck with such a severe blow in the small of my back that I shrieked with agony . . . after this I ran away and went to my mother. (36)

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Prince’s actions are indicative of the questing fugitive hero, most notably Fredrick Douglass, who uses physical struggle as a motivation for escape. However, Prince’s return to her mother, who feeds and hides her, suggests a variation of the loophole of retreat that so effectively assisted Harriet Jacobs in her quest for freedom. Indeed, Prince makes it clear that her mother’s efforts saved her: “She dared not receive me into the house, but she had me up in the rocks near, and brought me food at night” (36). As Valerie Smith reminds us, hiding away may seem like another variation on confinement, but actually leads to physical liberation: Likewise, and perhaps more important, the garret, a place of confinement also renders the narrator spiritually independent of her master, and makes possible her ultimate escape to freedom.24

That Prince is assisted by her family reifies Smith’s argument that female escape is often negotiated with the help of family and/or community members. Prince’s experiences with Hetty and other slaves at Spanish Point are instrumental in the development of her self-conscious confrontational identity. The development of this voice parallels her many movements throughout the Caribbean. Importantly, it is during her voyage to Grand Quay to work on the salt ponds that anticipates a significant shift in Prince’s relationship to her enslavement. Salt mining was a particularly brutal endeavor and was far different from the types of labor to which she had grown accustomed, but it nevertheless provided her with an opportunity to congregate with a larger community of slaves with which she could identify. The narrative takes on a different tone, and she no longer speaks in terms of the narrative “I” that marked her speech at Spanish Point. She instead speaks in terms of the collective, “we.” This shift in pronoun usage is far more than a grammatical slippage; it marks the development of a resistance and group consciousness. Through this overtly oppressive state, Prince overcomes the isolation she has experienced. The identification can also be read as a yearning for the family that she has left behind and therefore a critique of the familial disruption that slavery engenders. Prince takes great pains to tell of her suffering, as well as the suffering of the others in the gang of slaves. The aged Daniel was a symbol for what lies ahead for all slaves: “He was an object of pity and terror . . . and in his wretched case we saw, each of us, our own lot, if we should live to be as old” (39). In this reimagining of the ruptured slave family, Prince reminds her readers that she is culturally and morally obligated to tell their stories: “In telling my own story, I cannot pass by those of my fellow slaves for

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when I think of my own griefs, I remember theirs” (40). Ultimately, the salt ponds and oppressive conditions she was forced to endure allowed her to access a public experience that could be used in the service of others. The salt ponds provide a space of liminality that eventually facilitates her empowerment. That state of liminality, as defined by Carla Peterson and Victor Turner, allows the disenfranchised individual the ability to access communal connections.25 Hence, at her greatest site of oppression, she can access a communal sensibility that leads to opportunities for selfexpression and collectivity. Prince’s efforts to gain economic independence are some of the most important ideological sites in the narrative and are part of a larger framework that deals specifically with the cultural practice engendered by West Indian slavery. Houston Baker reminds us of the complexities of West Indian slavery in stating, the consequences of the differing views of slavery in the West Indies and the Old South are reflected in the possible degrees of freedom available to enterprising West Indian and Afro-American slaves. West Indian slavery was more inclined than that of the Old South to permit the substitution of one form of capital for another.26

In referencing Equiano’s text, Baker identifies a crucial link between the slave’s subjectivity and economic value: The narrator, having been reduced to property by a commercial deportation decides during his West Indian captivity that neither sentiment nor spiritual sympathies can earn his liberation. He realizes, then, in effect, that only the acquisition of property will enable him to alter his designated status as property. He thus formulates a plan of freedom constrained by the mercantile boundaries of a Caribbean situation.27

Baker’s reading establishes the fact that Equiano is well aware of his economic value. Similarly, Prince is well aware of her value in terms of the slave society. Prince even remarks on this situation in stating: The bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty-seven . . . the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum of money for so young a slave. (31)

Both Equiano’s and Prince’s reflections indicate not only their knowledge of the economic implications of the slave trade, but also their role within this particular system. But, as Baker reminds us, the slave’s

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acknowledgement of the system is not enough; the initial acknowledgment has to be accompanied by his actions to change his status: It vividly delineates the true character of Afro-America’s historical origins in slave economics and implicitly acknowledges that such economics must be mastered before liberation can be achieved.28

Prince shows us that a self-conscious, mercantile self-evaluation is essential to her pursuit of freedom: The way in which I made my money was this—When my master and mistress were from home, as they sometimes did, and left me to take care of the house and the premises, I had a good deal of time to myself, and made the most of it. I took in washing, and sold coffee and yams and other provisions to the captains of ships. I did not sit still idling during the absence of my owners; for I wanted, by all honest means, to earn money to buy my freedom. Sometimes I bought a hog cheap on board ship and sold it for double the money on shore; and I also earned a good deal by selling coffee. By this means I by degree acquired a little cash. (45)

Prince’s commercial involvement is also characteristic of the tradition of huckstering that was widely practiced by women throughout the Caribbean. Huckstering, broadly defined as the informal commercial activities of slaves, was a crucial element in black women’s social and economic relations.29 The popularity of huckstering was in large part a response to the social and material conditions of slavery that allowed women to attain limited resources, including higher quality food and, in some cases, property. Likewise, huckstering allowed women to maintain some semblance of control over their time. As Beckles points out, Huckstering . . . enabled them to make profitable use of their leisure time. And it afforded them the chance to travel and normalised their social lives as much as possible under highly restrictive circumstances.30

Prince’s commercial endeavors reveal her skillful use and manipulation of time, space, and place. During the absence of her owners, Prince transforms their site of ownership (the home) into the proving ground for her own ownership. Prince’s use of labor also underscores her sense of self and personal authority. Through her negotiations with ship captains and other customers, Prince develops a public persona and a heightened level of visibility. Therefore, well before she narrates her story for a public audience, Prince’s labor provides her with a public platform.

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The emphasis that Prince places on her labor also serves as a metaphor for freedom and the rights of citizenship. In telling of her efforts, Prince brings to light the quotidian acts of slave life that illustrates the experiences of other enslaved blacks. Prince’s labor also illustrates the reciprocity inherent in the contract of citizenship. In relating the story of one black woman’s participation in economic exchange, Prince suggests that blacks should have the right to participate as equal agents in the marketplace. As a result, not only does labor facilitate her own personal freedom, but it also marks blacks’ eventual independence from whites. Indeed, unlike the shared moral and Christian-based outrage, the hard labor of the slave is the facet that cannot be appropriated by white interest precisely because only the slave can speak to the harshness associated with the labor of the enslaved. Prince finally realizes her own independence once she travels to England. In what is probably the most important of her migratory experiences, Prince’s move to England gives her the freedom to speak, to act, and finally to leave her owners and seek the help of Moravian missionaries. In one of the many verbal duels with her owners in which they threaten to throw her out, Prince asserts her rights on the basis of the evils of slavery and also turns their abuse against them: This is the fourth time my master and mistress have driven me out, or threatened to drive me and I will give them no more occasion to bid me go. I was not willing to leave them, for I am a stranger in this country, but now I must go—I can stay no longer to be used. (51)

Prince disengages herself from her owners’ control and after her departure from the Woods’ household she continues to work toward her physical and emotional freedom. Prince’s closing manifesto is the culmination of her attempts to gain freedom, equality, and the rights of citizenship. Still free from the prevailing constraints of propriety, Prince refuses to hide her anger as she critiques the uncivilized behavior of the English. In an interesting twist, Prince subverts the alleged civilizing nature of British influence: Since I have been here I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go the West Indies, they forget God and all feelings of shame, I think, since they can see and do such things. (54)

Though Prince is still enslaved, she already achieved a psychical freedom evident in the status she assigns to her self and her story.

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Consider, for example, her construction of the relationship she shares with the woman to whom she narrated her story, Susanna Strickland, whom she refers to as “my good friend” (54). Prince’s reference is personal and most likely alludes to some sense of mutual affection between the women; however, the reference also uncovers a more important political imperative. That she refers to Strickland as a friend indicates that she does not recognize the cultural and political rules that establish difference between a black woman and a white woman. In short, Prince’s statement reveals that she views herself not as the lowly recipient of Strickland’s benevolence, but instead as Strickland’s equal. In another equally profound statement, Prince acknowledges that the telling of her story is a history-making event that will significantly impact British views of slavery: “I will say the truth to English people who may read this history” (54). Herein, Prince recognizes the importance of her story, as well as the significance of telling the stories of other slaves. In telling her English readers of her personal experiences and by including the voices of other slaves in that framework, Prince alters the abolitionist impulse and Western concepts of history and notions of individuality. Considering that many abolitionists sought to dismantle the institution of slavery without necessarily considering the lives and the experiences of the slaves themselves, Prince prioritizes the involvement of black bodies in freedom movements. For Prince, the institution has to be destroyed, but the interior lives and culture of enslaved blacks have to be maintained. In naming her efforts as part of a larger history-making project, Prince makes a conscious move to insert herself into national historical discussions. Indeed, as historian Hilary Beckles argues, Prince is in the vanguard of West Indian resistance: Slave women like Mary Prince…who neither led troops into battle, nor mobilized any community for such action succeeded nevertheless, in making a considerable contribution to the radical tradition through the writing of memoirs. . . Her “voice” in metropolitan anti-slavery circles constituted an important “literary” force from the West Indian women’s anti-slavery vanguard.31

As if to further solidify her commitment to a revolutionary past, Prince does not frame her argument in terms of Christian love and sisterhood between white and black women. As I have pointed out, Prince is not interested in impressing her readers or in creating a fiction of sisterhood, but, as her statement suggests, she is interested in becoming an economic subject:

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Prince claims knowledge of the centrality of labor in the Empire, and thereby argues that she should be considered an equal worker, not a slave. Her critique of the Empire, as well as her readiness to become an active participant in the civic and economic ventures of the Empire, does much to reflect the position of the Afro-Caribbean presence in the British nation. Labor was the mechanism through which she resisted the tyranny of her various owners, and work is the same mechanism she uses to demand citizenship. In this sense, labor operates as more than employment; it implies freedom, equality, and mutual respect and reciprocity between the citizen and the nation. Even though there is no record of Prince after 1833, her text and her work remain as tangible markers of the myriad ways in which the diasporic presence shaped the Empire, well before Windrush.

Selected Bibliography Andrews, William, ed. The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives. Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1998. —. To Tell A Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1769-1865. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Baker, Houston. Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. —. Long Black Song. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987. Beckles, Hilary. Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, Ltd, 1999. —. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Braxton, Joanne. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. London: James Currey, 1990. Craton, Michael. Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean. Jamaica: IRP, 1997. Davies, Carol Boyce. Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Ferguson, Moira. Introduction to The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related By Herself. 1-55. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. —. ed. Nine Black Women: An Anthology of Nineteenth Century Writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda, and the Caribbean. New York: Routledge Press, 1998. Foster, Frances Smith. Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Mullen, Harryette. “Runaway Tongues: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved.” In Cultures of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 244-262. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince.” African American Review 26 (Spring 1992): 131-146. Peterson, Carla. Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. 1831. In The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, edited by William Andrews, 2281. Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1998. Santamarina, Xiomara. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Sharpe, Jenny. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women’s Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Todorova, Kremena. “‘I Will Say the Truth to the English People’: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 285-302.

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Notes 1

See Moira Ferguson, Introduction to The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave Related by Herself (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 1. It is also worth noting that despite a renewed interest in Prince’s text, a search on the MLA bibliography only yields twenty results, thus confirming my contention that the text has yet to receive the full critical attention that it deserves. In comparison, Equiano’s narrative yields over one hundred results, while Douglass’s narrative yields well over three hundred results. Jacobs’s text yields over forty results. 2 See the introduction to this anthology. 3 Kremena Todorova, “‘I Will Say the Truth to the English People’: The History of Mary Prince and the Meaning of English History,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 287. 4 Ibid., 288. 5 Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 10. 6 For more on the relationship between the former slave and capitalist pursuits, see Houston Baker, Long Black Song (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972). 7 Ferguson, “Introduction,” 13. 8 Nanny of the Maroons is remembered in oral histories for her leadership role in Jamaican Maroon society. See Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishing, 1999) and Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) for discussions on women and Maroon resistance practices. 9 See the introduction to this anthology. 10 Joanne Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 22. 11 Ferguson, “Introduction,” 19. 12 For an intriguing reading of the issues of voice and authority in Prince’s narrative, see Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Heartbeat of a West Indian Slave: The History of Mary Prince,” African American Review 26 (Spring 1992). 13 Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African American Women Writers in the North (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 23. 14 Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172. 15 Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean (Jamaica: IRP, 1997), 27. 16 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, in The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, ed. William Andrews (Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1998), 72. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be noted in the text.

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The only other autobiographical representation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is found in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavus Vassa, The African, in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. C. T. Davies and H. L. Gates (New York: Penguin, 1987). 18 Paquet, 132. 19 Braxton and Harryette Mullen, “Runaway Tongues: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved,” in The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 245. 20 Quoted in “Women, Work, and Resistance in the French Caribbean During Slavery, 1760-1848,” in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verne Shepherd (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2000), 989. 21 William Andrews, To Tell A Free Story (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 8. 22 Carol Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4. 23 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture, Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3. 24 Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 29. 25 Quoted in Peterson, 28. 26 Houston Baker, Blues Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 35. 27 Ibid., 35. 28 Ibid., 37. 29 Beckles, Centering Woman, 141. 30 Ibid., 141. 31 Ibid., 185.

CHAPTER THREE A VIRTUOUS NURSE AND A PÍCARA: MARY SEACOLE’S SELF-CHARACTERIZATION IN WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MRS. SEACOLE IN MANY LANDS STOYAN TCHAPRAZOV

More often than not, scholars portray Mary Seacole as a heroic Creole woman, who not only distinguished herself as a caring and loving nurse during the Crimean War, but also managed to break the chains of color and gender prejudices that ruled the nineteenth century. At the same time, they brush aside her not-so-heroic part, the more practical and selfinterested one. The tendency to sanitize Seacole’s image and that of her achievements actually dates back to December 6, 1856, when Punch published a poem in praise of her courageous exploits at the Crimea. Even if in somewhat light verse, the poem paints a distinctly positive portrait of Seacole: She gave her aid to all who prayed, To hungry and sick and cold; Open hand and heart, alike ready to part Kind words and acts and gold.1

There is hardly anything in this stanza, linguistic or structural, that requires strong analytical skills for deciphering its form or meaning. The language is simple—dominated by one-syllable words; and so is the meter—iambic tetrameter. As a result, one could easily recognize the image ascribed to Seacole: that of a dedicated, always-helpful, and industrious nurse. The rest of the poem is not much different from this stanza. In essence, it elaborates on the heroic and virtuous character of Mrs. Seacole.

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With a few exceptions, this almost idealized image of Seacole followed her closely for the rest of her life, and eventually turned her into a respected war heroine. In 1881, the Times obituary of Seacole described her as a woman who “greatly distinguished herself as a nurse on the battlefield and in hospitals during the Crimean War.”2 The heroic and honorable image Seacole acquired mostly during her post-war years in London has also tinged much of the more recent scholarship that examines her life and work. Amy Robinson, for instance, states that Adventures can be read as a successful manual of self-determination in which the visibility of gender and race act (despite her repeated disavowals) as the very sustenance of her autobiographical self.3

Evelyn Hawthorne presents Seacole in even more glamorous light: Transgressing gender, race, and class roles as an adventuring businesswoman in Jamaica, London, Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, and as a female who, undaunted by the horrors of the battlefield, deployed herself to the Crimean War, this heroine is extraordinary by any standard.4

Whether Seacole thought of herself as such an ideal, “extraordinary” heroine is open to debate, however. In Adventures she rarely depicts herself as a woman of distinguished manners or as someone who has committed numerous heroic deeds, the exception being the part when she speaks of her deeds that put her on the pages of the Times.5 In fact, most frequently, Seacole presents herself in Adventures as a pícara, as a woman on a quest for adventure, who is always ready to rise to the occasion if need be. The following essay takes a close look at Seacole’s numerous adventures and asks why she included material that could potentially present her in an unflattering light. Why did she not take the more conventional way of presenting herself as a purely altruistic and virtuous woman, especially given the apparent willingness of some Englishmen to see her as such, and her great need for money after the war? I look for answers to these questions in reading Adventures through the lens of the picaresque genre. Such a reading, I believe, paints a more balanced portrait of Seacole than the idealized one that has been and continues to be credited to her. I hurry to note here that my purpose is not to impose on Adventures the limitations of another genre, but rather, to show how a knowledge of that genre offers an alternative hermeneutics, which still highlights Seacole’s heroic achievements, but does not assimilate her otherness, her status of a Creole woman who struggled to survive at the

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margins of Empire. Specifically, the picaresque brings to the fore such writing tactics that allow Seacole (1) to separate herself more distinctly from the typically virtuous, house-bound Victorian woman: the picaresque is her carte blanche not only to travel, but also to live in grotesque environments and behave however she finds suitable, even dissolutely and selfishly; (2) to highlight the hybrid nature of her identity—the pícaros are notorious for being able to assume different identities; and (3) to fashion a narrative that artfully shifts its center from her own life and achievements to her environment. Although dressed as autobiographies, more often than not the picaresque texts are also critiques of the society the pícaro inhabits.6 A brief introduction to the major characteristics of the picaresque genre is in order at this point of the essay, for, as many scholars have pointed out, the picaresque texts hardly follow a single pattern according to which they are written.7 Not surprisingly, since what many identify as the first-born of that genre, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), all kinds of narratives have been ascribed to that genre—from seventeenth-century rogue stories and adventure novels, such as Quevedo’s La Vida del Buscón and Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, to more recent, twentieth-century journal and war novels, Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum respectively. This elusive nature of the picaresque has also led a number of scholars to list its main characteristics, and as with most lists that attempt to lock up genres in a set of features, the ones on the picaresque vary considerably in content. For the purposes of this essay, I have adopted Maximillian Novak’s list of major features of the picaresque genre: [In the picaresque novel,] events occur in an apparently random fashion, characters appear and disappear without any necessary pattern; the hero is free from the burden of a single personality, for he assumes many roles. He is sexually liberated, or at the very least, he observes the sexual liberation of others. He moves freely in space, and his narrative will usually move freely in time. Much, perhaps all, of his freedom is illusory, but for a large part of his narrative we are allowed to believe it exists. The very nature of first person narrative, the most natural form for a picaresque work, suggests a sense of immortality that conquers death itself, and while closure of some kind usually exists, the hero, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, is always capable of another voyage.8

The list, evidently, is not short. Moreover, it is not complete—all these features are not invariably found in every picaresque text, and if they are, they vary greatly in degree and form.

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In Adventures, however, one finds every single one of these features, with the exception of that which concerns the sexual liberation of the pícaro.9 To begin with, the events in Adventures are relatively loosely related and the “characters appear and disappear without any particular pattern.” Seacole is the only constant in the narrative, and the whole book hinges on her presence. Almost every other member of the cast quietly disappears after a cameo role. One example of Seacole’s (mis)treatment of characters is that of her “very dark” companion in London, to whom she dedicates only a few sentences without even mentioning her name.10 In fact, Seacole rarely provides the names of her characters, with the exception of those who write letters for her or are famous. The lack of names and character development in the book is probably prompted by the episodic nature of Seacole’s real life, which she attempts to replay on the pages of her book. Nevertheless, even when she stays for a longer period in one place, as she does in the Crimea, she underplays the presence of her characters. The partner with whom Seacole opens a hotel in the Crimea, Mr. Day, fades away like thin air after he is mentioned a few times. He then briefly returns at the very end of the novel, but his presence is once again short and unmemorable. That Seacole is “free from social conventions”—the second picaresque feature from Novak’s list—is also rather evident in the book. In fact, scholars have almost universally recognized Seacole as an iconoclastic figure, even if with reservations sometimes. Paul Baggett describes her as a woman with “autonomous agency,”11 Robinson as “an exception to the rules,”12 and Sandra Pouchet Paquet as an “individual who challenges the racial, national, gendered straightjacketing of nineteenth-century British imperialism at home and abroad.”13 Indeed Seacole constructs herself as an independent entity throughout her narrative, and although every so often she appears to be endorsing the imperialistic appetites of the British, she usually does so with a wink, thus also defying them, albeit only implicitly. A telling example of Seacole’s camouflaged criticism of the British is her remark about the recently-terminated (on paper that is) racist history of England:14 I think I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic— and I do confess to a little—it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related—and I am proud of the relationship—to those poor mortals who you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns.15

As a true pícara, Seacole does not openly reveal her views of the British. She tries to justify her “prejudices” against them, and resorts to indirect

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criticism of their past by attacking their offspring over the Atlantic. In this way, she manages to express her doubts about the supposedly anti-racist British public, without explicitly accusing it of still holding racist attitudes and beliefs. The last feature on Novak’s list is concerned with the first-person narration and constant travels of the pícaro, both of which are notably present in Seacole’s text. The latter part of this feature is self-explanatory from the very title of the book, and the “I” narrator rules from the first to the last page of Adventures, except for the brief moments when Seacole lets her editor and recommenders speak for her. The presence of an editor, letters, or other evidence, which establishes verisimilitude for real, authentic events, is actually yet another distinct characteristic of the picaresque tradition of writing. In Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe even transcribes in detail Moll’s bills in order to render his heroine’s story as authentic as possible.16 In the same spirit, in Adventures, both the editor, William Russell, a London Times correspondent during the Crimean War, and the letters of recommendation are employed by Seacole mainly to authenticate her narrative, to legitimize the stories told in it. Surely, Moll’s bills could be construed as fictional, while Seacole’s letters are genuine, but the authenticity of the documents is not important here; rather, it is their presence. Most likely, Seacole includes the voices of the editor and recommenders in order to validate the writing of her autobiography, for she is not rich or famous, nor is she English. In other words, the letters could be read as a testament to her life being worthy of a book, as well as a justification for the first-person narration. The presence of the letters elevates Seacole’s status. It is the equalizer that puts her on even ground with the English war nurses and volunteers, such as Florence Nightingale, who were already proclaimed war heroes in England while Seacole was commended only by the English press for her deeds in the Crimea. Apart from Novak’s list of the major features of the picaresque, Adventures bears a number of other distinct characteristics of that genre— the direct addressing of the reader; the main character’s otherness, which is typically attributed to his or her emergence from the lowest and poorest echelons of society; and the use of grotesque events and imagery. One needs to read only the first chapters of Adventures to find that Seacole repeatedly engages in direct dialogue with her reader.17 Her status as the “other” is a constant throughout her text as well—not only because of her lower class origins, but also because of her racial heritage and gender, for she usually occupies predominantly white male spaces. Grotesque scenes are not more difficult to find either. For instance, when in need of a bed in

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Cruces, Seacole decides to spend the night under one of the tables in her brother’s bar: Stripping the green oilskin cloth from the rough table—it would not be wanted again until to-morrow’s breakfast—[I] pinned up some curtains round the table’s legs, and turned in with my little servant beneath it. It was some comfort to know that my brother, his servants, and Mac brought their mattresses and slept upon it above us. It was a novel bed, and required some slight stretch of the imagination to fancy it a four-poster; but I was too tired to be particular, and slept soundly.18

This scene is only one of many in Adventures, for Seacole’s pecuniary struggles and traveling regularly oblige her to endure bizarre and unfriendly environments.19 Nevertheless, like Lazaro, Pablos, or any other picaresque character in literature, she does not seem to be shocked by her often-unpleasant surroundings. She treats them as just another bump on the road, as obstacles that she needs to overcome in order to survive. The evidence presented so far strongly suggests placing Adventures on the same shelf as the picaresque texts. As I have noted earlier, however, my purpose is not to contain Adventures in the picaresque tradition of writing, but to draw attention to its resemblance to texts of that genre in order to evoke a more balanced image of Seacole than the one typically ascribed to her. In doing so, I want to demonstrate how Seacole’s writing strategies and choice of stories persistently portray her not only as a hero, but also as a woman who took advantage of every opportunity that came across her way—in other words, as a woman who struggled with finding or assuming one particular identity. Not one or two are the moments in Adventures where Seacole’s selfless actions are followed or accompanied by selfish ones, or her views and identity shift from pro-British (white and Scottish) to anti-British (black and Jamaican). This duality, or hybridity, of Seacole constantly resurfaces in her text, be it in Jamaica, in Panama, or at the Crimea. The reader first encounters Seacole’s selflessness, commitment, and willingness to help those in need in Cruces, where she comes face to face with one of the most lethal diseases of her day—cholera. Without waiting for too long after the outbreak of the disease, Seacole eagerly offers her knowledge and help to everyone who asks for them, even those who could not pay her: It must be understood that many of those who could afford to pay for my services did so handsomely, but the majority of my patients had nothing better to give their doctress than thanks.20

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Not only does Seacole work for mere “thanks” most of the time, but she does so with courage and dedication rarely found in human nature. If the Spanish doctor, who comes from Panama specifically to aid the sick people of Cruces, becomes “nervous and frightened at the horrors around him,” Seacole remains calm and productive, painstakingly treating patient after patient.21 She is so devoted to her patients that she sleeps for only a couple of hours a day: “For days and nights together I scarcely knew what it was to enjoy two successive hours’ rest.”22 Once, she even travels out of town to help several muleteers afflicted by the disease. Eventually, her hard work and dedication to her patients earn her the title of “‘the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine.’”23 It is also in Cruces, however, that one learns about Seacole’s other side, the more practical and self-interested one. After curing many of cholera in Cruces, Seacole, like her brother, starts her own business there. She rents a small, run-down house, hires a chef and a few people to help her, and starts selling food to the numerous crowds of people that crossed the streets of Cruces. Seacole’s eye for making money off needy travelers stands out almost immediately after she opens her “table d’hôte.” To increase her clientele, she invites a barber to work for her and diversifies her services, so to speak, by continuing to offer treatment to those in need of any kind of medical help. Moreover, although often in danger of being robbed or deceived, for the “company at [her] table d’hôte was not over select,” she does not give up. She fights courageously with those who attempt to deceive her, often outwitting them and making them pay dearly.24 Even when Cruces is deserted and Seacole is forced to move to Gorgona, she successfully relocates and starts a new business—she builds a hotel that is “principally for the entertainment of ladies, and the care of those who might fall ill on the route.”25 Her new enterprise is no less profitable than the previous one, and she manages to make enough money to go back to her native Jamaica. At this point in Seacole’s (ad)ventures, the reader is more overtly introduced to how her selflessness and self-interestedness work hand in hand. While describing the racially prejudiced women who stayed at her hotel in Gorgona, Seacole highlights the conflicting nature of her character: Not that [their racism] ever gave me any annoyance; they were glad of my stores and comforts, I made money out of their wants; nor do I think our bond was ever closer; only this, if any of them came to me sick and suffering (I say this out of justice to myself) I forgot everything, except that she was my sister, and that it was my duty to help her.26

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As this quotation plainly tells, when able to make money out of her clients, Seacole even forgets about their racist beliefs and predispositions. But when the latter are in need of medical help, she treats them as she would her own “sister,” disregarding their beliefs, social status, or financial situation. Even more telling of how Seacole’s selflessness and selfishness work closely together in Cruces is the episode with the cholera-stricken “little, brown-faced orphan infant.”27 While initially Seacole exhibits what appears to be true affection and sympathy for the great suffering of the infant—“I thought more of that little child than I did of the men who were struggling for their lives, and prayed very earnestly and solemnly to God to spare it”28—later on she is not able to stop herself from dissecting the same child’s dead body and examining it for the sake of “gaining knowledge on the inner workings of [cholera].”29 To be sure, Seacole was not the first or the last person in the nineteenth-century to dissect a cadaver for medical research. The practice of excavating dead bodies from the graves for purposes of gaining medical knowledge was actually common among medical practitioners in the early parts of the nineteenthcentury.30 Yet, it is hard not to be impressed by Seacole’s ability both to grieve passionately for the suffering of the child and cold-heartedly split open its body. Seacole’s duality stands out not less prominently at the Crimea as well, where by day she is a dedicated, selfless nurse, saving the lives of wounded soldiers under the bullets of the enemy, and by night she is a hotel owner, making money off the same wounded soldiers. Moreover, as Alicia Blackwood remarks in her book about her own experiences at the Crimea, the prices Seacole charged at her hotel/store appeared to be on the “heavy” side.31 As if to justify Seacole’s high prices, Blackwood also adds that the former had all the right to overcharge her clients because she spared no pains and no exertion to visit the field of woe, and minister with her own hands such things as could comfort, or alleviate the sufferings of those around her.32

Maybe so, but Seacole’s actions in this case cannot but suggest as well that her motivation for going to the Crimea did not end with her willingness to help her British “sons,” who were suffering at the front. Seacole actually confesses, although implicitly, to some of her not-sopatriotic motivations for going to the Crimea. In the final pages of Adventures she states that she identifies with the soldier for whom “war and action were necessary to his existence, gave him excitement, occupation, chance of promotion.”33 She is so devastated by the end of the

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war that she exclaims: “What better or happier lot [i.e., war itself] could possibly befall me.”34 Put differently, war was like home for Seacole. It was the means for and the driving force behind her existence, an environment that allowed her to exercise the nursing skills she had inherited from her mother as well as to further her position as a colonial subject in the English empire—both socially and financially. Certainly, then, Seacole did not see herself, nor did she want to present herself, only as a selfless and compassionate woman who was ready to help wounded soldiers even under the bullets of the enemy but also as a woman who insisted on the practical, worldly aspects of life, including her need to make a living and her willingness to do so through war. The last and perhaps most conspicuous sign of Seacole’s attempt to play simultaneously two different, if not opposing, roles is her declaration of being both British and Creole. She insists on being read as a woman of mixed-race heritage from the very first lines of her book: “I am a Creole, and have good Scotch blood coursing in my veins.”35 As this quotation openly intimates, Seacole valued dearly both sides of her identity—the British and the Creole. Notwithstanding her words, however, a number of scholars have argued that she appears to put a stronger emphasis on her British side than on the Creole one in her book. Paquet observes that the British Empire is a sacred value in [Seacole’s] life, whether it presents social and cultural legitimacy at home and abroad or much desired safety from predatory “Yankees” in New Grenada.36

Such a reading of Seacole is certainly valid. The fact that she voluntarily goes to the front line to help soldiers under the bullets of the enemy is a reason strong enough to demonstrate Seacole’s support of the British and their endeavors. Too often and too explicitly, moreover, her text caters to the reading tastes of the British. As Baggett points out, Seacole expresses opinions that one would usually associate with the rhetoric of British colonialists rather than with that of the colonized, especially when she speaks of people of other cultures. She calls the Greeks “cunning-eyed,” the Maltese “lazy,” and the Indians “dirty” and “good-for-nothing black cooks.”37 Nevertheless, even if Seacole seems to paint a rather British portrait of herself, she still shows a lot of affection for Jamaica as well. For one, her medical practice, one of the major markers of her identity, never loses its Jamaican roots: wherever she goes, she brings with her knowledge of the potions and remedies she inherited from her Jamaican mother. In addition, her high mobility and frequent involvement in such exclusively male spheres as war and business rather visibly separate her from the generally

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quiet and domesticated Victorian woman. In brief, even though not as explicit and vocal as that to Britain, Seacole’s attachment to Jamaica is also fairly strongly evident in her text. One way of explaining Seacole’s attempt to play on both the British and Jamaican side of the field is her dire financial situation at the time of the writing of the book. Perhaps she foresaw the writing of Adventures as a lucrative venture, and that is why in her narrative she catered so much to the English beliefs and prejudices. As a mixed-race colonial subject who writes about England, Seacole is forced to ally herself with the British in order to make the most of her book. After all, she needed the British to buy her book and thus get her out of bankruptcy. A more compelling explanation for Seacole’s duality could be found, however, in what Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls the “double-voiced” nature of black texts: One can readily agree with Susan Willis that black texts are “mulattoes” (or “mulattas”), with two-toned heritage: these texts speak in standard Romance or Germanic languages and literary structures, but almost always speak with a distinct and resonant accent, an accent that Signifies (upon) the various black vernacular literary traditions, which are still being written down.38

Black literature, in Gates’s words, cannot escape its twofold heritage. Seacole, being a child of a black woman and a Western man, epitomizes this dual character of the displaced African—be he or she a subject in the English empire or a slave in the colonies. Creating a “double-voice” for herself, to use Gates’s term, Seacole is able to assume both black and white identities. She refuses the binary between British or Creole and chooses to embrace both, with all the baggage they bring with themselves. Seacole constantly travels between identities in Adventures. So, moreover, does her text. Echoing the hybrid and elusive nature of Seacole’s character, Adventures, too, dances at a fine line between identities, drawing on such diverse genres as the nineteenth-century British travel narrative, autobiography, and the picaresque novel. This fusion of genres is nothing out of the ordinary, of course. As Roland Barthes has convincingly argued, writers rarely confine their works to only one genre: [The text] cannot be caught up in a hierarchy, or even in a simple distribution of genres. What constitutes it is on the contrary (or precisely) its force of subversion with regard to the old classifications.39

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The text, in Barthes’s words, defies the clear-cut nature of genres, and to label it epic, gothic, or picaresque would mean to reduce its value greatly, to see only one facet of its multifarious identity. Seacole’s text makes a strong case in favor of Barthes’s words—it is caught between the picaresque genre and those of domestic fiction. Precisely this hybrid nature of Adventures is what allows one to see the various sides of Seacole’s identity—the heroic, industrious, opportunistic, pragmatic. This same hybrid nature of her text, however, is what also makes it problematic, for it exposes the volatility of her identity, and thus leaves too many question marks about it. Was she indeed an altruistic, generous woman, or did she exploit war to make money? Does she ally herself with the colonizer or with the colonized? These are fair questions to ask, but Seacole provides no straight answers to them. Her text reveals that she could be a truly caring, volunteer nurse while also making money for herself; that she cared about the British cause, but did not forget to criticize it. This instability of Seacole’s character pervades her text; it is at the center of her narrative. It underlines in bold print her constant wavering between being British and/or Creole, a conflict that quietly rages within her and splits her identity. To remain true to her own Manichean identity, Seacole had to find the writing strategies which would best suit it and the life she had led. She thus seems to reinvent the picaresque genre in Adventures—a genre that allowed her to preserve the fluidity of her own selfhood and life experiences, which were not much different from those of the sixteenthcentury Spanish pícaros, the pioneers of that genre: constant travels, grotesque incidents, adverse environments. The picaresque also allows Seacole to escape the constraints that the norms of domestic fiction would have put on her as writer. The typically self-idealizing ways of autobiography, as well as those of the pretentiously unbiased, yet Eurocentric and nationalistic, travel narratives were no match for the life she had led, or to her identity. Both of these genres were mainly exercised by men and women from the upper classes of nineteenth-century British society—by “privileged individual[s] with leisure and means to satisfy an adventuring drive for exoticism and otherness.”40 In contrast, with its portrayal of marginalized characters that are ready to do everything within their power to overcome their inauspicious place in society, the picaresque grants Seacole the freedom to move from place to place and behave in accordance with her environment. By presenting herself as a pícara, as someone who owns nothing but her own self, Seacole does not have to justify her constant travels and often-unladylike behavior. What is more, the picaresque gives her the freedom to jump

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from one identity to another. Pressed by their typically unfriendly environments, the pícaros usually resort to assuming a mixture of identities in order to survive. So, too, does Seacole: depending on circumstances, she turns black and Jamaican, or white and English. Thus, under the umbrella of the picaresque, Seacole can successfully pretend to write the story of her life while at the same time expose the ulcers of Britain and its colonies or the grim reality of war. Lastly, the picaresque genre, which, in Edward Friedman’s words, “develops, in part, as an alternative viewpoint, a vision of the world from below by a narrator unlike the reader,” permits Seacole to write her book from the perspective of the marginalized and disenfranchised, and thus remain true to her humble origins and status as the “other.”41 Surely, then, even though Seacole performed heroic deeds and achieved what very few in her time and situation did—she managed to break the barriers of color and gender prejudices in nineteenth-century England—it would be misleading to portray her only as a hero, to idealize her, for she also improved her own situation, whether financially or otherwise. Portraying Seacole as a clean-cut, ideal heroine, I believe, cuts her down in size. Such a reading sterilizes her, and, more importantly, turns her into yet another example of how generous the English empire has been to its subjects in Jamaica or elsewhere in its colonies; it shows how the English managed to turn “savages” into great, admirable heroes. While such a reading may find fruitful ground for development in Adventures, it also silences the part of Seacole’s identity she clearly wants her readers to see and remember as well—that of a mixed-race woman who struggled to survive both at the margins and center of Empire, in a world abundant in poverty, adversity, and racism.

Selected Bibliography Baggett, Paul. “Caught between Homes: Mary Seacole and the Question of Cultural Identity.” MaComère 3 (2000): 45-56. Blackwood, Alicia. Narrative of Personal Experiences and Impressions during a Residence on the Bosphorus throughout the Crimean War. London: Hatchard, 1881. Barthes, Roland. From Work to Text. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders. 1722. Edited by Edward Kelly. New York: Norton, 1973.

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Fish, Cheryl. “Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas.” Women’s Studies 26, no. 5 (1997): 475-495. Friedman, Edward. The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gunning, Sandra. “Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 949-81. Hawthorne, Evelyn. “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and PostEmancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2000): 309-331. McKenna, Bernard. “‘Fancies of Exclusive Possession’: Validation and Dissociation in Mary Seacole’s England and Caribbean.” Philological Quarterly 76, no. 2 (1997): 219-239. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1640-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Novak, Maximillian. “Liberty, Libertinism and Randomness: Form and Content in Picaresque Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 75-85. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands.” African American Review 26, no. 4 (1992): 651-664. Punch. “A Stir for Seacole.” December 6, 1856, 221. Robinson, Amy. “Authority and Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.” Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 537-557. Romero-Cesareo, Ivette. “Women Adrift: Madwomen, Matriarchs, and the Caribbean.” In Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, 135-160. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Seacole, Mary. Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Times. “Obituary of Mary Grand Seacole.” May 21, 1881. 7, col. f. Williams, Andrews. Introduction to Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, by Mary Seacole, xxvii-xxxiv. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Notes 1

Quoted in Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 134. To read the whole poem, see Punch, “A Stir for Seacole,” December 6, 1856, 221. 2 Times, “Obituary of Mary Grand Seacole,” May 21, 1881, 7, col. f. 3 Amy Robinson, “Authority and Public Display of Identity: Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (1994): 554. 4 Evelyn Hawthorne, “Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2000): 309. 5 Seacole, 170-71. I am aware that Seacole’s rare depictions of herself as a heroic woman may be due to the Victorian codes of autobiography, which prohibit selfelevation as inappropriate. Most Victorian autobiographers, as Regenia Gagnier explains, try to avoid seeming to brag. Yet, throughout her book Seacole incessantly promotes herself—most obviously, through the numerous letters of praise and acknowledgment by military personnel, which she reprints on the pages of her book. It seems out of character for her, therefore, to avoid mentioning deeds that would make her look heroic, simply because the codes of autobiography writing invite her to do so. See Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of SelfRepresentation in England, 1832-1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6 So far, Adventures has not been read as a picaresque text, but scholars have noted the picaresque nature of Seacole’s character in the book. Cheryl Fish states that “Seacole wrote as a pícara, using humor and excessive homage to Englishness even as she ironically undercut flattery at times.” Cheryl Fish, “Voices of Restless (Dis)continuity: The Significance of Travel for Free Black Women in the Antebellum Americas,” Women’s Studies 26, no. 5 (1997): 479-480. Ivette Romero-Cesareo observes that “in a typically picaresque gesture, whereby she reveals her commercial motivation, Seacole admits to the practical fruits sown through her encounter with the other.” Ivette Romero-Cesareo, “Women Adrift: Madwomen, Matriarchs, and the Caribbean,” in Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, ed. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 154. Both Fish and RomeroCesareo identify Seacole as a pícara, but they ignore the question of what the implications of writing as a pícara are. 7 See Richard Bjornson, The Picaresque Hero in European Fiction (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 4. He identifies the term picaresque novel as a “synthetic, somewhat arbitrary label for a collection of works which critics and scholars have retrospectively grouped together on the basis of rather vaguely delineated similarities.” 8 Maximillian Novak, “Liberty, Libertinism and Randomness: Form and Content in Picaresque Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 4 (1972): 81. Novak’s essay reviews three books—Parker’s Literature and the Delinquent, Miller’s The Picaresque

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Novel, and Cuillén’s Literature as System: Toward the Theory of Literary History—all of which, in one form or another, deal with listing the main characteristics of the picaresque genre. I chose to quote Novak, mainly because his essay allowed me to avoid the confusion that the quoting of several authors, instead of one, may bring in a short essay like mine. 9 It is quite puzzling that Seacole never speaks of men to whom she was attached intimately. Yet, as Sandra Gunning reveals in her essay, Seacole appears to have had an illegitimate daughter, whose existence she does not acknowledge in her book. Also see Gunning’s discussion of the people who managed hotels in the West Indies and how these hotels were viewed by the public. Typically, such hotels were owned by “mixed-race women,” and were considered “houses of pleasure and ill-repute.” Sandra Gunning, “Traveling with her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” Signs 26, no. 4 (2001): 957. 10 Seacole, 4. 11 Paul Baggett, “Caught between Homes: Mary Seacole and the Question of Cultural Identity,” MaComère 3 (2000): 46. 12 Robinson, 537. 13 Sandra Paquet, “The Enigma of Arrival: The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands,” African American Review 26, no. 4 (1992): 652. 14 In 1807 the British declared the slave trade illegal, and in 1833 abolished slavery in the colonies. 15 Seacole, 14 (emphasis added). 16 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (New York: Norton, 1973), 128. 17 The examples of direct addressing of the reader are too many to be listed in an endnote, so I am providing here two of the very early ones—the beginning of the last paragraph: “All my readers must know” (9); and the first sentence of chapter III: “The sympathizing reader, who very likely has been laughing heartily at my troubles, can fancy that” (17). 18 Seacole, 23. 19 Chapter V teems with grotesque scenes and imagery. See, for instance, the depictions of Seacole’s newly acquired “table d’hôte,” where serving food coexists with heavy drinking, thievery, and fighting (34-46). Also see the Turkish-fleas episode (91) and the depictions of Crimean thievery (123). 20 Seacole, 27. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 25. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Ibid., 37. 25 Ibid., 49. 26 Ibid., 50. 27 Ibid., 29. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 30.

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For more on dissecting dead bodies, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987). 31 Alicia Blackwood, Narrative of Personal Experiences and Impressions during a Residence on the Bosphorus throughout the Crimean War (London: Hatchard, 1881), 263. 32 Ibid. 33 Seacole, 192. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 1. 36 Paquet, 656. 37 Baggett, 52. 38 Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiii. 39 Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989), 58. 40 From Julie Codell’s essay in this anthology. 41 Edward Friedman, The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1987), xi.

CHAPTER FOUR TRANSPOSING TRAVEL NARRATIVE: IRONY, ETHNOGRAPHY, AND THE GUEST DISCOURSE IN INDIAN TRAVEL WRITING JULIE F. CODELL

An increasing number of Indians in the last quarter of the nineteenth century traveled to England and other Western countries, including America, Continental Europe, and Britain’s “white colonies” (Canada, New Zealand, and Australia). Their travel writings have recently been subject to scholarly study,1 but little attempt has yet been made to analyze their narratives’ literary nature, including the literary devices they deployed to criticize Britain. Many Indian travel writings were not overtly literary, but the authors were aware of the generic features of travel writing and reversed the authorial subjectivities and descriptive vocabularies of Western travel narratives. British literary culture was an important part of Indian education and was used by the British to claim intellectual and moral superiority. Indian authors deployed literary and rhetorical devices, inserting literary and classical references and citing radical writers from Byron to Carlyle, who were critical of Britain. Indian travelers also employed a “guest discourse” that offered opportunities to present a series of generic and thematic reversals as travel itself shaped their own hybrid subjectivities.2 These authors were both guests of Britain’s hospitality and imperial British citizens. The “guest” narrative permitted comparisons between Britain and India that sublimated and reversed power relationships. Indian authors were painfully aware of their position as guests, hardly the identity self-fashioned by Western explorers or adventurers who boldly entered all places and countries at will. Indians’ excessive appreciation of British hospitality was filled with ironies and conflicts shaped by travel itself: they were not only guests of Britain but also imperial British citizens—not entirely outsiders, yet constituted by the interstices of identities, where, as Homi Bhabha notes,

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subjectivities are created within “the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” permitting “the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value” to be negotiated.3 Through this guest discourse, Indian authors mediated among multiple identities (national, regional, religious, caste/class), while aware of themselves as Anglicized and as emerging Indian nationalists. They carved out complex identities that blended roles as native informants, anglophiles, and nationalists, avoiding the “complicity/resistance dialectic” as Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Stitt note in their introduction to this volume, despite the tendency by British governmental officials to divide Indians between these two simplistic and politically charged identities.4 Anticipating postcolonial literary discourses of displacement, incongruity, and upheavals of “centers” and their presumed “margins,” Indian authors’ subjectivities were complexly constituted by travel, dreams of England, acts of seeing/witnessing, and their own suddenly “deracinated, mobile identities,”5 all of which were organized around themes of home, dystopia/utopia, and hospitality. The Indian narrator was a flâneur out of a modern picaresque as described in Stoyan Tchaprazov’s essay in this volume as marked by traits of random wandering, freedom from conventional behavior and spatial parameters, and an open-endedness of the voyage. Travel narrative and the picaresque are close, despite their different relationships to history and fiction. Both genres permit a “camouflaged criticism” that appears on the surface to be naive and made of simple observations. Authors in both genres perform identities that are fallible but critical and ironic, and always in motion, psychologically and socially, as well as geographically. As Antoinette Burton notes, Indian travelers, revealed that the privilege accorded the rambler, the stroller, or the flâneur was open to appropriation, and that London itself could be represented as a site open to colonization in the process.6

The flâneur, the archetypal modern European, turned wandering into an empowering act within the imperialist hierarchy; Viceroy Curzon in 1901 worried about the morality of “well-known Indian flâneurs.”7 I will examine travel texts’ rhetorical turns and themes of hospitality, home, and utopia.8 Out of these generic mixes, voices, and themes, Indian travelers anticipated postcolonial literary discourses. They reversed generic features of travel narrative, becoming ethnographers of the West, enjoying a smorgasbord of tourist sites, addressing differently both Indian and British readers, turning the Grand Tour into a carnival of allusions to radical British literature, and transgressing and subverting imperial social

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orders, all without appearing openly seditious. Indians carnivalized the genre of travel writing by adopting the dominant Western travel persona of the ethnographer through which they criticized Britain by focusing on the poor in London. The grateful “guest” could alter power relationships between host and guest underlying hospitality, as Jacques Derrida defines it.9 Gratitude, instead of being subordinate, gave Indians an authority and a virtual space wherein to fashion themselves as authors, ethnographers, native informants, cultural critics, bearers of knowledge, and advocates of change. Deploying sophisticated literary and rhetorical means gave them permission to criticize that would have been unavailable if they wrote openly political diatribes. But the political implications of the literary were even recognized by Raj administrators who vigilantly surveyed Indian literary works in India.10 Indians wrote at various historical moments, some before Queen Victoria became empress and India officially part of the British Empire in 1877, others into the early 1900s when resistance to British rule became more assertive. Indian travel authors were generally well-to-do and varied in professions (a jurist, Missionary Society member, curator, maharajas, social reformers, students) and purposes (tourism, business, education).11 Several narratives were serialized and widely disseminated in the Indian press before being published as books. Despite different professions and intentions, Indian travelers’ familiarity (and probably over-familiarity) with imperial ideologies, including notions of British and Indian identities, shaped their travel experiences. Many went to Britain as pilgrims to see their “mother” country. These privileged Indian authors, advocating travel’s educational value, took on the role of teacher for Indian readers, many of whom feared crossing the “dark waters.” Hybridity suited their reversed Grand Tour and many reversals of generic features. Western travel narrative naturalized “ideal” travelers— male, privileged, and autonomous agents, possessing leisure and means to satisfy their wanderlust. Indian travelers shared these traits but were not on quests for self-discovery that occupied Western authors.12 Most Western travelers explored the “unexplored” where Europeans had not been and tried to dominate through heroic claims and notions of the “other” as exotic, inferior, quaint, erotic, and picturesque. Indian travelers played with these conventions applied to the over-explored, over-discovered Western metropole, reversing the hierarchy of periphery and center, and recalling the aristocratic eighteenth-century Grand Tour of Europe. In these reversals, Indian authors claimed the authority to address both Britons and Indians.13

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Mostly Anglophiles, Indian travelers were saturated with British culture and lived comfortably under the Raj. They were fit, then, to define what constituted Britain, as Euro-travelers defined and coded their “East.” They wanted to see Britain and Europe firsthand, judge what their colonizers told them, discover what colonizers did not say, and transmit firsthand information to other Indians. They negotiated generic conventions in resistance to and compliance with conventions, creating generic hybrids of guidebooks (in an age of guidebooks), local histories, autobiography and ethnography.14 Indian travelers shared a utopianism constituted by their desire to see Britain and fueled by new sights and experiences. But the more they saw of the metropole, the more London appeared dystopic. These authors insisted on describing the poor as part of their revelations of differences between the real Britain and the represented Britain they knew secondhand in India. Such realities called into question British claims of superiority and Enlightenment idealism; poverty was Britain’s Achilles’ heel. Other Western countries functioned as fulcrums on which to balance contrasts between India and Britain. As the utopia of Britain melted away, the utopian possibilities for an imagined modern India increased, grounded in Indian society and Western modernism, not a past golden age (although the Indian past was sometimes cited as a golden age). The East as utopia was a Western trope available for Indian travelers to reinscribe with their own interpretation, to “see England with clarity and to author spaces for India and Indians from inside,” as Pallavi Rastogi notes in her essay in this volume. This utopia, or more accurately this atopia (imagined textual ideal), covertly implied the end of British rule—both welcomed and unnerving for such travelers whose transnationalism embraced Enlightenment ideals. Contradictions witnessed in Britain had already been embedded in colonial uses of education as an ideological state apparatus for educated Indians whose knowledge of English culture “performed” in their travel writings constituted their authority, as it also became a basis for their criticism, irony, and generic reversals (exoticism in Europe, ethnography of the West, reversed Grand Tour).15

Historical Summary Historians have analyzed some of these writings for shared features, cited briefly here.16 These travelers had few hardships, unlike many Indian students; they often lived well and were pampered, courted, and lionized by London society.17 Britain was the land of their dreams. T. Ramakrishna claims “to visit England was the dream of my life” (1). Behramji Malabari

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calls England “the land of my youthful dreams” (8), while T. N. Mukharji proclaimed that England “opens the eyes and widens the mind” (330). London embodied modernity in its breathless energy, “mania for novelty” (Malabari, 39), and crowds in motion (Burton, “Making a Spectacle,” 129). Advertisements and gas lamps captivated Mukharji and Jhinda Ram. Technological “progress” became metonymic of Britain’s power and authority (e.g., T. B. Pandian, 21). The dark side of modernity, London poverty and working-class lives, also impressed these travelers (Mukharji, Pandian, Malabari). Authors saw themselves as ambassadors to improve India’s image abroad and to prepare Indians for travel. Bhawani Singh wrote for his people of Jhalawar, “whose ideas of European civilisation were of the vaguest” (vi). Romesh Chunder Dutt wanted his book to “serve as a guidebook to Indian youth intending to visit Europe” (i). Mukharji wanted to be a good ambassador for India. Students J. Nowrojee and H. Merwanjee hoped their writing would “increase the existing kindly feeling toward the natives of the East” among Britons (xv). Ramakrishna wrote to “promote a sympathetic understanding between Britain and India” (i). Their standard tourist sites offered “wonders and curiosities,”18 including Indian objects in British museums, friendly, helpful Bobbies (Malabari’s “knights,” 141), and personable cab drivers (Sandhu, 103-04), who contrasted sharply with hostile authorities in India. Dazzled by clean streets, goods in shops, English domestic life, and women in public, which most found exhilarating, Indian travelers were subtle on politics, advocates of Home Rule (they liked Prime Minister Gladstone), and surprised and disappointed by British ignorance of India (Sandhu, 109). London, the focus of their travels and sites, overwhelmed them. It showed the Rajah of Kolhapoor how small he was, Bhagvat Sinh Jee how dreamlike his trip, and Ram how central London was to wealth, commerce, and intellectual and moral life. Pandian called London “the most remarkable city on the face of the globe” (Sandhu, 110). Malabari described London with both cynicism and euphoria: dirty, muddy, yet “unequalled in the power of contrasts and in the wealth of extremes; I sit entranced” (192). One shared theme was seeing: “eye” and “camera” appear in several titles and included Indians seeing Britain and being seen or stared at for their dress or skin color. As Burton notes, these authors constructed an “Indian eye” that offered a collective identity at a time when one justification for empire was that India was merely a heterogeneity of disunified peoples. The “Indian eye” gave travelers a relatively uniform

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imaginary perspective from which to write back to their colonizer-host (Burton, “Making a Spectacle,” 130, 143-44). In their travels they were not only objects of the gaze, but also its bearers. Their narratives are means for looking—full of physical descriptions, sometimes in picturesque ramblings in which meanings accrued through a series of things and events seen over time. They construct an Indian eye, and in turn are constructed by British eyes in their travels. They were also constructed by an imperial “eye” of colonial administration and ideology in India, even before they began their tours. This imperial gaze, with its projection of Indian stereotypes and British presumed superiority, was for most of these travelers ultimately dismantled by what they witnessed in Britain, which affected their own vision of themselves and of Indians in general.

Structures of Travel: Pilgrimage, Tourism, Ethnography To justify their travel, they projected various motives of tourism, altruism (bringing information to fellow Indians), and pilgrimage to the “mother country.”19 Some motives were mixed or changed by the writing itself. Maharaja Jagatjit Singh spent time sightseeing and shopping; his trip was arranged by Thomas Cook to include visits to European royals (2). His Continental Grand Tour was interrupted twice by desire of Her Majesty, in order to be present at the opening ceremony of the Imperial Institute . . . again . . . to witness the marriage of His Royal Highness the Duke of York. (iv-v)

He was also invited to Windsor Castle. To avoid appearing indulgent, Singh promised to bring back knowledge to benefit his people, between his many shopping trips to Bon Marché and Whiteley’s (24). The world of goods dominated tours. Ram called Whiteley’s “sufficient compensation for the money I had spent on my travels” (105). Conventional tourist sights also dominated travel narratives. Singh’s rare comments on sites like the British Museum seem verbatim descriptions from guidebooks (e.g., mentioning the number of books in the Museum’s library, 74), while he more happily detailed his entertainments: Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, Gluck’s Orpheo, Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Derby Day, among many others (75-79, 134, 139). Some were on business trips; T. N. Mukharji was a curatorial administrator accompanying the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. Whatever their intentions, their narratives often followed a diary format or literary vignette form of short episodes, and they usually

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claimed to be ethnographers, sometimes to disguise more frivolous pursuits. Jee attended the theatre for “insight into the social life of the people” (32). Pandian created a sociology of British homes, classes, public buildings, business, advertising, trains, journalism, and country life. Mukharji was “thankful that opportunity was given to me to . . . study those virtues which have made them the most powerful nation now on the face of the globe” (28). Ram uttered inane statistics, satirizing British administrative ethnographic reports on Indian population, production, finances, and agricultural statistics (e.g., “1,300 miles of sewers,” 45). Ethnography afforded these writers authority and seeming objectivity. In a passage filled with carnivalesque reversals, Singh was fascinated by habits of the people: their lively movements; their animated speech and gesture; their good-humoured laughter; their keen sense of the ridiculous; . . . novel to me, fresh from the East, where we are accustomed to give but little open expression to our feelings. The freedom of the women … is also naturally a source of wonder to an Oriental . . . from all I can learn, that this liberty is in no sense abused by the weaker sex, now long accustomed to self-reliance, which induces self-respect. (42-43)

The word “wonder” was commonly applied by European travelers to the Orient (Singh reminded readers he was an Oriental outsider). However, Indians were not discovering a new world—they had extensive knowledge of British culture and politics before they left India, and their wonder often turned to cynicism.20 Singh learned from his travels to admire women’s liberty, self-reliance (a trait the British considered theirs), and self-respect. By tying freedom to these character traits, he implied that these traits, which Britons denied could be “Indian,” might be Indian, if they were given the same freedoms as the British. Indian ethnographic claims reversed Europeans’ presumed superiority as “scientific” investigators. Ram turned the tables by describing England as “a living museum,” a phrase often applied to India (11). He described crowded London streets as “almost blocked up with omnibuses, hansoms, cabs, landaulets, traps, dogcarts, and in fact conveyances of all sizes, shapes and descriptions” (11). Here Ram is echoing British descriptions of the widely varying vehicles on Indian city streets. Through ethnographic study, Indians transformed subjugation into empowerment. Ethnographic discourses provided reversals of travel rhetoric—Indians described London’s poverty as the English had described Calcutta’s as “picturesque” or “uncanny,” the Western traveler’s literary terms reversed in Indian applications of them. Through these ethnographic personas and

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literary tropes, Indians decolonized themselves and their Orientalized stereotypes, while “orientalizing” Britons.

Witnessing Empire: Seeing is Not Believing Seeing not only functioned ethnographically, but it also provoked awe and hyperbole arising from the excitement of traveling West. Ramakrishna’s visit “was the dream of my life” (1), full of “amazement” (22). Malabari dreamed of Britain. Ramakrishna repeated the word “witness,” witnessing speeches in Parliament, a suffragist march, and George V’s coronation. Mukharji’s “heart palpitated violently under different emotions . . . now in the great England of which I had been reading from my childhood” (28). Singh’s greatest desire is gratified, “I have seen something of the world outside India . . . my great ambition to travel in Western countries” (iii). Fluent in French, he was awestruck by Paris: I had heard so much of the history, vicissitudes, and triumphs of Paris, that my imagination was excited to the highest pitch . . . I am full of anxiety to see everything and ascertain whether the ideal is after all a reality. (52)

On the Eiffel Tower, he was “lost in wonder and admiration for a long time” (57). Ram’s “throbbing of my heart knew no bounds” as his ship left Karachi, with “palpitation in a young and inexperienced Hindu heart” (1). Ram’s first impression of London was of “an inexhaustible fund of amusement, admirably illustrating the whole world of Western Civilization” (11). Mukharji “saw things which no Indian remaining in his own country can hope to see . . . in the atmosphere of England which opens the eyes and widens the mind” (330). Seeing led to judging and even participating. Singh traveled to “judge for myself of the marvellous things that were told me concerning them” (iii), asserting his authority from the very beginning of his book. He noted: “I look forward to being able to judge for myself of the relative merits of both Continents” (110). For Malabari, “what I actually see here exceeds my anticipation” (27), including “a good deal of suffering among the gay or busy crowd” (28), like starving women (33). Ram, “in whom nature has put in a large dose of a craving for knowing anything and everything,” joined a march of 60,000 Socialists in Trafalgar Square, leaving his purse with his friends to avoid pickpockets and carrying a large stick in case of assaults (46).

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Literary devices and allusions helped mediate differences between witnessed realities and imagined expectations. Ram adopted the voice of the naïf, describing everything as if seen for the first time. Calling on a gentleman, he laboriously described wiping his feet, servants’ movements, and the host’s banal comments. Ram constructed “innocent” eyes, empirical, credible, and seemingly without preconceptions. He expressed wonder over London’s thousand towers pointing upwards from horizon to horizon … her assemblage of palaces, whence emanate by night the delicious sounds of music … her thousand haunts of business and pleasure—you will seek in vain in any other part of the world for another such city!” (12)

At Madame Tussaud’s he mistook wax figures for real people and vice versa (53). Ram’s rich poetic language, however, signaled that his innocent eye was a conscious ploy. He alluded to Western literary ideas such as the “cicerone” (4), a classical term used by Joseph Addison. Ram invoked Lamb, Carlyle, Byron, Kingsley, and Thackeray. Lines from Gay occurred to him when trying to find his way in London (75). Seeing the tombs of Westminster Abbey, Ram was reminded of Addison’s comments on humankind’s petty struggles (65-66), and walking by Traitor’s Gate or St. Thomas’s Tower, he recalled lines from Samuel Rogers (69). English literature, which Macaulay recommended as part of a colonizing Indian education, became for Ram a tool for criticizing Britain through the words of British authors. He cited Tennyson’s lines on the burial of Wellington (48). He quoted a speech on London’s vastness by John Bright (17). Other literary echoes demonstrated Ram’s wide cultural knowledge. He called Hyde Park at night a “temptation” (14), recalling trips to the underworld in classical Western epics. Ram used these citations as criticisms. He echoed Caesar’s opening from his Gallic Wars, perhaps imaginatively becoming the conqueror of Britain: “London is divided into several parts” (18). Ram quoted Byron’s Childe Harold on Venice’s plunder of the East, a subtle criticism of Britain whose might was compared to Venice by many Victorians (109). Ram noted that Rome, another empire with which the English compared themselves, was in “ruin, ruin, ruin,” no longer “Mistress of the World” (123). Beyond literary reference, Ram also deployed ringing rhetorical emphases, slipping in almost unnoticed a last dark invocation:

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Commerce, commerce alone, has made the English nation what it is now. Commerce, commerce alone, has made this noble nation, the wealthiest nation in the world. Commerce, commerce alone, has made these energetic people, one of the most powerful people in the world. Commerce, commerce alone, has put India full of millions under the British yoke. (82)

He frequently and subtly employed irony. Ram mentioned that Indian arms in the Tower’s armory were the most popular, “putting to shame the arms and armours of England” and achieving at least a virtual military victory of sorts (73). In the Royal Arsenal he ironically identified Britain’s progress with “all the ingenious scientific contrivances for improving the instruments of death” (60). He described the Crystal Palace in tiresome details of size and content that lampooned British statistical reports on India (54-55). His own metaphors of imperialism were the young girls who induced passers-by to shop or enter a restaurant. Seduced by everything they saw, Indians would never get the dream girl who signified Europe’s rampant consumerism that by then had impoverished India. Irony was a common rhetorical device among Indian authors. In the preface to Mukharji’s book,21 N. N. Ghose stated obscurely: “His comments on social life and manners have a touch of irony; but Mr. Mukharji is never bitter” (viii). Ghose argued that “what Mr. Mukherji [sic] especially regrets is the hidebound condition of Hindu society” (xixii). But Mukharji’s bitterness was more widespread and tied to the gaze by which the stereotyped Indian identity was imposed on him by staring Britons astonished to see Indians produce works of art with tools Britons had discarded long ago, “as a Hindu would be to see a chimpanzee officiating as a priest in a funeral ceremony and reading out Sanskrit texts” (99). From Mukharji’s adopted British point of view, “blacks” were monkeys and Hinduism was superstition. In Naples, crowds treated Singh’s entourage as if they were “strange monsters who had escaped from a travelling show” (17). Some Indians resorted to English clothes to ameliorate stares (Ram, Sorabji), while some refused (Lala Baijnath, Nandalala Dasa, Malabari). Linked to being seen were the sight of Indian objects in London museums, many seized violently (Burton, “Making a Spectacle,” 137), especially spoils of conquest like Tipu Sultan’s girdle and helmet at the Tower of London. These objects seemed to stare back and rebuke Indian travelers. Seeing a display of muskets, Ram cursed the day from the very bottom of my heart when the Arms Act was passed in my poor country. I felt great humiliation in the innermost depths

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Singh mentioned the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the Tower, without commenting on its having originally belonged to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, before being seized by Britain after defeating Singh, something his Indian and British readers would have known (71), but which had very different meanings for these two groups of readers. Ranjit Singh’s exiled son Dalip (Duleep) Singh lived in aristocratic style in England as an exile from childhood, then became disenchanted and asked for the diamond back, to no avail. So many Indian things in London amazed the Raja of Kolhapoor (Sandhu, 100), who described Madame Tussaud’s wax statues of two well-known maharajas in Britain, the Maharaja of Scindia, and the Nizam of Hyderabad (Burton, “Making a Spectacle,” 131). For Mukharji, British museums embodied a precarious view of Indians: The Museums of Europe . . . bring to the mind of an Indian a feeling of humiliation and sorrow . . . ranked among barbarous tribes with their cannibalism, human-sacrifice, tattooing and all sorts of cruel and curious customs that denote a savage life. (324)

He compared sati and infant marriages to Aztec sacrifices (325-26) and insisted, it is time for us to realise our true position among the nations of the world . . . It matters little now what we were many thousands years ago …. It matters much to be able to see what we are to-day . . . It avails nothing if the Jain condemns animal-sacrifice or the Muhammadan disavows Sati. There we are, all in a lump, to be judged by the most striking acts committed in our country. (327)

For Mukharji, representing educated Indian Anglophiles in his curatorial capacity, it was startling to realize that despite India’s history, traditions, cultural depth, and British education, the British in reality considered Indians no better than other “barbarians.” Directly addressing his Indian readers, he blamed their extreme practices for sullying all Indians in British eyes, while attempting to inform his readers of how they were “read” in Europe according to the lowest common denominator and “in a lump.” He seems not to have taken the British to task for this at all here.

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Utopia, Dystopia, Atopia The concept of utopia was used strategically by these writers, as Nagendra Nath Ghose noted, I have represented England or Europe as a veritable Utopia . . . I hold up to you the bright side . . . the only side that we can most profitably study . . . to dwell only upon what is blamable in us and what is laudable in the English, and thus to show the contrast between England and India in as unfavourable a light to ourselves as facts will permit.23

Indian travelers envisioned utopia through comparisons between India and Britain. Mukharji insisted “whatever tends to bring Indian life and ideas into contact with English, is desirable even more in the interest of India than of England” (1) to break through the trammels of caste, to rise above old prejudices and superstitions, and to seek education and enlightenment at the fountainhead of modern civilization. (9)

Ram’s “heart aches when I compare the woman of India with that of Europe” (118) and, similarly, “what a vast difference between a nobleman of our country and a nobleman of Europe” (119). Pandian found England superior in its treatment of women, vast press, and education. In India the latter two were under Raj authority, so he may have been criticizing the Raj here. For Ram and Singh, utopia was Paris, a preference that disguised a criticism of the British as well. These travelers imagined England as utopia, but their references to political freedoms were double-edged. Always in the background was the disparity between their imagined England and the realities of the Raj. Indians also mentioned European failures, contradictions, and class conflicts.24 Between the ideals and the realities of colonialism, lay the dystopia of European culture, some time anticipated even before arrival in England. Singh was disappointed with the Suez Canal, “much narrower than I expected . . . not room for two ships to pass except at fixed stations” (8). He imagined lives lost building tunnels in the Alps (50-51). He criticized Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, as a “magnificent pile … The money would perhaps have been better spent in improving the accommodation for third-class passengers” (5). His word “pile” implies a ruin, a British archaeological trope for ancient Indian architecture. He measured the building’s grandeur by the cost of misery to Indian railway passengers. His comments on other European extravagances reversed

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British critiques of maharajas’ expenditures. Leaving India, Singh passed the Taj and wondered if he would see as beautiful a building in Europe: “Now that I have returned to India I may say it stands unique and without compare as the Gem of the Earth” (5). Jee, too, insisted that European architecture could not “beat India” (244). Singh’s pleasures in Italy concluded with a paean to India and critique of Europe (31). He noted that cremation, originally an Indian practice, was appearing in Europe, although hindered more by the religious feelings of the people than from any real objection to the new system. India is not the only country in which difficulty is experienced in abolishing old customs and substituting others. (32-33)

This comment reversed European claims that Indians were superstitious, Europeans rational. He also noted the European popularity of massage, another Indian practice (169). For Mukharji, utopian India was imaginable through the examples of English women: The bright faces of women, the reflection of their pure innocent hearts … can alone efface the brutal instincts . . . Give us mothers like English mothers to bring up our boys, young girls to spur impetuous youths on to novel deeds, wives to steer our manhood safely through the whirlpools of life, and elegant ladies to refine, revive and invigorate our rotten society— then India will be regenerated in twenty years’ time. (53)

Mukharji praised European courtship practices’ romance, which was denied Indians by arranged marriages (49). He advocated emancipation of women and the end of child marriages, but thought India superior in family life: “There is more concord in an Indian family . . . than in an English family” (50-51). Like Mukharji, Ram focused on issues regarding purdah. Political and social spheres were extensions of family life, as Ram noted: “The answer will be simple enough: ‘You must improve your home first’” (89). Directly addressing his Indian readers, Ram called for social changes, especially women’s status, before political ones: Rise up India, rise . . . If once you prove to the British Government that you are nearly equal to the civilized countries in social reformation they will be compelled to give you the political rights of the civilized countries without your having to demand them … Look at Japan how far ahead they have gone of you in a short period in social reformation. (89)

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As many scholars have pointed out, the status of women and who could speak for Indian women, often silent in public debates, became the most significant marker of a country’s level of “progress” and “civilization” in imperial discourses. Yet, as many British women realized, in matters of marital property rights, Muslims were more generous and “liberated” than Englishmen. But Mukharji noted that some British achievements harmed India: “Successful capitalists reduce workers to white slaves” (165), forcing Indians to “buy things not at their legitimate prices fixed by free competition, but at prices fixed by English manufacturers” (166). Dystopic London poverty was a central topic: “Do not fail to see the misery and wretchedness in its streets, little children clothed in rags, and having neither shoes nor stockings” (Ram, 13). Ram described Hyde Park at night as a trysting place for prostitutes (14). London, “centre of commerce, of wealth, of intellectual and moral life,” also “beats all other cities of the world” in vice and crime (17). Sandhu criticizes travel writings in general for being “deficient in being able to relay the myriad plenitudes and fascinating contradictions of individual societies” (112). But Indian accounts addressed contradictions between utopian dreams and dystopian experiences, making room for political commentary. Mukharji assessed contradictions between British behaviors at home and in India—good treatment by Britons at home (102108), but English hostility in India (118). Ram noted in a blunt reversal that closing down London for Lord Mayor’s Day “shows that Englishmen even stick to their old customs, although nonsensical” (20), echoing British condemnation of “outmoded” Indian customs. Describing antigovernment speeches at a socialist rally, Ram sarcastically noted, no body could dare to make such a speech in India; but there in England, the birth place of freedom and liberty and the mother of free nations, the speakers made these speeches in the presence of the police, the military and the cannons. (47)

Here, Ram was also alluding to British restrictions on free speech in India. All recognized that Irish Home Rule was relevant to Indians. Mukharji admired Britons’ political participation: “Every individual is part and parcel of the sovereign power” (60), implicitly commenting on the Raj’s denial of this to Indians. On economics, Mukharji was direct: “We pay England 5 millions to make our clothing and could have that in India if we made our own clothing” (229). He estimated that England took 15 million from India, while India gained 8 million when China was forced to buy opium and raw materials. But, he blamed Indian poverty primarily on “the

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demoralised, stagnate condition of our national character” (230) and religious doctrines teaching Indians “to despise wealth and power” (233). Sometimes India beat Britain. For Mukharji, Indians “know better how to treat our poor than the people of Europe. There is more brotherly feeling in the East . . . charity as an act acceptable to God, and not as a social obligation” (175-176). The British class system was “rigid and exclusive” (197) and “based on conquest and wealth,” while, the Indian system was “based on piety, learning and trade” (199). He even suggested Christian missionaries give money directly to Indians, because of “the Christian charity that is inherent in us among the nations of Europe” (308). Watching Catholics in Rome, Ram slyly noted, “Christians have beaten the orthodox Hindus in worshipping idols” (137). Ramakrishna idealized Scotland (he adored Carlyle) and suggested comparisons: Mary and South Indian queen Mangamma (46), honor codes of Scotland and South India (50), Scottish and Dravidian religions (52-62), great thinkers and universities (84), and independence struggles by Wallace and Robert the Bruce (39). Southern India was called the Scotch of the East (52): “No race or section of people resembles the Scottish race more than the Southerners of India, I mean the Dravidians” (63, a tilt here against Aryan theory promoted by British and Indian intellectuals). Scotland and England were united “citizens of Great Britain” (111), a unity only possible in India through a “far seeing Viceroy of India” who, believing East and West could meet, disavowed the white man’s burden (112). Between British and Indian utopias and dystopias, Indian travelers wrote an atopia, a virtual space. In this narrative space they had authority to criticize Britain and to imagine India’s future. This atopia was the product of their travel, even the function of travel itself which made possible these comparisons and judgments. Their descriptions were of Britain, but their subject was the future of India.

Home and “Home” The concept of the home, a concrete and communal place, embodied their abstract utopian/atopian speculations. Indian traveler-ethnographers focused on the home as nation and family domicile. England was “not so much the home of Englishmen, as it is the home of imperialism, liberalism and human freedom … the home of all races” (Mukharji, 120). Pandian spent several chapters describing English homes as hospitable, clean, orderly, even among the poor (6), detailing middle-class rooms, gardens,

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food, and hospitality (6-11). Malabari described English home life as “a life of equality among all the members” (58), a model for Indian women. London was an ideal home to Mukharji struck by the cleanliness of streets, shops, and houses: “No stink in the road, no filth left accumulated in any place” (27). Mukharji asked his Indian readers to take pride in London as they do in Calcutta: “O for a despot like Akbar or Peter the Great to force us to learn and practise all that we ought to learn and practise” to overcome “curses of oriental nations” (30). But would Akbar or Peter, despot of Britain’s rival Russia, be preferable to Britain? This seems an ironic plea, indeed, and a poke at British fears of a Russian invasion of Northern India from Afghanistan. The other side of home was homelessness. Malabari noted: “Poor as India is . . . she knows not much of the poverty to which parts of Great Britain have been accustomed.” Britons suffer “emaciation, till they can hardly be recognized as human” (80). Utopia met dystopia in Mukharji’s two case studies: first, a rich banker “honest, industrious, frugal and methodical . . . risen in life . . . by sheer force of mind” (40) with a “palatial residence in the suburbs and governesses and maids and lots of sumptuous food” (41) who educated his daughters. Against this positive case study, Mukharji contrasted a young married shop assistant making thirty shillings a week, paying eight for two small rooms and leasing furniture, like “a cartsman in Calcutta” and charged “an exorbitant rate of interest” (44-45). Indians often described their return home at journey’s end, a moment rarely narrated in Western travel narratives. Because Indian travel writing evoked the social transgression of travel, especially for Hindus, the return provided a literary cleansing parallel to the religious ritual cleansing undertaken by Hindu travelers. The return also functioned narratively as closure and resolution. Finally, the return brought the reader and author into a shared geography to suture reader and author as it also defined the trip as a “success.”

Subjectivities of Travel The return home put India back in the center and Britain in the narrative periphery. It restored the narrator to his prior identity. Most Indian travelers identified with a region: Singh as a political force in Kapurthala (2) and reformer (5-6), Ramakrishna as South Indian. Identities were also produced by travel. These authors had regional identities (Bengali, Dravidian, etc.) and an emerging Indian identity shaped by travel and their donning of an “Englishness.” Imperialism

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constructed traveling Indians as “cosmopolitan and complex . . . critical outsiders”25 whose intercolonial subjectivities crossed borders between colony and metropole. Scholar Emily Hicks describes border writing as “a strategy of translation rather than representation” to “undermine distinctions between cultures”26 by deterritorializing the subject and cultural codes.27 Indian narratives fit Hicks’s description of border writing; their travels deterritorialized them as Indian or British, or Anglophile Indian or Indian-Briton, or Bengali-Indian-Briton, or other hybrid possibilities. But Indians could never be completely deterritorialized as colonials. Scholars apply “autoethnography” to new modes of colonial life writing that “writes back” to the Western autobiography genre, as literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt notes, to “engage with the colonizer’s own terms.”28 Travel writing “writes back” to its genre, too. Whereas most Western travelers were self-fashioned as heroic, unique, alone, and triumphant over nature and natives, the rarer unheroic, unself-conscious traveler (e.g., Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa) presented identities in a lower key, more humorously self-effacing, less self-aggrandizing. Such “lighter” identities approximate the more ludic identities of most Indian travelers so well educated in Western literary conventions. Steve Clark claims the genre “allows the production of a self in the course of writing by means of perpetual detours into communal utterance, public codes” that counterbalance “complex decorums of witnessing.”29 London provoked Mukharji to decry his Indian identity: In India everything is inert and dead . . . The listless indolent look noticed in the face of prisoners while at work, or in the face of men dragged from their homes to work under the forced labour system . . . is merely an exaggerated form of expression natural to the Indian race . . . the high intellectuality of the Indian races, being driven back by the rampant forces of nature. (38-39)

Indolent prisoners and forced laborers referred to political authorities’ actions in India; although, in his ambiguity, he blamed Indians themselves. Mukharji saw differences over the conquest of nature: The English “disembowel the earth for her hidden treasure, to span mighty rivers, bore mountains, and bring to the service of man the various substances which lie in all parts of India.” (132)

He thought Indians needed discontent to act “for better dwelling, for better clothing, and for luxuries which by habit become necessaries. It is

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discontent . . . makes a nation great . . . is modern science rightly understood,” which is what ancient Indians understood but have since forgotten (138): The European . . . is always on the look out for new things . . . to make new contrivances and to discover new ways and means . . . the Indian . . . has always done his best to shut his eyes against the influence of modern enlightenment. (77-78)

National identities were gendered and aged. For Mukharji John Bull represented “vigorous manhood . . . the Hindu . . . decrepit old age” (8687). Ram exhorted Indians in a biblical language: “When wilt thou rise from thy lethargy!” (23) Joseph Childers notes that Mukharji, distancing himself from Orientalized Indian identity, while taking on English liberal identity, was so torn that he “often cannot articulate a subjectivity that does not participate in the Orientalism confronting him.”30 Some Indian travelers internalized British perceptions of Indians (20-21), while some like Malabari resisted this process. Mukharji suggested Indians embrace British identity (171). He urged Indians to produce more food to “help the people of England materially by cheapening the cost of living in that country” (172). This was an ironic comment, given British callousness during famines in India, as in 1876-77. Mukharji’s convoluted view of his Indian identity was exacerbated by an evolutionary paradigm against which “inferior men of such a peculiar structure as will not be exterminated” persisted despite “the low capacity of their mind” (301), from which he distanced Indians. But at the same time he asked if Britain could save “this ancient and highly intellectual people of India from such a fate?” (302). He feared Indians might degenerate “into the lower order as a natural consequence” of the British “persistent refusal to educate the Indian people to defend their hearth and home” (301). Mukharji called for the same treatment the British accorded other colonials: “Government makes special arrangements to make up deficiencies in other races. Why not one for us to remedy a particular deficiency of ours?” (304). The British failed to properly educate Indians, despite the fact that British institutions had been taken up by Indians successfully: “We have not disappointed the Metcalfes and the Macaulays among British administrators in their noble efforts to elevate the Indian races” (301). Mukharji here defended Indians as fulfilling British ambitions for them and therefore meriting both British protection and British trust in Indians to use their education to “defend their hearth and home” and not to revolt.

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Hospitality Mukharji constructed an ambivalent subjectivity, critical of and identifying with both cultures. His reference to defending hearth and home parallels Ram’s reference to the Arms Act that left him emasculated and incapable of being able to “try a shot.” Home for travelers is richly resonant as memory, ideal place, community, and nation. Home is also a site of interchange. We can leave and return to home. Outsiders can be invited in or turned away. The threshold between inside and outside of the home is determined by owner-inhabitants controlling who crosses the threshold. Entering a home or a nation can be an act of hospitality or hostility. Indian authors linked home and nation through a guest discourse by which they addressed their British readers directly and their Indian readers indirectly. Many authors prefaced their narratives with expressions of gratitude for British hospitality. Ram “cannot find words by which to express the deep gratitude” he owed the ship’s captain solicitous of his well-being, as well as Anglo-Indians who “treated me very well” (8) and “railway officials, unlike those in India … civil and attentive to passengers” (9). Pandian dedicated his book to “the Enlightened Daughters of Great Britain in appreciation of their generous spirit and deep interest in the Author’s Mission,” as did Malabari (“To the Women of England in Grateful Remembrance”). Pandian saw British hospitality as derived from “the Christ-like magnanimity of her attitudes towards the ‘strangers within her gates,’” referring to Britain as a refuge for exiled foreigners (77). Ram called the English “one of the best people, if not the best in the world” (80) and the Englishwoman “a most noble woman . . . purity itself in mind as well as in appearance . . . pleasing and amiable,” whose talk “animates and vivifies the party” (80-81), inspiring his attack on purdah. Pandian was enamored of police: “Are we ever likely to see such a Constabulary as this in India, where bribery and corruption are regarded as mere venial offences among police officers ?” (5). Mukharji dedicated his book, “to the people of Great Britain and Ireland, in gratitude for their kindness to the author during his sojourn in their country.” He was welcomed into British aristocratic society. Singh thanked his friends, especially Americans, for their hospitality (59). At the Quirinale Palace “I was welcomed with the greatest cordiality; . . . intended as a compliment to India generally, and not to me as an individual merely” (43), indicating the communal consciousness borne by Indian travelers. He was cheered by a crowd at the Chicago Stock Exchange and visited wealthy Americans (114-17). Directors of the Great

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Fair held a reception in his honor: “I shook hands with, I think, at least a thousand people” (134). The “courteous, generous and hospitable citizens of Chicago” proved that America, England’s emerging commercial rival, embodied “all that is best and useful in modern civilized life” (142-43). In London, crowds “cheered me . . . streets were lavishly decorated, and the balconies crammed with ladies and gentlemen, who waved parasols and handkerchiefs” (Singh, 61). But Ramakrishna, perhaps ironically, defined as British hospitality the stares he got for his “oriental dress”: The English people by the manner of their treatment of me showed that they realised that I was a guest whom they were bound to treat kindly . . . I experienced . . . nothing but kindness. I never heard a harsh word spoken nor saw a contemptuous look …. Nor did the people gaze at me with curiosity as I passed. They looked at me with genuine and kindly interest. (23)

In this passage Ramakrishna also described British hospitality as obligatory, rather than heartfelt. Indians also witnessed rudeness in public, sometimes directed at Englishmen. At the Imperial Institute Banquet, May 17, 1893, Singh was shocked by rude mistreatment of Gladstone by those “who had the bad taste to hiss him,” including “many ladies” (69). Singh considered Gladstone “this most remarkable man of this time” (80-81). The guest discourse permitted criticisms of Anglo-Indians. Ram’s English host family welcomed him “with open arms . . . What contrast between the treatment we received in England and the treatment we receive in India from the hands of Anglo-Indians!” (11). Anglo-Indians were rude in India, solicitous in Britain. They in India, are haughty and overbearing . . . insulting natives of very high position . . . My countrymen, you will hardly believe, if I proclaim that Anglo-Indians in England are foremost in paying attention to Indians. They take a great interest in their welfare. (Ram, 78)

The guest discourse permitted other criticisms under the Raj’s radar of censorship and fear of sedition. Singh described public affection for Italy’s King and Queen in loaded terms: Unbounded enthusiasm … a strange contrast to similar ceremonies in India, where the crowd is less demonstrative and the surroundings altogether different. (38)

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He implied here that Indians did not cheer the Raj, a “different” surrounding. He described the Italian Queen’s popularity with the poor, “for whom she is ever doing acts of mercy and charity . . . Happy the people over whom God has sent such Rulers!” (40), alluding to the Raj’s excessive taxation, among other imperial hardships. Singh adored Gladstone, promoter of Irish Home Rule (66), and praised Britons for permitting the Home Rule march in Hyde Park: “These remarks apply with equal force to the artificial agitation recently started in India, known as the National Congress” (72). Did he mean that the Congress was insipid or harmless, or that the British in suppressing expression of public feeling risked more violent consequences, as occurred in Ireland, and so should leave the Congress alone? Singh’s remarks had a wider intended resonance, however indirect. Malabari, however, was openly suspicious of British hospitality, asking if warm welcomes were “affectation” (31): The patronizing Englishman does us as much harm as he who always disparages and decries our merits … We should be treated exactly as equals, if we deserve to be … Equal justice—and no more … I resent patronage from a superior race. (61)

He admonished those who are extra-polite to us, simply because we happen to be strangers, who stoop and bend in order to pat us on the back, I appeal earnestly to treat us more like fellow-subjects. By all means be kind and hospitable to us, as you are to your own people; but, above all, be just and impartial … do not patronize but befriend us. (62)

More bluntly, Malabari asked, As to ruling India by the sword, my dear Colonel Swashbuckler, you ought to know better. How many swords do you keep in India? Sixty thousand? Eighty thousand? A hundred thousand? And what is the population of India? Two hundred millions. (65)

Malabari was also unimpressed by British pursuits of happiness: “The scramble after happiness indicates a low ideal, rather than a high one” (69).

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Sly Civility Derrida describes the guest identity as informed by hospitality’s collusion with power.31 Hospitality, a “general name for all our relations to the Other . . . re-invented at every second,”32 transforms the private home into a public space: “I risk opening my home to the stranger . . . to the absolutely unknown,” and potentially dangerous.33 Yet, every society has some concept of hospitality as “a welcome without reserve and without calculation.”34 Singh invited his hosts to India, “reciprocating, in a small way, the many kindnesses I have received at their hand” (vii). But British domination denied Indians the right to “host.” By acknowledging British hospitality, Indians signaled a recognition of their powerlessness to repay hospitality; Britain had taken away the freedom and property rights over their home(land) they needed to be hosts. For Derrida, to be hospitable . . . one must have the power to host. Hospitality hence makes claims to property ownership and it also partakes in the desire to establish a form of self-identity . . . if the guests take over a house through force, then the host is no longer being hospitable . . . to behave hospitably is also always partly betrothed to the keeping of guests under control, to the closing of boundaries, to nationalism.35

These paradoxes expose the underside of Indian travelers’ gratitude toward their host nations. Roxanne Euben argues that for ancient Greeks knowledge from travel was practical political knowledge, the result of seeing how others lived and worked.36 Such knowledge “served as a precursor to imperialist ventures” and as the basis on which “conceits of cultural superiority are challenged.”37 Indian travelers brought back reformist ideas and constructed “Wests” to suggest how Indians might negotiate social and political changes. Travel exposed British poverty and this undercut Britain’s claims of superiority. Indians exposed imperial power through hyperbolic expressions of gratitude in a “sly civility,” as Bhabha defines the exposure of despotism in a nation’s otherwise democratic self-fashioning, the recognition of authority as “civility’s supplement and democracy’s despotic double.”38 Colonizers expected deference and affection from the colonized and used discourses of civility and democracy to disguise their force and despotism. Does the traveler’s excessive gratitude critique hospitality as more an assertion of power than a heartfelt kindness? Through hyperbolic gratitude, Indian travelers anticipated the question Bhabha proposes, why we are here—both “we” English in India, hostile

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and paranoid after the 1857 Rebellion, and “we” Indians in Britain, citizens who should be at home in Britain but are now guests of a hospitality that disguises domination but only barely. The subsequent emigrations of South Asians to the United Kingdom resonate with the issues of citizenship in these travel narratives. South Asians were met with hostility in the 1970s when taking up the presumed invitation implied in British citizenship granted by colonizers who never imagined South Asians flooding into Britain to return to the “homeland.” Indian travelers reformulated the travel narrative genre, its ethnographic persona, narrative voice, and epistemological purpose through their negotiations of multiple identities with local and global audiences. Sometimes they expressed cynicism out of the mix of their knowledge, utopian expectations, and harsher experiences. Their shared views on hospitality, home, utopia, bobbies, cabbies, women in public, modern technology, education and the class system constructed a Europe (and other “Wests”) from Indian perspectives, needs, ideals, desires, and dreams.39 Their virtual textual maps of Western countries and of present and future Indias structured an atopia out of their imperial worlds, reflecting the limited power of literary genres to “colonialist logic.”40 This atopian textual model, nonetheless, revised the rapprochement between India and England as these authors reinscribed Indian subjectivities and counter-subjectivities that foreshadowed an India that soon would openly, and sometimes violently, resist the Raj, led by Indians whose identities were formed and transformed while they lived, studied in, or traveled to Britain.41

Selected Bibliography Primary Sources Baijnath, Lala. England and India: Being Impressions of Persons and Things English and Indian, and Brief Notes of Visits to France, Switzerland, Italy, and Ceylon. Bombay: J. B. Karani, 1893. Das, Nandalala. Reminiscences-English and Australian, Being an Account of a Visit to England, Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Ceylon, etc. Calcutta: M. C. Bhowmick at the “Herald Press,” 1893. Dutt, Romesh Chunder. Three Years in Europe. Calcutta: S. K. Lahiri and Co., 1896. Ghose, Nagendra Nath. The Effects of Observation of England upon Indian Ideas and Institutions. Calcutta: Thacker Spink and Co., 1877.

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Jee, Bhagvat Sinh, Thakore Saheb of Gondol. Journal of a Visit to England in 1883. Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1886. Malabari, Behramji M. The Indian Eye on English Life or Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1893. Mukharji, Trailokyanatha N. A Visit to Europe. Calcutta: W. Newman, 1889. Nowrojee, Jehangeer, and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee. Journal of a Residence of Two Years and a Half in Great Britain. W. H. Allen: London, 1841. Pandian, Thomas B. England to an Indian Eye, or English Pictures from an Indian Camera. London: Elliot Stock, 1897. Ram, Jhinda. My Trip to Europe. Lahore: Mufid-I-Am Press, 1893. Ramakrishna, T. My Visit to the West. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915. Shah, Syed A. M. “A Visit to the Tower of London.” The Indian Magazine 24, no. 268 (April 1893): 208-10. Singh, Jagatjit. My Travels in Europe and America. London: George Routledge and Son, 1893. Sorabji, Cornelia. India Calling: The Memories of Cornelia Sorabji. London: Nisbet, 1934. West, Edward, ed. Diary of the Late Rajah of Kolhapoor During His Visit to Europe, 1870. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1872.

Secondary Sources Adam Matthews Publishing. The Empire Writes Back. 2004. Microfilm series. Anjaria, Ulka. “Satire, Literary Realism and the Indian State.” Economic and Political Weekly (November 18, 2006): 4795-4800. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Brown, Judith. “The Making of a Critical Outsider.” In Gandhi and South Africa, edited by J. Brown and Martin Prozesky, 21-34. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Burton, Antoinette, ed. After the Imperial Turn. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. —. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. —. “Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-de-Siècle London.” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 127- 46. Childers, Joseph. “Outside Looking In: Colonials, Immigrants, and the Pleasure of the Archive.” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 297-307.

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Clark, Steve, ed. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. London: Zed Books, 1999. Codell, Julie. “Excursive Discursive in Gandhi’s Autobiography: Undressing and Redressing the Transnational Self.” In Life Writing and Victorian Culture, edited by D. Amigoni, 166-95. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. —. “Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collections of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharajah of Baroda, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern India.” Journal of the History of Collections 15 (2003): 127-46. —. “Resistance and Performance: Native Informant Discourse in Biographies of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda.” In Orientalism Transposed, edited by Julie Codell and Diane Sachko Macleod, 13-45. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Darnton, Robert. “Book Production in British India, 1850-1900.” Book History 5 (2002): 239-62. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. —. “The Principle of Hospitality.” Parallax 11, no. 1 (2005): 6-9. Euben, Roxanne. “The Comparative Politics of Travel.” Parallax 9, no. 4 (2003): 18-28. Fisher, Michael H. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, c. 1600-1857. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. —. The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Hicks, Emily. Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Lahiri, Shompa. Indians in Britain. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Ramabai, Pandita. Pandita Ramabai’s America. Edited by Robert Eric Frykenberg. Translated by Kshitija Gomes. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. —. Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter. Edited and translated by Meera Kosambi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Roberson, Susan L. Defining Travel: Diverse Visions. Oxford, MI: University of Mississippi Press, 2001. Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. Vadgama, Kusoom. India in Britain. London: Robert Royce, 1984. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

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—. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 17001947. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Viswanathan, Gauri. “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India.” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1-2 (1987): 2-26. —. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Wyschogrod, Edith. “Autochthony and Welcome: Discourses of Exile in Levinas and Derrida.” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 36-42, and at http://www.philosophyandscripture.org.

Notes I wish to thank Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Stitt for their valuable comments on drafts of my essay. I also want to thank the Huntington Library for a fellowship that permitted me to examine several Indian travel narratives and Peter Mancall and Susan Green for their comments on an earlier version of this essay that appeared in the Huntington Library Quarterly 70, no. 1 (March 2007): 173-89. 1

Most of the known Indian travel narratives have now become available in microform through Adam Matthews Publishing. 2 I wish to thank Rosemary Marangoly George for suggesting this phrase in her commentary on my paper at the 2004 Association for Asian Studies conference. 3 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2. 4 I have explored some of these issues in my essays on the Gaekwad of Baroda in “Resistance and Performance: Native Informant Discourse in Biographies of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda,” in Orientalism Transposed, ed. J. Codell and D. S. Macleod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 13-45; and “Ironies of Mimicry: The Art Collections of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharajah of Baroda, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern India,” Journal of the History of Collections 15 (May 2003): 127-46. 5 Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 5. 6 Antoinette Burton, “Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travellers in Fin-deSiècle London,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 128. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 7 See Julie Codell, “Excursive Discursive in Gandhi’s Autobiography,” in Life Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. D. Amigoni (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Curzon’s comment from a letter to Hamilton, August 21, 1901, quoted in David Gilmour, Curzon (London: John Murray, 1994), 236. 8 I will focus on Bhagvat Sinh Jee, Thakore Sabeb of Gondal, Journal of a Visit to England in 1883 (Bombay: Education Society, 1886); T. B. Pandian, England to

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an Indian Eye, or English Pictures from an Indian Camera (London: Elliot Stock, 1897); Jhinda Ram, My Trip to Europe (Lahore: Mufid-I-Am Press, 1893); T. Ramakrishna, My Visit to the West (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1915); and Jagatjit Singh, My Travels in Europe and America, 1893 (London, 1895). More wellknown are Behramji M. Malabari, The Indian Eye on English Life or Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co, 1893); and T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (Calcutta: W. Newman, 1889). Subsequent references to these works will be made parenthetically in the text. My selections are based on time periods, geographical range of travel, and variety of interpretations of shared experiences and themes. 9 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 10 The British had an administrative office that annually surveyed published works in India for seditious content. See Robert Darnton, “Book Production in British India, 1850-1900,” Book History 5 (2002): 239-62. This indicates how important Indian literary productions were for the ever-vigilant British. 11 Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 96-97. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. 12 Two female Indian writers and thinkers also wrote about their lives abroad. Cornelia Sorabji was educated as a lawyer in Britain and, after returning to India, she eventually settled in England, an example of a diasporic life, which was not the case for the travelers I describe in my essay, all of whom returned to live in India permanently. Sorabji’s autobiography is examined in Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Pandita Ramabai’s travels in Britain and the United States combined travel and ethnographic observations on Americans with her campaign to raise money for her school for Indian child widows. Her main focus is on the United States and raising funds, so her writing and purpose are outside the focus and generic parameters of the writings I focus on. Ramabai has been the subject of two recent studies: Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter, ed. and trans. Meera Kosambi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) and Pandita Ramabai’s America, ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg, trans. Kshitija Gomes (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003). 13 See the essay in this volume by Margaret Lucille Trenta for similar deconstructions and reconstructions of British and Indian identities and acquisition of authorial power by Mulk Raj Anand. The essay by Pallavi Rastogi also addresses issues of identities and authorial power of Indians in Europe. 14 Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999), 3. 15 See Gauri Viswanathan, “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India,” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1 and 2 (1987): 2-26, and Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New Delhi: Oxford University

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Press, 1989), for details about British literature as a tool of imperial domination in Indians’ education. 16 Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and The Travels of Dean Mahomet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 2002), and Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The History of Indians in Britain, 17001947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain (London: Frank Cass, 2000); and Kusoom Vadgama, India in Britain (London: Robert Royce, 1984). 17 See Sandhu, 93-99. 18 Syed A. M. Shah, “A Visit to the Tower of London,” The Indian Magazine 24, no. 268 (April 1893): 208-10. 19 See Susan L. Roberson. Defining Travel: Diverse Visions (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2001). 20 See Peter Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13-14 on wonder. 21 Mukharji and two Indian gentlemen were deputed by the Government of India to supervise the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, 1886 (vii). 22 The Arms Act of 1878 forbade Indians from carrying arms. 23 Nagendra Nath Ghose, The Effect of Observation of England Upon Indian Ideas and Institutions (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Co., 1877), 5. 24 See Burton, “Making a Spectacle,” 134-35. 25 Judith Brown, “The Making of a Critical Outsider,” in Gandhi and South Africa, ed. J. Brown and Martin Prozesky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 22-23. 26 Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxiii. 27 Ibid., 113. 28 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 7. 29 Clark, 1. 30 Joseph Childers, “Outside Looking in: Colonials, Immigrants, and the Pleasure of the Archive,” Victorian Studies 46, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 299. 31 Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 55. 32 See http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/derrida.htm. 33 From the French edition De l’hospitalité, 29, quoted in Edith Wyschogrod, “Autochthony and Welcome: Discourses of Exile in Levinas and Derrida,” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 40. 34 Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Hospitality,” Parallax 11, no. 1 (2005): 6. 35 Jack Reynolds, “Jacques Derrida,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/derrida.htm#Hospitality. 36 Roxanne Euben, “The Comparative Politics of Travel,” Parallax 9, no. 4 (2003): 20. 37 Ibid., 20. 38 Bhabha, 96.

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They often treated British ways as oddities, another reversal of a trope of European travel literature; see Mancall, 14. 40 For a similar literary dilemma in the late nineteenth-century Indian novel, see Ulka Anjaria, “Satire, Literary Realism and the Indian State,” Economic and Political Weekly (November 18, 2006): 4795-4800. 41 Among the most well-known British-educated Anglophiles turned nationalists were Mohandas Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

CHAPTER FIVE AN EASTERNER IN THE EAST END: UNSETTLING METROPOLITAN DISCOURSES IN OLIVE CHRISTIAN MALVERY’S THE SOUL MARKET PALLAVI RASTOGI

In 1906, a young Indian photojournalist published a series of sketches about the London poor. Entitled The Soul Market, With Which Is Included the Heart of Things, Olive Christian Malvery’s little book agitated for big changes in the economic structure of London society.1 This argument was by no means original or even new. Malvery’s narrative was located within an already existent corpus of reform rhetoric.2 Her readiness to go undercover in London’s East End and actually experience working-class culture first-hand wasn’t any different from contemporary reformers.3 The uniqueness of her project lay in her ethnicity, to some extent in her gender,4 and in her skillful use of metropolitan racial discourses— particularly colonial rhetoric, the racialization of the working class, and anti-Semitism—in order to unsettle those modes of representation. Malvery’s strategic deployment of the thought-paradigms of her time reveals how the colonized acquire power and authority and the ways in which different disaffected groups—particularly colonial subjects, working classes, and immigrants—interact with each other in the heart of empire.5 Her writing also highlights the rifts and fissures in a seemingly Anglophilic persona, showing, as do many other essays in Before Windrush, that colonized identities in the metropolis were multiple in their affiliations, always fraught with contradiction.6 Although Malvery was popular as a writer and novelist in her time, surprisingly little is known about her personal life. She went to England at the end of the century, when she was around sixteen years old, to train in voice at the Royal College of Music (Winter, 104). She traveled

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extensively within England and the United States and married Archibald Mackirdy, an American affiliated with the embassy in Muscat (Walkowitz, 7). Her husband’s work must have taken her to Arabia as she references the region frequently in her writing. Malvery died in 1914, when she would have been in her early thirties.7 She left behind an extensive body of socially committed work—composed in what Rick Allen describes as the “best traditions of Christian and conservative paternalism”—that has only recently received some critical attention.8 According to historian James Winter, she was noticed by important members of the Anglo-Indian [the English in India] establishment, given an English education and probably sponsored not only because she was talented but because she might be useful to charitable and temperance organizations in London. (104)

Winter also describes Malvery as “lovely, soft-eyed and unmistakably Indian” (104). “Unmistakably Indian” she may have been, but the possibility of racial passing was always available to Malvery. We know that she was provided access to working-class life because of her foreign appearance, her racial otherness acting as a mark of empathy with the urban poor. Yet, because she had a white parent, she was lighter-skinned than most Indians. Malvery could also speak English with the fluency of a native. Photographs accompanying The Heart of Things show her dressed in English clothes, usually “surrounded” by what Walkowitz calls the accoutrements of “genteel literary production”: paper, desk, and chair (3). Rather than looking “unmistakably Indian,” Malvery was selectively so, alternating with ease between an exotic Indianness and a flexible Englishness (Walkowitz, 8). Yet, Malvery uses her effortless access to metropolitan society to challenge its ways of thinking from within. We will probably never know whether Malvery had read the travel literature of her time. However, we can say with some degree of certainty that Malvery had a remarkable grasp of metropolitan modes of racial representation.9 Malvery deploys the tropes of Orientalism, the racialization of the working class, and anti-Semitism not only to analyze but also to position herself within the urban sprawl. She marshals her background, mainly Indian and Arabic culture, through a hierarchical imperial rhetoric but shifts the reference points of Enlightened Occident and Benighted Orient. The colonies are often associated with abundance and civility while England is represented as the cultural Other of the “East.” This is an inversion of the modalities of colonial travel writing in particular and Orientalist rhetoric in general.10 In depicting England as deficient, Malvery questions imperial notions of white Western

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superiority. Malvery also maintains Indian culture in England through a sartorial politics that has subversive effects of its own. Her ethnic heritage thus acts as a foil against the traditions and practices of metropolitan society. In describing class in the language of race, Malvery argues that reformists should first empower the “heathen within” and only then attempt to civilize the colonies.11 Racializing the poor is an old mode of literary depiction.12 Nadja Durbach argues that the imagined connection between the metropolitan working class and the colonized peoples was hardly new. The identification of the poor with colonial subjects and racial others had been established in the early nineteenth century by missionary societies. By the 1870s, the racialization of class difference had become a trope of late-Victorian journalism. (82)

What happens, however, when a colonial subject deploys these tropes? How are—or are—power and authority redistributed and realigned? Malvery’s “racing” of the working class exposes the vulnerability of the metropolis to criticism by subjugated outsiders as well as blurs the social and civilizational binary between colony and imperium.13 Malvery also excludes the Jewish immigrant population from a unifying frame of Britishness because of its failure to absorb the norms of the metropolis. She thereby emphasizes her own claims to a British identity via her assimilable potential, becoming what Walkowitz calls a “decorative ‘daughter of Empire’” (3). Yet, Malvery reveals the range of ethnicities that reside in London even as she goes out of her way to depict the Jews as Other. She uses already-existent tropes of anti-Semitism to represent Jewish alterity but complicates anti-Semitic discourse by revealing that ethnic groups such as the Jews are not just passively situated in the city’s “squalid” spaces. Instead they actively strive to change the character of street-life as well as the normative assumptions of metropolitan knowledge and will-to-power. As her portrayal of the colonies, the English working classes, and the Jewish immigrant population demonstrates, Malvery subscribes to the most oppressive Western rhetoric, yet her diverse, skillful, and calculated use of those modes of representation challenges the supposed superiority of England as well as shows its internal diversity. The Soul Market was initially commissioned as a series of journalistic articles, accompanied with detailed photographs. It was published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1904 and in book form first in 1906. Malvery assumed a number of undercover disguises to collect material for her essays:

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An Easterner in the East End A flower girl … a street singer, a member of a busker troop, a costermonger selling tomatoes, a licensed hawker, and a ‘hokey-pokey’ (ice-cream) pedlar. (Winter 103)

The first few pages of The Soul Market, however, are a recapitulation of Malvery’s college life. Malvery’s memories of her time at The Royal College of Music are like Cornelia Sorabji’s rendition of her Oxford years: glorious days filled with lighthearted fun.14 Malvery became a public reciter rather than the singer she was trained to be: To avoid sartorial competition with Society ladies, she adopted a graceful Indian costume for her performances . . . [she] also established herself as an elocutionist, offering lessons on English pronunciation to schoolgirls and MPs alike. (Walkowitz, 7)

According to Malvery, “two members of Parliament, one well-known barrister, and several clergymen came to me with recommendations from friends” (19). An Indian woman giving English lessons to the upper and middle classes of England is, of course, ironic. However, as Walkowitz comments: When Malvery promoted herself as the embodiment of the British nation and Empire, she was implicitly drawing upon emerging ideals of Imperial Federation and a vision of an English-speaking Greater Britain that spread across a large part of the globe, but not to Europe. She embraced a Britishness that incorporated British India, the Scottish Celtic fringe, the United States, and even Cockney London. (8-9)

A proponent of the universalizing imperatives of empire, Malvery envisions a “global Great Britain” united by the commonalities of the Christian religion and the English language. This does not mean an erasure of ethnic identity; rather, it empowers Malvery, as a British subject, to give lessons in elocution to MPs and clergymen. Despite her obvious pride in her ability to integrate, Malvery, like Sorabji, paraded her ethnic identity. We know, for example, that she performed on stage clad in a “shimmering sari” (Winter, 105) and that she was with much fanfare married in “Indian costume” (Walkowitz, 7). Yet, her self-conscious projection of ethnicity did not engender a merely multicultural existence. Instead, she deployed her racial difference to further her social, political, and cultural agenda. In transforming herself from the “clever Indian girl”15—an epithet given to her by an adoring London press—to the worldly British woman,

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Malvery assumes a proprietary access to England. Malvery immediately became something of a society lady in London. This was in no small measure due to her exotic appeal as well as her ability to render that appeal familiar by dressing in English clothes when occasion demanded and speaking perfect English. However, Malvery sought to dissociate herself from the supposedly shallow aspect of high society, especially that of upper-class women.16 Malvery’s awareness of the seamy side of London life instills in her a burning desire to initiate reform: Indeed, the romance of London life soon faded away, and I was brought into actual contact with things as they are, in place of things as they were written about. My desire to render service to the needy, to the working girls and women in this country, was not because of romance or sentiment, but because of the knowledge that unless those who are able will fight the battle for those who are disabled, there can be no hope of eventual reform in our social system. (66)

Malvery is able to see beyond the “romance of London life.” In a few short years, she develops an empowered entitlement to England and a colonizing desire to correct its ills. Here, then, the Indian woman imbues herself with the reformist energy of colonialism and presents the inhabitants of the metropolis in need of salvation. Malvery thus assumes a proprietary entitlement to Britain. Her use of the word “our” in the last line of the quoted passage is significant, contrasting with the opening section of the travelogue in which she uses terms such as “native country” to describe India and “foreign land” to describe England (9). Malvery also constructs herself as empowered—“those who are able will fight the battle for those who are disabled”—particularly compared to working-class women who have no ability to represent themselves. We are reminded of Marx’s statement about the peasantry, that “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” a phrase that also opens Edward Said’s Orientalism.17 An Indian woman, part of that group supposedly incapable of self-representation, takes it upon herself to represent another group supposedly incapable of self-representation, acquiring agency and authority for herself in the process.18 That this agency and authority can be procured only by speaking for another dispossessed community is symptomatic of the way power was apportioned under colonialism as well as built into the class structure. Malvery’s reformist zeal further reminds us of white English women who went into the colonies brimming with the desire to better the lives of nonwhite women, gaining voice for themselves in the process.19 Even though

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Malvery subscribes to the classic tropes of colonialism, she complicates their usual associations. However, Malvery’s difference from the working classes is undercut by her ethnic otherness. She is able to go undercover and erase her upperclass identity precisely because of her status as racial outsider. For example, her companion, “the anonymous Mr. C.,” introduces her to women workers in a matchbox factory as “a poor little furin’ sort of gal” (69) in order to win their sympathy. Malvery further acknowledges it is in no wise [sic] easy to “slip” into a new life. Among the “people,” as we term the labouring and poor classes, an outsider is very quickly recognised. I found, however, that my foreign appearance really helped me. (134)

Malvery, therefore, does not seek to deny her racial identity in any way. Her careful exhibition of ethnicity—especially maintaining Indian culture in England and celebrating “Eastern” social values—foregrounds her use, and reversal, of colonial rhetoric in The Soul Market.20 She writes that she decided to wear “Indian dress” even for her “public work”: Indeed, it is this extreme difficulty of procuring anything really suitable except at enormous expense and a vast expenditure of time and trouble that made me decide on wearing Indian costume for all my public work . . . I could hardly ever get a dress made according to my own ideas, and the trouble I experienced was so extreme that I solved the difficulty for ever by electing to wear nothing but Indian dress for my public work. (177-178)

By wearing Indian clothes outside, Malvery pluralizes English public culture. While sartorial difference “others” Malvery from English women of all classes, it also emphasizes the suitability of Indian dress to English life. European imperialists did not see the value in colonized dress or culture. Indeed, clothing was often viewed as an aspect of “native” life that needed European influence.21 In a defiant flipping of the colonialist hierarchy, Malvery views Indian dress as more appropriate to public culture than English clothes. The staging of ethnic alterity questions— perhaps even destabilizes—imperial norms and cultural codes: as a comment on the usefulness of Indian clothes for English civic life and as a repeated emphasis on the fact that Indians are attempting to reform England. Bakirathi Mani argues that clothing is tied to

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the production of aesthetic and political value in multiple colonial and racial economies. Men like Gandhi who had the option of choosing between costumes, attempted to syncretize at each moment different semiotic systems, and to fuse together culturally disparate referents of identity . . . Gandhi’s dress signalled the national imaginary of an independent India.22

Dress, then, always functions within an over-determined circuit of meaning.23 As Gandhi’s Indian clothes gestured toward an independent India, so too do Malvery’s sartorial politics suggest a similar yet different sort of independence: one that may celebrate British colonialism but nevertheless question its desire for cultural uniformity. However, Malvery does much more than merely diversify the visual splendor of the communal imaginary. She also installs herself—the Indian woman—as an active participant in English street-life. Malvery still thinks of her mind, morals, and intellect as quintessentially English despite the contrary signs of her aspect. When a vegetable-seller asks Malvery: “Is yer foreign,” Malvery answers, “not by half … one can’t help one’s birth, but one can help one’s heart … a sentiment that pleased her [Malvery’s questioner] extremely” (136). This paradox of belonging yet not belonging, of assimilation and resistance, is a key aspect of Malvery’s persona.24 Therefore, Malvery’s relationship with India and Indianness is deliberately indeterminate, surfacing in moments marked by both irony and ambivalence. Chapter II in The Soul Market, for example, is titled: “A ‘Heathen’ At the Opera: Music For the Million.” Again, Malvery uses colonialist rhetoric (what, after all, could be more imperialist than the European’s disdain for the “heathen”?), but the quotation marks around “heathen” suffuse the term with irony. Malvery does not perceive herself as a “heathen,” however aware she may be that other people see her as such.25 Because The Soul Market is partly an indictment of upper-class profligacy, Malvery harnesses the East to comment on society ladies, particularly older society ladies, who fail to conduct themselves with the “dignity of years”: To me, with an Eastern’s idea of the dignity of years, there seemed something horrible in these masquerading women, whom no young person could honour and respect. In the East, grey hairs are a sign of honour, and youth is obliged to pay a tribute of respect to such symbols of experience. Among the Arabs, no unbearded youth ever speaks in the presence of a bearded man unless he be addressed first, and young people will always stand up and remain standing in the presence of their elders; but in the

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Notice the words Malvery uses to describe the older society women: there is something grotesque (“horrible”) in their performance of fashionable life. The discontents of civilization—a lack of respect for the elderly and loss of dignity in age—are transferred onto the originator of Enlightenment: the colonizing West. Malvery’s celebration of Eastern conduct invested in such punitive notions of “dignity,” “propriety,” and “homely virtues” may end up homogenizing both East and West. Yet, her trenchant condemnation of certain European values opens spaces of resistance for the colonized in which they can criticize, question, and defy the Empire not only from inside the West but also through its discursive modalities.26 Malvery thus seasons her narrative with references from Arabian and Indian life, references that are used as a foil against which to assess English/Western behavior: In such a benighted land a man sits in his little hut with his family round him on the floor, eating his simple meal of unleavened bread and dates, or dried fish. The door is open, there passes a stranger, who has through some misfortune, neither home nor food. The man of the house sees him, calls to him, and says: “In the name of God enter and eat.” Water is given to him to wash his hands and feet, he joins the little family group and shares their homely fare, then thanking them in the name of God, he departs. Imagine a tramp entertained at any dinner-table in a Christian country. Such a thing would not be possible because the tramp, himself a product of high modern civilization, is so filthy and degraded an object that he is only fit for the society of swine. (223-224)

It is true that Malvery uses an Orientalist stereotype in her evocation of the simplicity of Arabian life. Yet, post-colonial critics such as Leila Gandhi have pointed out that the calculated exercise of stereotypes can disrupt the hegemony of Western modes of representation. As Gandhi says: Orientalist discourse was strategically available not only to the Empire but also to its antagonists. Moreover, the affirmative stereotypes attached to this discourse were instrumental in fashioning the “East” as a utopian alternative to Europe. Countless scholars, writers . . . travellers . . . invoked Orientalist idealisations of India to critique … the aggressive capitalism and territorialism of the West.27

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Malvery critiques the “aggressive capitalism” of the West by drawing on a stereotypical image of the “East.” Her sarcastic analysis of the tramp as a “product of high modern civilization” undercuts and censures England’s claims to civilization and modernity, a civilization and modernity that are incomplete because they leave behind a significant portion of the population. Civilization and modernity were also often the twin justifications for imperialism.28 Again, criticism of the West by mobilizing an expediently selected image of the East is not necessarily unproblematic. However, Malvery brings the colonies into a narrative about England, thereby inserting India into what was often perceived as “internal” English discourse, untouched and unmarked by the colonies. Moreover, Malvery demonstrates a willingness to question imperial hierarchies even though she reconstitutes a hierarchy of her own. Malvery uses the mechanics of colonial discourse to lay the groundwork fundamental for important modes of resistance: the ability to see England with clarity and to author spaces for India and Indians from inside. Continuing her inversion of the subjects of colonial discourse, Malvery often invests colonized women with a degree of power that contrasts with the blighted lives of working-class English women: I was particularly struck with the brutalising effect factory life seems to have on married women. These are often of a most degraded type. They are offensive personally, and use vile language. As a rule their homes are miserable hovels. In India and Arabia the conditions among married women in factories are very different to those obtaining in Great Britain. In those heathen countries the married women, who work, almost invariably, keep their earnings for themselves. Often the factory workers own a considerable amount of silver jewellery, which is, of course, an Eastern way of saving money. The women who have babies are given an opportunity to feed their little ones, who are brought to the factories. There is no destruction of child-life, or degradation, as there is in Christian countries. The factories too are open and airy places. (95-96, emphasis original)

Notice, first, the disruption of the imperialist associations of heathen and Christian. The factories in the “heathen” nations are clean and airy, spaces of civilization in other words. The “Christian countries” are associated with squalor and vice. Words such as “brutalising,” “degraded,” “offensive,” “vile,” and “hovels,” conveying depravation and lack of personal hygiene—stereotypes that usually attach themselves to colonial subjects—are transferred onto white working-class women by a colonial subject.

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Significantly, women in India and Arabia are relatively empowered.29 Malvery tells us that these women are allowed to enter the labor pool in the first place, thereby countering the notion of Eastern women as bound to “home and harem”;30 they are allowed to keep their earnings for themselves rather than give to their husbands to squander in drink, and are permitted to nurture their children in the workplace. Inverting the valorizations is potentially rather than inherently subversive. In shifting the discursive representations of colony onto metropolis and vice versa, not only does Malvery blur the distinction between ruler and ruled but also indicates that the colonizer can learn from the colonized. It must be noted that her rhetoric here is different from other discourses, including her own, that racialized the working classes. Instead of claiming that the urban poor are like the colonized in their “uncivilized” state, Malvery underscores the civilizational difference between England and the colonies. However, Malvery also shows that England is similar to the colonies. She uses rhetorical modes deployed by the colonizers in their representation of India and the East but imposes them on England instead.31 The racialization of the working class, particularly the depiction of the poor as a subculture, is a trope that has been commonly used in literature as well as the social sciences. Winter refers to an early book of photography titled Street-life in London by John Thomson, which Malvery might have read: Its first item is entitled “London Nomads”; it shows a group of gypsies gathered around their caravan. One notices at a second glance that the setting is not a field or common but a vacant lot surrounded by grim terraces and smoking chimneys; we are meant to see his subjects as traditional, nomadic people who have adapted to but have not been truly integrated into an ordered urban world … for Thomson, therefore, the transitory people who sell, gather, and scavenge in the city streets were not fully urban creatures but survivals from an earlier stage of human development, pre-modern men and women, living unchartered lives in chartered streets. (102-103)

As we will soon see, Malvery picks up on this rhetoric of the street dwellers as unstudied subjects, in other words, the ideal constituents of the ethnographic gaze. Walkowitz also foregrounds Malvery’s ethnographic agenda and argues that The Soul Market is an inversion of colonial narratives of travel: She structures her text as an inverted imperial travelogue: one that features a female narrator, accompanied by an indigenous guide (Mr. C., a Cockney actor hired by Pearson’s). Like female Imperial explorers,

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Malvery presents herself as a figure who wanders through a foreign landscape with no specific program and plan, observes exotic others who exist in an “ethnographic present,” and returns with stories of her picaresque adventures. (12)32

“Foreign,” “exotic,” “ethnographic present”: these words and phrases are an integral part of the vocabulary of colonial rhetoric, which emphasized that alien geographies should be mapped precisely because they were unknown.33 Thus, unlike Thomson who saw the city’s inhabitants living “unchartered lives in chartered streets,” Malvery depicts London as unmapped territory that must be subjected to the organizing power of the imperial gaze.34 If “mapping” was one of the salient justifications as well as consequences of colonization, then Malvery carries this discourse into the metropolis, arguing that the imperium is as much a “blank space” as the colonies, itself needing to be located, bounded, and mapped.35 Here then is Malvery’s first glimpse of London: Presently the train slowed down, and we began passing over what seemed to me a black-looking wilderness, strewn with disused flower-pots of strange shapes . . . This horrible, black, place, the city of a thousand dreams! A place I had thought of almost night and day while travelling 8,000 miles to reach it! (10)

In one short paragraph, Malvery deploys the word “black” twice. She describes London as a “wilderness,” using a word that is particularly loaded with the civilizing mission’s purpose of transforming untamed territory into a site of industry and civilization.36 While Malvery’s eager deployment of the word “black” is undoubtedly problematic, the importance of this paragraph lies in the geographical disorientation of London that her reading implies and further confuses the distinction between colony and metropolis. Malvery also reverses the trajectory of imperial exchange by setting up the colonized subject as the harbinger of light and knowledge and the metropolis as “the heart of darkness.”37 This is where her difference from British reformers, who used the same racial rhetoric to describe the working class and the cityscape, might be underscored. Correspondingly, Malvery punctuates her narrative with images of dirt and decay. In her exposure of the meat-processing industry, she says: The whole air was polluted by the smell from these horrid cases, and yet every scrap of that diseased offal was used in the preparation of potted tongues and savouries of different kinds. (100)

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She describes the women working in the meat-processing industry as among the lowest and most miserable specimens of humanity that I have come across … their bodily condition was so extremely unsavoury and disagreeable that added to the hideous smells of animal matter that was being preserved, it rendered life almost intolerable. (100-101)

Malvery’s use of the word “lowest” gestures toward a racial hierarchy at the bottom of which resides the working class. Her response to the women’s bodies is also significant (Walkowitz, 16), demonstrating the physical distaste of the upper class for the working class and of the colonizer for the colonized. Taking refuge in a domestic shelter, Malvery describes her “ablutions” as “primitive” thus continuing to stigmatize the urban poor in the vocabulary of race (101). Her language in characterizing this “hovel” is particularly significant: The tables were strewn with broken food, fish-bones, basins, and beercans. The floor was covered with filth and dirt to a most disgusting degree. The dreadful odours of these badly ventilated rooms were almost overpowering. (277, emphasis added)

Squalor, dirt, bad smells, poor light, the excess of which threatens to overpower the narrator, these are all recurring tropes in imperial discourse as well as in British ways of describing the working class.38 In this case, however, a subject born at the periphery of Empire is deploying them in “the heart of Empire” about “the heart of Empire.” In challenging imperial distinctions between colony and metropolis and by decrying the state of the English working class, Malvery carves out a place of authority for herself. Moreover, in an audacious dispersal of the mega trope of Empire, she endows Indians—who are supposedly a subject people—with the right to reform and re-form “the Mother Country.” In that respect, Malvery’s efforts to change England from within by bringing in aspects of India (her dress, “Eastern” values, her empowering of Indian and Arabian women, her reformist energy) could be called subversive, albeit partially and problematically so. While there is little mention of any interaction with other colonial subjects, The Soul Market paints a vivid picture of the threat posed to British culture by foreign non-colonial subjects, particularly Eastern European Jews. Although Malvery portrays Indians, Cockneys, Irish, Scots, and Celts as integrated by a universalizing Britishness, she deploys a classic trope of anti-Semitism: that of immigrant Jews as not just of a

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different race, but also endowed with a different language and culture, their work ethic supposedly that of relentless exploitation of human capital rather than individual self-generation.39 Malvery observes that some sectors of professional life are in control of immigrant Jews: The public houses are very often held by foreigners, though this is not by any means universal. But there exists an evil as great, I deem it, as the public house, which is virtually the invention and monopoly of the aliens. This is the sister institution of the public house—I speak of the pawn shop, of which almost every street boasts one. (197)

The word “pawnshop” would, of course, have conveyed in Malvery’s time an image of Jewish usury. Malvery also criticizes the Jewish population for running “sweaters” (sweat shops), particularly in the garment industry: It would be in such cases as these that the Consumers’ Leaguer would set its machinery in motion—follow the petticoats from the Jew’s shop back to the women’s rooms where they were made, and then sent to the large houses which bought them wholesale. These garments would then be condemned as having been manufactured with what might be called the price of blood. Let us hope that no decent woman would purchase them. (200)

Malvery’s rationale for halting Jewish migration into England is predicated on a central argument that she makes consistently in The Soul Market: England needs to look after its own poor before allowing immigration into an already over-crowded metropolis and before attempting to reform the colonies. In her criticism of the Jewish presence in London, Malvery anticipates the rhetoric of the likes of Enoch Powell who would claim later, and, ironically in reference to colonials such as Malvery, that unchecked immigration would so substantially alter England that it would become alien to the English themselves.40 According to Malvery, some localities in London…are almost entirely foreign; indeed some places are so alien in their characteristics that one might fancy oneself in another country on entering them. (217)

But Malvery unwittingly points to the plural character of London street life:

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The Jewish quarter rings with the sound of many tongues and the cultural furnishings of different nationalities. Migrants from other parts of Europe, as well as from the Empire, are changing the character of the city in which they reside and Malvery’s initial disquiet lies precisely in this vital consequence of diaspora: the “unassimilable” nature of these “alien” immigrants. Malvery “reworlds” imperial London as a city of many nations, many tongues, and many races.41 “Reworlding”—or making anew another culture elsewhere—fundamentally destabilizes English hegemony in England itself.42 The danger as well as the attraction of the Jewish presence in the East End lies in its resistance to adopting a normative English identity, ironically what Malvery herself has sought to do.43 Although Malvery’s initial tone is that of revulsion, she cannot help noting the “picturesque” aspect of the diverse population. While Malvery claims that the smell of the Jewish neighborhood is different from that in the “purely English slums,” there is none of the distaste and disgust that attend her description of the English working class. Instead, the vitality of the Jewish quarter seems to lie in its very impurity, as does its subversive potential. Significantly, Malvery does not represent the Jewish population as an undifferentiated homogenous mass but instead observes with her photojournalist’s eye the various national origins and cultural differences that characterize this community. She also seems charmed by the pictorial features of the Jewish area even though she deploys racist language— “thick-lipped Fagins” and “hook-nosed ugliness”—to describe some of its inhabitants. Her statement that “nowhere in the whole of England can one see so varied and so picturesque a crowd,” attests to the cosmopolitanism of the Jewish quarter, which is able to maintain a distinctly un-English identity. Thus, while Malvery criticizes the impact of Jewish immigration on England’s economic life, she seems to, almost reluctantly, admire its impact on England’s cultural life.

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Malvery’s depiction of the Jewish presence also points to the complexity of her vision, a vision that takes on an increasingly international element. As Walkowitz observes, the global character of imperial London was modulated and altered by colonial as well as non-colonial foreign subjects. In setting up a triangulated relationship of the Cockney, the Indian, and the Jew, Malvery signals other international dimensions besides Empire to the discourse of Britishness. (35)

The imperial metropolis consisted of a multiplicity of Others: not just Indian students and reformers, but also refugees who migrated to an England increasingly perceived as a refuge from religious persecution. In bringing together these dispossessed groups, Malvery shows us how various subaltern constituencies interact with each other. Her writing challenges the racial dynamic often foregrounded in post-colonial studies: that between powerful colonizer and powerless colonized.44 Instead, she shows us the various, problematic ways in which disenfranchised communities represent and acquire power over each other. What does is it mean to be a colonial subject traveling to the imperial metropolis at a time when England was suffused by a sense of its superior prowess and at the apex of its imperial domination? Anglophilic colonial subjects may seem to reinforce notions of English superiority, yet outsiders bring in other perspectives that alter conventional accounts of the zones of power. Malvery’s writing reveals the plurality within British culture, demonstrates her ability to decenter the locus of hegemony from within, and foregrounds resistance despite a submission to imperial mandates. Through her sartorial politics and her use of India and Arabia as a mode of analysis in a narrative about England, Malvery inverts the reference points of colonial discourse and also counters the relentlessly negative rhetoric generated about the “East” by the “West.” Although Malvery’s class-consciousness and anti-Semitism make her an undeniable bigot, we must pause to analyze the intent behind her depiction of the working class as “savage” and “barbaric.” Malvery wanted to engender reforms within England. To that end, her deployment of racial imagery is important because it reveals to the colonizers the poverty of the English working class using rhetorical strategies—such as the tropes of filth, disease, and barbarism—originated by the English themselves. These familiar terms highlight the necessity of reform in England. In addition, while Malvery’s anti-Semitism cannot be excused, she is able to appreciate the visual and cultural diversity of the Jewish

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quarter, a perspective that complicates what would otherwise be a mere regurgitation of the anti-Semitic rhetoric of her time. Olive Christian Malvery was very much a product of her time. She existed in a period where the rhetoric of Indian nationalism was still nascent and Anglophile Indians were Anglophile indeed. Despite her overidentification with England, it is remarkable that Malvery situates herself, an Indian woman, as an active agent of its reformist agenda. In the process, she helps create a space of authority for other migrant Indians to become an energetic part of English life and thereby stimulate intercultural merging and mingling. Malvery’s plural vision was always coexistent with her Anglophilia and anti-Semitism.45 To focus on how Malvery resists the hegemonic urges of metropolitan culture even while buying into some of its most oppressive discourses is not to excuse her role in perpetuating these discourses, but rather to understand how racism may paradoxically function in tandem with its antithesis: a defiant assertion of diversity.46

Selected Bibliography Allen, Rick, ed. The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street Life, 1700-1914. London: Routledge, 1998. Arnold, David. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. —. Burdens of History: British Feminisms, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Cheyette, Brian. Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Cohn, Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1990. David, Deirdre. Rule Brittania: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Durbach, Nadja. Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Endelman, Todd M. The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Gandhi, Leela. Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Gidley, Ben. The Proletarian Other: Charles Booth and the Politics of Representation. London: Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2000. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Age of Colonialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Heffer, Simon. Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998. Jenks, Chris. Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Jones, Lloyd Roger, and M. J. Lewis. British Industrial Capitalism Since the Industrial Revolution. London: UCL Press Limited, 1998. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Laybourne, Keith. Fifty Key Figures in Twentieth Century British Politics. London: Routledge, 2002. Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. London: Routledge, 2003. Malvery, Olive Christian. The Soul Market, With Which Is Included the Heart of Things. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1907. Mani, Bakirathi. “Undressing the Diaspora.” In South Asian Women in the Diaspora, edited by Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram, 117-136. New York: Berg, 2003. Marriot, John. The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Mill, J. S. The History of British India. London: James Madden, 1848. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900. London: Verso, 1998.

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Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Spivak. Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Rastogi, Pallavi. “The World Around and the World Afar All Seemed Compassed: Cosmopolitan Ethnicity in the Victorian Metropolis.” Women’s Studies 6, no. 3 (September 2003): 735-759. Renk, Kathleen J. Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization. Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1999. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Walkowitz, Judith R. “The Indian Woman, The Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London.” Victorian Studies (Autumn 1998/1999): 3-46. Winter, James. London’s Teeming Streets, 1830-1914. London: Routledge, 1994.

Notes 1

I am deeply indebted to Judith Walkowitz’s ground-breaking essay for introducing me to Malvery and to Malvery’s complicated identity. While I build on Walkowitz’s work, I also extend her claim that The Soul Market is “an inverted imperial travelogue” to show how Malvery unsettled other metropolitan modes of representation. Judith R. Walkowitz, “The Indian Woman, The Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London,” Victorian Studies (Autumn 1998/1999): 12. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically. 2 See James Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, 1830-1914 (London: Routledge, 1994). Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically. Winter says, “London . . . was one of the first great Western cities to begin this process of analyzing the urban condition and of implementing reform programs” (x). According to Roger Lloyd Jones and M. J. Lewis, the Edwardian period was “characterized by debates over poverty, education, the role of the empire, the functioning of the constitution, the performance of the industrial economy, the strength of organized labour, and the women’s movement, not forgetting the Irish question and the escalating arms race and military tension with Germany. The

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growing call for the reform of a number of existing institutions suggests that it was the decade before the outbreak of the war, rather than the 1890s, which provided the more fertile ground for a … structural crisis.” Roger Lloyd Jones and M. J. Lewis, British Industrial Capitalism Since the Industrial Revolution (London: UCL Press Limited, 1998), 107. 3 Jack London, as Walkowitz and others point out, is one of the foremost examples of undercover reporting in London. Discussing “the multiple identities Jack London imagined for himself,” Jonathan Auerbach states that London became an “undercover reporter masquerading as a down-and-out American sailor . . . [and like Malvery] assumes as his single subject the people of the abyss, whom he confined to the sufficiently removed confines of England’s East End.” Jonathan Auerbach, Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 117-118. In addition to Malvery, Ben Gidley cites Beatrice Webb, Rudolf Rocker, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor, Claude McKay, and Sylvia Pankhurst as “examples of writers who encountered the urban proletariat.” Ben Gidley, The Proletarian Other: Charles Booth and the Politics of Representation (London: Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2000), 25. Also see the chapters in the section entitled “Incognitos, Fictions, and Cross-Class Masquerades” in Seth Koven’s Slumming on “the elites use of deceptive practices (incognitos, undercover investigative journalism, falsified photographs) to reveal ‘truths’ about the poor that they claimed would have otherwise remained hidden.” Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 19. 4 Chris Jenks points out that the normative notion of the East End is “the endogenous, swashbuckling, costermonger that Mayhew introduced as a social type.” Chris Jenks, Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 158. 5 For more on how the colonized “remake power relations in imperial culture,” see Antoinette Burton’s At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 3. 6 See, for example, the essays by Stoyan Tchaprazov, Julie Codell, and Margaret Trenta in this collection. Burton also makes a similar point in Heart, 15. 7 See Walkowitz for the confusion in the records of Malvery’s birth date (36, note 4). 8 Rick Allen, The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street Life, 1700-1914 (London: Routledge, 1998), 215. In addition to The Soul Market, With Which Is Included the Heart of Things (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1907), Malvery is also the author of Baby Toilers (London: Hutchinson, 1907), Thirteen Nights (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), The White Slave Market (London: S. Paul, 1912), and A Year and a Day (London: Hutchinson, 1912). Subsequent references to The Soul Market will be made parenthetically. While Walkowitz’s essay is the only substantial piece on Malvery, she is also mentioned in some detail in James Winter’s London’s Teeming Streets and footnoted in works such as Seth Koven’s Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London and Antoinette

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Burton’s Heart of Empire. Additionally, Rick Allen’s collection contains an excerpt from The Soul Market. 9 See Walkowitz for Malvery’s resonances with and reversals of Jack London and empire (11). Also see Julie Codell’s essay in Before Windrush where she shows the facility that Indian men demonstrated with the travel discourses of their time. 10 In the table of contents of The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), David Spurr lists some of the stock colonial tropes: “surveillance,” “appropriation,” “aestheticization,” “classification,” “debasement,” “negation,” “affirmation,” “idealization,” “insubstantialization,” “naturalization,” “eroticization,” and “resistance.” 11 Nadja Durbach points out that “radicals such as William Cobbett, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O’Brien all opposed the antislavery movement and attacked the hypocrisy of abolitionists who embraced the liberation of the ‘negro’ while turning a blind eye to the exploitation of the white factory ‘slave.’” Nadja Durbach, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 82. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically. 12 Also see Sukhdev Sandhu, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (London: HarperCollins, 2003), 70-71 and Joseph McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 7-10. 13 Making the metropolis and its inhabitants vulnerable to criticism by outsiders was a staple strategy of representation in Asian and black writing. See the essays by Julie Codell, Anne Witchard, Margaret Trenta, and Stoyan Tchaprazov in Before Windrush for more examples of this phenomenon. Also see Burton, Heart, 3. 14 Cornelia Sorabji attended Oxford in the 1880s and trained as a lawyer. Resolutely Anglophilic, she, nevertheless, was also surprisingly acerbic in her assessment of the English. For more on Sorabji and her careful use of identity politics, see Antoinette Burton’s At the Heart of Empire. Also see Pallavi Rastogi, “The World Around and the World Afar All Seemed Compassed: Cosmopolitan Ethnicity in the Victorian Metropolis,” Women’s Studies 6, no. 3 (September 2003). 15 This epithet was given to Malvery by Reynold’s Newspaper (Walkowitz, 6). 16 Walkowitz, 6, 7. 17 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), epigraph. 18 This is also similar to the way white women often co-authored slave narratives. See, for example, Susanna Strickland’s representation of Mary Prince in The History of Mary Prince. 1831 (London: Penguin, 2000). Also see Michelle Taylor’s essay in this collection. 19 Antoinette Burton argues that white women often depicted colonized women as savage and backward so that they could construct themselves as civilized and superior and therefore deserving of power. She states that “arguments for recognition as imperial citizens were predicated on the imagery of Indian women,

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whom British feminist writers depicted as helpless victims awaiting the representation of their plight and the redress of their condition at the hands of their sisters in the metropole.” Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminisms, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 7. 20 For more on the subversion and reversal of imperial rhetoric, see Julie Codell’s essay in this collection. Also see Codell for how Indian male travelers responded to English poverty. 21 Discussing the British reformist Annette Akroyd, Barbara Ramusack writes that “she [Akroyd] had been offended by the dress of the . . . middle-class, respectable Bengali women, which she considered vulgar at best and immodest at worst. Their heavy jewelry, their transparent muslin saris, and the lack of undergarments suitable for purdah, she found out of place in public spheres into which she tried to draw Indian women.” Barbara N. Ramusack, “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 123. Also see the chapter entitled “Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century” in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 22 Bakirathi Mani, “Undressing the Diaspora,” in South Asian Women in the Diaspora, ed. Nirmal Puwar and Parvati Raghuram (New York: Berg), 121. 23 For more on Indian dress in England, see Burton, Heart, 136. 24 Walkowitz describes Malvery as an “imperial outsider” who can assume the identity of a “metropolitan insider” (12). Also see Walkowitz, 22, 34. 25 See Walkowitz, 13. 26 Malvery’s angry tirades anticipate, perhaps even make possible, the playful irreverence of later post-colonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Meera Syal. 27 Leela Gandhi, Post-Colonial Theory: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 78. 28 For example, Philippa Levine argues that “modernity was at its core a colonial concept and a colonial project, forged and shaped through the implicit comparisons that colonialism invited.” Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 90. Jenny Sharpe points out that “the civilizing mission . . . is primarily a story about the colonizing culture as an emissary of light . . . the idea of colonialism as a moral mission to spread Western civilization appeared long before imperialism was named as such.” Jenny Sharpe, “Figures of Colonial Resistance,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), 100. Stephen Morton claims that “the civilizing mission of colonialism is presented as a progressive and modernizing programme to the ‘native subject.’” Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak (Cambridge, Malden MA: Polity Press, 2007), 20.

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Malvery is somewhat different from the Indian men of her time who traveled to England. As Julie Codell points out in her essay in this collection, Indian men often contrasted the emancipation of English women with the oppression of Indian women. See Codell’s essay for more on gender politics in the writings of Indian men. 30 This is a play on Inderpal Grewal’s Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 31 For some of these tropes see David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 32 The use of the word picaresque here echoes Stoyan Tchaprazov’s argument in his essay in this collection that Mary Seacole assumes the identity of the pícara. 33 Paraphrasing Mary Louise Pratt, Kathleen J. Renk states that “the writings of eighteenth century travel writers viewing the ‘undiscovered’ and unchartered lands reveals how Europeans viewed the larger world . . . Pratt argues that these narratives establish the narrator as a colonial seeing agent who categorized and hoped to redesign the land.” Kathleen J. Renk, Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1999), 18-19. 34 This is not to claim that British writers themselves have not subjected London to cartographical scrutiny. Charles Booth, for example, mapped London according to various colors. See McLaughlin and Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (London: Verso, 1998), for more on Booth as well as the politics of mapping. 35 Here I evoke Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Marlowe famously describes colonial territories as “blank spaces,” waiting to be filled up by European adventurers. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 10. 36 Deirdre David comment on the rallying charge of Empire is particularly apposite: “To take up Kipling’s burden of being a ‘white man’ in a dark place is characterized by a dominant Victorian figure: that of clearing the wilderness.” Deirdre David, Rule Brittania: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, Cornell University Press: 1995), 35. Similar to Malvery, “Booth [also] constructs the urban jungle as a place that is ripe for the colonizing, missionizing, and civilizing strategies that have formerly been carried out by the British in Africa” (McLaughlin, 21). In her representation of London as a wilderness, Malvery is rhetorically close to many of the Western writers that McLaughlin analyzes. 37 See Sandhu, xx, for the same idea and the same phrase. 38 See, for example, Thomas Carlyle’s “An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question”: “Before the West Indies could grow a pumpkin for any Negro, how much European heroism had to spend itself in obscure battle; to sink in mortal agony, before the jungles, the putrescences and waste savageries could become arable, and the Devils be in some measure chained there.” Quoted in Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Age of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 65. Also see J. S. Mill’s “Manners of the

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Hindus” in his History of British India: “This listless apathy and corporeal weakness of the natives of Hindustan, have been ascribed to the climate under which they live . . . the savage is listless under every climate . . . there is a state of barbarity and rudeness which implies, perhaps, a weakness of mind.” J. S. Mill, The History of British India (London: James Madden, 1848), 480-481. Mill wrote a monumental and “authoritative” anthro-historical study of India without, of course, ever having visited India. Finally, see the chapter entitled “Debasement: Filth and Defilement” in Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire. 39 According to Todd Endelman, “in public and private discourse, Jews were branded as unscrupulous, untrustworthy, rapacious, lustful and filthy.” Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 70. For examples of nineteenth and early-twentieth anti-Semitic discourse, also see the chapter entitled “Native Jews and Foreign Jews (18701914)” in Endelman and Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Also see Walkowitz for an analysis of Malvery’s depiction of the Jews as unfamiliar, exploitative, unassimilable, and “unEnglish” (28). 40 Best known for his “Rivers of Blood” speech, British politician Enoch Powell (1912-1998) held ultra-conservative views on immigration and claimed that the presence of migrants from the ex-colonies would forever alter the Britishness of Britain. According to Keith Laybourne, Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech delivered on 20th of April 1968 cautioned “against the dangers of continued immigration of the new Commonwealth citizens into Britain, [and] ended his direct political influence on the decision-making bodies and groups within the Conservative Party.” Keith Laybourne, Fifty Key Figures in Twentieth Century British Politics (London: Routledge, 2002), 202. For more on Powell see Laybourne. Also see Simon Heffer, Like The Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). 41 McLaughlin notes a similar moment of diversity in Margaret Harkness’s novel In Darkest London (4-8). Winter also records the growing presence of a foreignborn population in Victorian London: “The increase after the Continental upheavals of 1848, in the number of Italian organ-grinders and German street bands. To many Londoners it seemed as though the foreigner had all but displaced the native-born busker on the streets of the capital” (71). Already, the London population was responding with increasing hostility to the foreigners threatening to take over “their” jobs and “their” city. 42 I borrow the term “reworlding” from diaspora theorist Emannuel S. Nelson. See Emmanuel S. Nelson ed., Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992). 43 Walkowitz perceptively points to the frequent portrayal of Jews as “the urban picturesque” in the photojournalism of Malvery’s time although she does not explore Malvery’s depiction of the Jewish picturesque in her essay (31). Additionally, Malvery is not just taken in by the visual diversity of the Jewish

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community. Instead she shows the changes wrought by the Jewish presence, giving them agency in the process. 44 Similarly, Burton interrogates “approaches to colonialism that insist on a binary axis between colonizer and colonized because they do not do justice to the complexity of colonial relations.” Burton, Heart, 22. 45 For similar contradictions in Cornelia Sorabji, see Burton, Heart, 17, 114, 151. 46 Also see Ibid., 14.

CHAPTER SIX LIMEHOUSE, BLOOMSBURY, AND PICCADILLY: A CHINESE SOJOURN IN THE TWENTIES ANNE WITCHARD

The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks in 1948 and the attendant conflicts that came to a head in the Notting Hill race riots of 1958 have come to symbolize a period when the establishment of a Black British population became a central issue of political and social life in Britain. At the same time, critics have questioned the dominance of Windrush in the narrative of multi-cultural Britain in terms of its elision of already existent Black settlements and their attendant racial antagonisms.1 In fact the historiography that takes 1948-58 (from Windrush to Notting Hill) as originary not only “forgets” earlier settlements but has served also to repress the unoriginality of the period’s racialized discourse.2 What is striking about the newspaper stories and government reports about “coloured British subjects” involved in pimping, gaming, and drugtrafficking, is how precisely they replicate the early twentieth-century rhetoric of a Yellow Peril, which sensationally fixed Britain’s Chinese community in exactly the same discursive matrix of urban squalor, transgressive sexuality, and drugs. Foucault emphasized the repetitive strategies of the totalizing narratives that facilitate the production of raced subjectivities: There is scarcely a society without its major narratives which are recounted, repeated and varied; formulae texts, and ritualised sets of discourses which are recited in well defined circumstances.3

Establishment reaction to immigration in the 1950s clustered around images of miscegenation and illicit drug-taking. Along with the black man had arrived the “marijuana menace”:

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Limehouse, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly Thousands of these immigrants are pouring into Britain every year. A majority of them smoke hemp. They do not leave their vice at home–they bring it with them. And the blunt truth is that numbers of them take perverted satisfaction in “lighting up” a white girl.4

Marijuana was identified as the agent that facilitated sexual contact between the races and its threat to white womanhood was proclaimed “the worst and most diabolical in the history of Metropolitan crime!”5 Hypothetical stories about drugged white girls in thrall to black men informed factual as well as media reportage. The content and the hyperbolic language of the popular press infiltrated Home Office reports, which in turn affected parliamentary debate on immigration: Two groups of crime which are causing the police a good deal of anxiety are organised prostitution and the traffic in dangerous drugs . . . the tendency for those crimes to occur among coloured people is a hundred times more per person, than among white people in the London area.6

Whilst the post-Windrush era marks a watershed in terms of Black British solidarity and activism, its narration has elided a previous story of immigration and virulent racist representation. The social charge excited by Notting Hill’s shebeens and Soho’s jazz clubs as sites of sexual and racial transgression had formerly been furnished by the opium dens of London’s Chinese Quarter in the Limehouse docks area of London’s East End. The same demonology of race and vice had been expressed in similar terms of concern and played an influential role in immigration policy, effectively diminishing Britain’s Chinatown populations during the interwar years.7 After Windrush, preoccupations shifted and the discourse of dirt, drugs, and miscegenation, which together had constructed the Chinese as unalterably alien and unassimilable, was deployed anew. Now the “coloured” dope fiends were Black rather than Yellow. Even though Chinese people formed a significant body of the economic migrants who arrived in Britain all through the 1950s, as an immigrant community they were to be the least noticed, removed from the center of racialized discourses.8 As the postwar economic boom began to fizzle out, the government’s official “welcoming” position altered. Recession activated union hostility to black immigrants and housing shortages exacerbated tensions. Racism experienced by black people was blamed on black people themselves, a representational strategy that functioned via a correspondent “success story” narrative which fixed the Chinese in the paradigm as “a quiet, obliging and servile community.”9 The wide regional dispersement pattern of post-WWII Chinese settlement in Britain,

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and their economic and social self-sufficiency in family-run catering businesses, allowed the Chinese presence to be “reduced to the willing provision of everyday staples” and thus portrayed “with orientalist condescension as an example of a dormant and pacified contribution.”10 Today there is diversity in the category Chinese in Britain which includes those from backgrounds as far apart as Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Caribbean, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese mainland. This group constitutes the third largest visible minority community in Britain, yet until very recently Chinese people have been sidelined in multiculturalist debate and their presence avoided in the developing studies of new ethnicities or cultural hybridity. While people of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian descent have been shaping what it means to be British, investigating the structures of colonialism and the historical repertoires of representation that constitute the conditions for identity formation, the Chinese experience has been missing. Postcolonial scholarship engaged in the recovery of an Asian and Black British heritage is marked by a void in the literature of the Chinese who sojourned or settled in Britain. To some extent this is because the struggles of British Chinese for self-definition have not been articulated to a broader collective identity which privileges “Black” as a political signifier characterized by alterity rather than biological or racial definition. In the United States, Chinese American and Asian American identities were forged in coalition with the Black Power and civil rights movement of the 1960s, grounded in a concrete and collective experience of racism and resistance to American imperialism in Vietnam.11 In Britain, unlike in the United States where Chinese dominate the category, Asian is taken to refer specifically to those of South Asian origin (either from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh). A key transitional moment for an emergent British Chinese selfawareness was the return of Britain’s last major colony, Hong Kong, to China in 1997. After four decades of invisibility, the Chinese presence in Britain was under scrutiny once more. The British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act of 1990 resurrected arguments hitherto mobilized chiefly against black and South Asian migrants: They are lovely excellent people but different people … does it make sense to allow a quarter or half a million more people, worthy, estimable, pleasant and educated though they may be; but of a different culture, race and background to come to this country? . . . we are building up a store of problems for our children.12

The systematic diminution of the citizenship rights of Hong Kong Chinese, and the notable absence from the debate of the unequal treaties

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by which Britain had acquired this possession, has raised questions of status and identity that coincide with the coming-of-age of the second generation of post-WWII Chinese immigrants. The institutional and cultural networks developed by black and South Asian people are starting to gain a foothold in the Chinese community. To give just two examples, 1994 saw the publication of On Another Province: New Chinese Writing from London, the first major selection of Chinese writing in Britain and testimony to the emergence of a British Chinese literary voice.13 In 2003, the Windrush Achievement Award was given to Sarah Yeh, a British Chinese woman, for her success in setting up www.dimsum.co.uk, a nonprofit making community website with the aim of uniting and giving a voice to the geographically and culturally diverse community of Chinese and East Asian people in Britain.

England’s Yellow Peril What it means to be Chinese in Britain needs to be understood in terms of pre-existing relations between Britain and China and an awareness of two centuries of Chinese migration and settlement. A constitutive part of the history of the Chinese diaspora is the way in which Chinese people have been represented in the Western societies to which they have migrated. Overt hostility has formed an integral feature of the discursive framing of the Chinese population in the United States and Britain, and stereotypical racist views stretching back to the Victorian era remain endemic. That Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories are still in print owes something, no doubt, to the Yellow Perilism that remains close to the surface of the Western psyche.14 Rohmer (pseud. Arthur Ward) peddled a feverish racism and went on to develop a lucrative multi-media industry from his tales of Dr. Fu Manchu, the “yellow peril incarnate in one man,” wreaking global havoc from his headquarters hidden deep in London’s Limehouse.15 Rohmer, who wrote for the popular press, was exploiting a contemporary mindset to which today’s media is indebted for a legacy of East Asian “types”: The slit-eyed, bucktooth Jap thrusting his bayonet, thirsty for blood. The inscrutable, wily Chinese detective with the wispy moustache . . . The Geisha. The sultry, sarong-clad, South Sea maiden. The serpentine, cunning Dragon Lady. Mysterious and evil, eager to please. Effeminate. Untrustworthy. Yellow Peril. Fortune cookie psychic.16

The first Fu Manchu story, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913), was serialized in the wake of race riots in the East End over Chinese cheap

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labor and allegations of organized illegal immigration. “Conditions for launching a Chinese villain on the market,” admitted Sax Rohmer, “were ideal.”17 The menace to Western labor of the “yellow” workman inured to a low standard of material comfort and the effects of his immigration into America had been widely reported.18 The phenomenon of “yellow” invasion speculation, the supposed military, economic, and cultural threat to the West of an unimaginably vast and “inferior” race had begun in the United States in the late 1870s with the “invasion” of the white labor market. It was provoked for various ends by politicians, religious fundamentalists, and trade unionists, and prejudice against “the Asiatic” was popularly articulated in the catch-all phrase Yellow Peril. The British working class was well instructed in the threat to its interests posed by Chinese immigration. In 1882, George Sala deliberated the American phenomenon in his Illustrated London News column: “Are we really in danger of being invaded by the ‘Heathen Chinee,’ not in his hundreds, but in his tens of thousands”: Are Betsy Jane the cook and Sarah Ann the housemaid to be ousted by the yellow men with the pig-tails who cook so cleverly, make beds so neatly and scrub floors so conscientiously; while Mrs Tearall, the washerwoman is ousted from her tub by Ah Sing, the laundryman from Canton.19

Sala’s conclusion was less equivocal. While “isolated” he wrote, the Chinese “are useful and harmless,” but “in their gregarious state their filthy habits, their addictedness to gambling and opium-smoking” rendered them “far from agreeable denizens of a civilised community” and not to be encouraged.20 Despite the acknowledgment of Yellow Peril rhetoric, English periodicals at this point generally discussed the Chinese presence in London as a benign curiosity. Events of 1900 were to prove a turning point. On the fifth of July, Queen Victoria received a message through Reuters claiming the slaughter of all the white men, women, and children besieged by the Boxer rebels in the British embassy at Peking.21 During the weeks that followed, The Times and the London Daily Mail printed what would prove to be entirely fictitious accounts of a “Massacre at Pekin,” The Times reporting how the “Europeans fought with calm courage to the end against overwhelming hordes . . . All that remains for us is to mourn them and to avenge them.”22 Readers were warned to prepare for “a universal uprising of the yellow race” and British soldiers set sail for China to carry out “a great vengeance” for something that actually had never taken place.23 The twentieth century began, as Rozina Visram writes, “with cries of a Yellow Peril.”24 The anti-foreign

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dimension of the Boxer phenomenon would leave a lasting impression on the Western imagination: In film, fiction and folklore, they functioned over the years as a vivid symbol of everything most detested and feared about China . . . its fiendish cruelty, its xenophobia, its superstition.25

A fear and loathing of the Chinese was informed not only by “atrocities” in the outposts of empire but the notion of a Yellow Peril at its center. The years leading up to the Boxer uprising had seen an expansion of imperialist penetration in China.26 While Britain’s soldiers, missionaries, and entrepreneurs set sail from Limehouse Reach to defend and extend her interests in the Far East, a Chinatown had developed along the riverside streets of Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields. Provisions stores, restaurants, association halls, laundries, and boarding houses catered to the indentured laborers and seamen signed on in China’s treaty ports.27 The men were more or less isolated by culture, language, and the transience of their stay. Taking their cue from Chinatown reportage in the United States, and in response to the relentless demand for sensation, English newspapers in the 1910s fostered anti-Chinese sentiment. After the shock of the Boxer Uprising the British public was ready to believe anything of the “treacherous” Chinese. Worry grew about the exploits of “mysterious Chinamen” who dwelt at the hub of Britain’s empire, feeding the myth of an Oriental criminal conspiracy operating from within London’s East End. In the face of impending war, the very existence of foreign quarters threatened the idea of a nation wishing to believe itself ethnically and socially homogenous. Sax Rohmer set his stories in Limehouse just as its Chinese community was becoming the focus of this increased police and press attention.

Fictional Limehouse While seamen’s and dockers’ unions deliberately provoked resentment over Chinese cheap labor, attention began to focus also on the fact of their being virtually an exclusively male community. The Chinese no longer married and bore the rosy-cheeked children or pretty, prattling youngsters of earlier newspaper reports.28 Now they “mated” with dissolute white females and “spawned strange offspring.”29 A 1911 census recorded 220 Chinese men living in London and just 27 women, but this was not considered a suitable explanation for attempts by Chinese men to find partners among the indigenous population.30 Rather than a consequence of the almost total absence of Chinese women, it was seen as indicative of a

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transgressive sexuality: “The Chinaman is a problem, both to trade union officials and to the police,” declared the Reverend Mitchell: “Personally I have only one complaint to make against the Celestials, and that is their blind obsession for English girls—they will marry them if they can!”31 Appeals were made to the Home Office to “do something” about unhappy white girls fascinated by the yellow man: “This cheapening of the white woman . . . must have consequences in the East, and in every part of the world where coloured and white races dwell side by side.”32 In 1916, a London journalist, Thomas Burke, gained instant notoriety with the publication of Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown.33 Burke thrilled and scandalized readers with stories of forbidden love, or “the novel, and to most [people] unsavoury, implication that Yellow Man cohabited with White Girl in that East End of an Empire’s capital surrounding Limehouse Causeway.”34 Like Rohmer, Burke would go on to make his name writing stories about Chinese Limehouse. Between them, these two writers would articulate the ambivalence in British conceptions of the Chinese and because of them London’s Chinese quarter became “Chinatown,” not just a territory on the map but a densely signifying space.35 The genre of Limehouse fiction developed as an outcome of Britain’s relations with China. Colonial authority was maintained by a hierarchical structure of race, and the ideology of the British Empire was grounded in racial purity. While Rohmer reinforced the ideology of separating “us” from “them” with his unremittingly evil Chinamen whose interest in English women is part of their fiendish Yellow plot to destroy the West, it is the Orient as a site for erotic projection that Thomas Burke would locate in the East End.36 Yet while the Chinese presence loomed large in the British imagination and despite its considerable intrusions into China, Britain had very few Chinese residents. Official scrutiny together with unofficial sensationalism underpinned a general climate of exclusionism. Labor unions were vigilant against the employment of Chinese seamen.37 The effect of the wartime Defense of the Realm Act’s ban on opium use was to criminalize a significant number of Chinese, giving the authorities “a pretext to invade Chinese privacy and stage exemplary deportations.”38 To an ever-increasing extent, the Chinese were to become a target for what were considered major social ills, the force of which negativity bore no relation at all to the size of their presence. While there was “a reluctance in the press to acknowledge the existence of either Indians or Africans living within Great Britain,” Chinese Limehouse as a locus of drug-trafficking, gambling, and the sexual ensnarement of young women proved too irresistible a source of newspaper copy.39 By the 1920s there was a steady stream of novels, plays, and films that were notable for their use of

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offensive stereotypes for Chinese people. As a consequence, Chinese immigrants in London lived in a condition of perpetual humiliation. A rare if not unique portrayal of the reality of London life for Chinese at this time is the novel Er Ma, or Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (1929) by the Chinese writer Lao She, who lived in London from 1924 until 1930. Er Ma is a direct response to the popular cultural Sinophobia of the Limehouse genre and describes its pernicious effect on the attitudes of Londoners to the Chinese among them. Lao She’s novel is a sharply poignant, yet warm and engagingly funny, portrayal of the political and sexual preoccupations of the student population and the social and commercial affairs of the settled Chinese, the shopkeepers, restaurateurs, and seamen, that made up London’s Chinese community in the interwar years.

Lao She: Literary Revolutionary The twenties brought a new sense of cultural diversity to London and in the aftermath of war, new challenges to the assumptions on which the British Empire was based. There was an increasing presence in Britain of intellectuals from the colonies and Asian and black voices were central to this climate of change.40 It was a consequence of China’s developing nationalism and modernization that many of her writers and intellectuals traveled overseas to study Western ideas.41 Significant among them was Lao She (pen-name of Shu Chingqun, 1899-1966), who was to emerge as one of China’s most distinguished writers.42 Western literary criticism has only very recently begun to trace the literary and artistic consequences of cultural exchange between Chinese and Western writers and artists during the early twentieth century and in doing so, to reconfigure literary modernism by including China in its international network.43 In her History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain 1700-2000, C. L. Innes argues that modernist art and writing is in some ways an effect of postWWI imperial trauma, when a growing awareness of alternate cultures and alternate modes of perceiving the world provoked questions about and challenged the assumptions of British ruling culture.44

Like Mulk Raj Anand, Lao She studied, lectured, and engaged in the intellectual life of interwar London. He taught Mandarin and Classical Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies and it was here that he first began to write.45 While the narrative of Er Ma takes place in London, the issues that underlie the drama stem from China’s subjection to Western

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aggression. Written principally for a Chinese readership, the novel was at once an indictment of British imperialist ideology and a Chinese wake-up call.46 The twentieth century had begun in China with high hopes. After a string of humiliations at the hands of Western countries, the Manchu Qing dynasty was overthrown and the Republic of China established in 1911. In the vortex of revolutionary forces that anticipated the establishment of Republican China, anti-imperialist discourse was strong, but rather than ideologically oppositional to imperialism per se, “the point was for China to become as strong as the West, to become the West’s ‘equal.’”47 With this in mind, not only was it “important for officials and scholars to arm themselves with a competent knowledge of Western institutions, arts and sciences,” but the populace had to be alerted to the national threat of ever increasing foreign encroachment.48 It was in the spirit of patriotic strengthening that intellectuals proposed a new direction for Chinese literature. The only hope for a decayed and weakened China, under constant threat of dismemberment from foreign powers, lay in a future unshackled by archaic Confucian traditions. The New Fiction was charged with renovating the Chinese character and awakening a sense of national shame by drawing attention to such iniquities as religious superstition, concubinage, “the inveterate habit of opium smoking,” and “the cruel torture of foot binding.”49 To reach as wide an audience as possible there was a need for a move away from the use of Classical Chinese (wen yen) which was far removed from the everyday spoken language, in favor of the more egalitarian Peking vernacular (bai hua). Idealistic faith in the steady progress of the new China, however, was to suffer a blow. On the 1st of May, 1919, the news was published in the Peking press that the postwar Peace Conference at Versailles had acted to keep China in semi-colonial bondage by ceding the former German concessions of Shantung Province to Japan. China’s decision to enter the war on the side of the Allies had been dictated by her desire to force cancellation of Germany’s special privileges in her territories. Enraged by feelings of national humiliation and betrayal, thousands of Chinese students took to the streets of Peking. The massive protest that broke out into riots on the 4th of May gave its name to a new epoch in Chinese history. The spirit that had fired the Literary Revolution fed the goal of the May Fourth Movement, namely to establish “a scientific and democratic ‘new culture’ purged of all relics of China’s feudal past.”50 That the New Fiction was now seen as a sure means to this socio-political end was signified by the decision of the Ministry of Education in 1921 to order the introduction of all primary-school textbooks in bai hua.

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Lao She was an early exponent of bai hua. He belonged to the generation of intellectuals that paid witness to foreign invasion, political revolution, and the radical social and cultural upheavals that marked the transformation of China from a Confucian to a Communist empire. He was born in 1899 to a Manchu family. His father, a hereditary bannerman at the Imperial palace, was killed defending the Forbidden City from Western troops during the Boxer Uprising. Lao She was raised by his mother in uncertain circumstances at a time when the Qing dynasty was collapsing and to be a Manchu was to be marginalized.51 He would gain his teaching post in England through the auspices of the London Missionary Society’s church in Peking. In his study “New Light on Lao She, London and the London Missionary Society, 1921-1929,” Robert Bickers shows how Lao She’s relationship with the L.M.S. made it possible for a young man who was “unqualified, relatively poor, and hardly well connected . . . to end up teaching in London.”52 While Bickers acknowledges the possibility that Lao She became a Christian for opportunistic reasons (Manchu “distressed gentlefolk” were the object of poor relief and missionary language classes “attracted scholars of initially secular intent”) he suggests that the degree of self-abasement that would have to be endured to withstand the rigorous procedures of public profession required by Christian baptism, which he underwent in 1922, makes it unlikely that Lao She was a “rice Christian.”53 Like many other literary reformists, Lao She was strongly motivated by Western humanism based on Christian thinking as an ethic more answerable to the needs of modern China than Confucianism.54 Nevertheless his lampooning of the Reverend Ely in Er Ma indicates a marked distancing from the British missionary endeavor: The Reverend Ely was an old missionary who’d spread the Word for twenty years in China. He knew everything there was to know about China . . . And yes he truly loved the Chinese, and at midnight, if lying awake unable to sleep, he would invariably pray to God to hurry up and make China a British dominion. Eyes filled with hot tears, he would point out to God that if the Chinese were not taken in hand by the British, that vast mass of yellow-faced black-haired creatures would never achieve the ascent to Heaven on High.55

Lao She arrived in London in 1924, the year of the spectacular British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Despite the fact that Britain’s empire had never been larger, encompassing more than a quarter of the globe and with possessions on every continent, it was obvious that a crisis was in the making as political and economic arguments against it gathered strength.

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There was increasing unemployment and social unrest at home while independence movements in the colonies were growing widespread. The exhibition was intended to stimulate the interest of the British in the empire they were already beginning to lose.56 The visitor to the Exhibition’s Hong Kong section might dine in its restaurant on “birds’nest soup, sharks’ fins and other of the Chinese delicacies served by Chinese ‘boys’ to the accompaniment of a Chinese band.”57 Stepping into “the street” outside, he “finds himself really in China. The bewildering bright signs indicate, in Chinese characters, the names of the shopkeepers and the wares for disposal” and the trepidatious visitor is assured that “the proprietors of the shops, pigtails and all, are smiling.”58 The stated purpose of the exhibition, billed as “a Family Party,” was to stimulate trade, to strengthen the bonds that bind the Mother Country to her Sister States and Daughter Nations, to bring all into closer touch, the one with the other, to enable all who owe allegiance to the British Flag to meet on common ground, and to learn to know each other.59

Chinese people inevitably found it problematic to get “to know” London. “Some of us” wrote Chiang Yee, in The Silent Traveller in London, keep apart in a dull way; some refuse to mix in circles where they would be asked many difficult questions arising from popular books and films on Chinese life.60

Lao She would begin to write Er Ma after he had learned to “know” at first hand “the nation which had been an anathema to China for many decades.”61 Lao She had largely ambivalent feelings about the English: He resented their stubbornness, arrogance, unsociability, utilitarianism, racial and class discrimination, individualism carried to the extreme and narrow-minded patriotism.62

At the same time the message Lao She would convey in Er Ma was that only after radical social reform would the Chinese be in a position to compete with the British. As Julie Codell’s essay in this anthology explains, for the Oriental observer, the British utopia becomes “embodied and fallible” permitting the option of another utopia, a modernized homeland constructed by comparison. Lao She was impressed by the orderliness and general public spiritedness he noticed in England compared to the lack of order and absence of similar social values in

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China. Excited by the possibilities of China’s literary revolution, Lao She looked to Western forms and styles of literature.63 He read Charles Dickens and the acute social observation of Er Ma is informed by the comic, the farcical, and the grotesque, testament to the influence of The Pickwick Papers. Keenly aware of the humiliations of the Chinese in Britain, Lao She utilizes satire in Er Ma to question cultural and moral codes, yet thanks to Dickens his indignation is undercut by humorous detachment. In its tone of melancholic pessimism, and irresolution, however, as well as a compassionate awareness of man’s impotence in the face of political exploitation, Er Ma is indebted to Joseph Conrad. Lao She deeply admired Conrad’s works, “especially those dealing with the absurdist moments in man’s struggle for meaning and order” and “the ultimate limitations of human nature.”64 The novel’s plot concerns old Mr. Ma and his son Ma Wei who have come from Peking to London to run the antique shop they have inherited from Mr. Ma’s brother. Mr. Ma is representative of Old China and everything that is wrong with it. He has led an idle existence living on money sent by his late brother, fruitlessly dreaming of one day holding an official post. He has no understanding of national affairs nor does he wish to entertain new ideas. After his wife’s death he sends Ma Wei to Rev. Ely’s missionary school because he can board there and that “saves him a lot of bother.”65 Mr. Ma is a shameless “rice Christian.” The structure highlights the generation gap between Mr. Ma and young Ma Wei, who is an ardent patriot. By making Mr. Ma representative of the older generation of Chinese who still held on to traditional values, and Ma Wei representative of China’s new youth, Lao She could present the dilemma of contemporary Chinese society.66 By telling their story in the context of London and the farcical situations involving British and Chinese social intercourse, he was able to contrast British and Chinese national characteristics in a nuanced way that countered the crude race analyses of foreign “interpreters” of China.67

Er Ma, London through Chinese Eyes Behavioral trends in post-WWI London, as the writer Douglas Goldring recalled, contained co-educationists, Morris-dancers, vegetarians, teetotallers, professors of Economics, drug-takers, boozers, Socialists, gossip columnists, playwrights, Communists, Roman Catholic converts, painters and poets . . . all having an uninhibited fling.68

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Er Ma opens with a snapshot of this very panoply of British concerns. It is a noisy spring Sunday at Speakers’ Corner.69 Socialists waving red flags and Conservative Party members waving Union Jacks blame each other for the world’s ills. The Salvation Army bang tamborines while next to them proclaims “a Catholic preacher, and beyond him, a number of other groups, with various causes to promote: independence for India, rapid extinction for China.”70 Smiling Guardsmen in red uniforms, with backs “straighter than a drawing board” effortlessly attract girls. Observing them is young Ma Wei, thin, sallow, miserable, “his back slightly bent.”71 If upright posture is what distinguishes man from other vertebrates, abandonment of that posture negates the distinction. Here Lao She makes implicit the intellectual ferment that informs the thrust and virility of England in contrast with the stagnation that has led to China’s cringing impotence. “Compare him with those red-uniformed young men arm-inarm with the girls, and he’d certainly seem to come off rather the worse.”72 The scene shifts from the West End. It is much later that evening and Ma Wei has gone to the house of his friend, Li Tzu-jung, to ask if he will put him up for the night. There are hints that this is the dockside Chinatown in the East End, the hooting of steamers breaks the silence of the night and evidently the neighborhood is home to Chinese people. Next morning Li Tzu-jung wakes to find Ma Wei has disappeared. He opens the curtains of his bedroom window and looks down on the River Thames below. It is now clear that this must be Limehouse Causeway, or the Chinese Causeway as it was then known. By the 1920s, the narrative conventions of the Limehouse genre established by Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke were firmly in place. They required that the sun never pervades the glooms and fogs that permanently shroud the twisting streets, the waters of the Thames are always oily and foreboding, and the shutters of the houses where Chinese people live are always closed. For example: The shuttered gloom of the quarter showed strangely menacing. Every whispering house seemed an abode of dread things . . . Every corner, half lit by the bleak light of a naked gas-jet, seemed to harbour unholy things, and a sense of danger hung on every step. The Causeway was just a fog of yellow faces.73 Under the uncommunicative Limehouse night the river ran like a stream of molten lead . . . Sirens wailed their unhappy song. Slothful barges rolled and drifted, seeming without home or haven . . . and far-away Eastern voices were usually expressive in chanties.74

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Lao She’s presentation of Limehouse implicitly subverts this mode according to which April in Chinatown is only known “by the calender [for] Limehouse has no seasons . . . there are only more seamen or less seamen.”75 The scene from Li Tzu-jung’s flung-open window is in marked contrast: An airy mist hung around the tree-tops . . . the sun’s rays shone on the tender leaves, making them sparkle faintly, like little pale-green pearls freshly fished from the water . . . The early tide was rising, the ever-rolling crests of its waves inlaid by the sunlight with gold scales. They surged up, hustling each other on and on, rank upon rank, crowding the shining gold to pieces. And as the shattered stars of golden light fell back again, the next oncoming wave stirred up a heap of small white flowers, white, white, white as the soft juice new-pressed from a dandelion stem. The furthest of the small boats fluttered slowly off, the waves of the river ever surging on in pursuit of it, writhing and rolling as if some golden golden-scaled dragon chasing the little butterfly away.76

In Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics, Wai Lim-Yip explains the aesthetic consciousness of landscape in traditional Chinese literature: “It does not require human intellect to interfere or mediate.”77 Chinese Taoism stresses the importance of Sitting in Forgetfulness for it is only “by emptying out all traces of intellectual interference that one can fully respond, as does a mirror or still water, to things in their concreteness.”78 Li Tzu-jung “stood staring dumbly at the small sailing boat until it turned the river-bend, before he finally pulled himself together.”79 By showing us Limehouse through the “forgetful” eyes of Li Tzu-jung, Lao She’s narrative points up the distorting “interference” of the British gaze and the constructedness of the mediated, “orientalized” space that was Limehouse in British fiction. Er Ma is written in the form of a flashback. The final scene of the novel will return to Li Tzu-jung’s Limehouse bedroom, to a moment just previous to this one when Ma Wei takes his leave of the sleeping Li Tzujung and, in despair, of London itself. Now the narrative moves back, “a year from the day when Ma Wei slipped away” in order to tell the story of what brought him to this point and the circumstances that caused him to wish “the world to be destroyed and himself along with it.”80 Lao She took the structural tactic of a frame-tale from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). Like Heart of Darkness, Er Ma begins and ends at that place on the Thames that is the heart of Britain’s imperial endeavor, the London docks or “the Orient squatting at the portals of the West.”81 Like Heart of

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Darkness, too, the narrative of Er Ma remains inconclusive or postulatory. In an essay on Conrad, Lao She writes: “Nothing” often becomes the ending of Conrad’s fiction. No matter how much will and vitality a man has, no matter how good or bad his personality is, once he steps into this realm of “Nothing” he is unable to free himself from the curse.82

It is Ma Wei’s impossible love for his landlady’s daughter, Mary Wedderburn, that inaugurates his decline into this “nothingness.” The novel starts and concludes with the question mark of his psychic survival in the glare of her withering racist gaze. Characterization forms the core of the novel. While the characters are rounded and believable, they are each representatives of a social type and their attitudes and actions are typical of positions taken up in relation to the over-arching discourse that racializes the Other. The Mas are introduced to their Bloomsbury lodgings by their former pastor, Reverend Ely, who is tickled by the idea of a Chinese member of his church coming to England, for that would enable him to show the English how missionaries in China really did do more than eat food and collect money.83

Here Lao She parodies the “ineffectual missionary” constructed by the “irretrievably Heathen Chinese,” a subplot essential to the narrative of godless darkness that supplied the ongoing “ideological rationale for subjecting China to economic, cultural and territorial colonialism.”84 Taking on the task of arranging the Mas’ accommodation, Rev. Ely heads for Bloomsbury because the larger English hotels “just won’t let rooms to Chinese.”85 Only the “small boarding houses behind the British Museum” are prepared to take them, not because they have “uncommonly kind hearts” but they thrive on “living off Orientals” so they make the best of being “obliged to deal with a bunch of yellow-faced monsters.”86 Here Lao She’s authorial voice intrudes on the narrative to spell out the situation that awaits Chinese people in 1920s London: The Chinese living in London can probably be divided into two classes: workmen and students. The workmen mostly live in East London, in the Chinatown that brings so much ignominy to the name of China. Those Germans, Frenchmen and Americans who lack the money for a journey to the Orient always come and take a trip to Chinatown for a nose round in quest of material for novels, travelogues or news items . . . If there were no more than twenty Chinese dwelling in Chinatown, the accounts of the

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Limehouse, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly sensation seekers would without fail magnify their number to five thousand. And . . . every one of those five thousand yellow-faced demons will smoke opium, smuggle arms, commit murder . . . Authors of novels, playwrights and screen-scenario writers are prompt to base their pictures of the Chinese upon such rumours and reports. Then all who see the play, watch the film or read the novel . . . firmly imprint these quite unfounded pictures upon their memories.87

Mrs. Wedderburn keeps a boarding house in Bloomsbury, and while her rooms are currently available, Rev. Ely meets with the expected response: “You can’t imagine that I would allow two Chinese to cook rats in my house?”88 Bernard Porter, in The Absent Minded Imperialists, describes how the imperialist agenda began to engage with elementary education in the late nineteenth century and geography books began “to emphasise the differences between cultures and races.”89 Sometimes it is done “quite sensationally,” he writes, quoting: “‘A real Chinese will eat mice, rats, kittens or puppies when they are cooked.’ That was for very young children.”90 Mrs. Wedderburn is of the generation that was raised on this emergent racialized narrative “that identified distance . . . and encouraged distrust” and it conditions her responses.91 Rev. Ely reassures her: Of course I shall enjoin them not to eat rats . . . As for the rent, you charge whatever you deem fit . . . and we must fortify ourselves with the true spirit of Christian humility in our efforts to provide some succour for this Chinaman and his son.92

Lao She underscores Christian hypocrisy with tragicomic irony. While Rev. Ely pontificates, Mrs. Wedderburn, torn between avarice and propriety, is feverishly working out exactly how much extra rent she could charge, or whether she should put her foot down and firmly refuse to accommodate two murderous, fire-raising, rat-eating Chinamen . . . She proceeded to pose countless questions based on the Chinese things she’d learned from rumours fostered by novels, films, plays and missionaries.93

Cultural misunderstandings arise from the moment Rev. Ely meets the Mas at the railway terminal cafe. Ma Wei suffers acute mortification as Rev. Ely began to laud the cleanliness of the café . . . going on from there to extol the orderliness of England in general. “There’s good old England for you! Notice it, Ma Wei? Aha!”94

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China’s “filthiness” was one of its stereotypical characteristics and Western-style drainage an ambition of her modernizers. In 1924, India’s leading poet and Nobel prize winner for literature, Rabindranath Tagore, gave a much publicized lecture tour in China arguing for a spiritual East that must stand aloof from Western-style materialism.95 This was construed as “backward thinking” by radical Chinese students who led attacks on his lectures pointing out, among many other failings, that “our streets which are latrines, and our deplorably dirty kitchens have made us lose our reputation throughout the world.”96 Tagore’s approach was quite out of step with the phase of acute nationalism in China and the keenly felt humiliation of radical youth in the face of a racist discourse which constructed the non-white Other as dirty. Lao She historicizes the misunderstandings between the Mas and their British hosts by the use of allegoric allusion to Western colonial aggression. Mrs. Wedderburn prepares herself mentally for the arrival of her new lodgers by taking out a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater to read, so that when her Chinese guests arrived, she’d have some suitable topic of conversation ready.97

Thomas De Quincey was probably the person most instrumental in formulating xenophobic representation of the Chinese. He had a pathological loathing of China and the Chinese, disseminated through the 1840s in articles which not only justified Britain’s intervention in China but also advocated a vigorous policy of aggression. From his very first essay on Sino-British relations written at the beginning of the first Opium War, De Quincey portrayed the Chinese, “our vilest oriental enemy,” as unquestionably inferior.98 He wrote: I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad.99

Mrs. Wedderburn has a little dog, a Pekingese named Napoleon. During the second Opium War, the Anglo-French Allied Armies discovered the royal lion dogs, later christened Pekingese, while looting the Imperial Summer Palace (Yuanming yuan).100 Five were brought back to England and one was named Looty and presented to Queen Victoria.101 Mrs. Wedderburn’s dog is a reminder of Chinese humiliation, while its name is indicative of the discourse that Orientalizes. When Napoleon, Britain’s chief adversary in the acquisition of Eastern territories, invaded Egypt in

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1798, he marshaled scholars from the School of Oriental Languages in Paris who produced The Description of Egypt (Wasf Masr), twenty-three enormous volumes of cultural, geographical, and historical data.102 The work was proto-typical of European attempts to “understand” the Orient in anticipation of occupying its lands and draining its wealth. This “great collective appropriation of one country by another,” writes Said, gave birth to modern Orientalism.103 Mr. Ma has prepared for his encounter with his British hosts by bringing gifts of tea from Peking. Here Lao She nods to the British affection for chinoiserie as Mrs. Wedderburn is charmed by the packet’s “quaint” label which reads: “The Moon Fairy Flees to the Moon.” She decides “these two Chinamen don’t look as ugly as they do in the films.”104 The next morning Ma Wei comes down to the sound of Miss Wedderburn’s voice that already sets “his heart trembling like rainpattered petals.”105 He sits at the breakfast table where Mrs. Wedderburn is serving the tea from China and tries to make conversation with a monosyllabic Mary. Mrs Wedderburn took a mouthful of toast, and was just about to pick up a cup of tea, when Miss Wedderburn tugged at her and exclaimed “Watch out, there may be poison in it!” She pronounced these words so earnestly and naturally, just as if Ma Wei wasn’t present at all, as if it were an absolute, unshakeable truth beyond all shadow of a doubt, that the Chinese were poisoners . . . It didn’t even occur to her that she could be insulting anyone. In every play where a Chinese appeared, he was sure to poison someone. It was the same in all the films and novels, as well.106

Throughout Er Ma, Lao She shows how the attitudes of Mrs. Wedderburn and her daughter to the Chinese are the consequence of misinformation rather than malice: When they teach history in the general run of schools in England, they don’t teach anything about China. The only people who know about things Chinese are those who’ve been to China, as traders or as missionaries. These two types of people are naturally not well disposed towards the Chinese.107

In due course Mrs. Wedderburn and Mary discover that after all there is nothing very weird about their Chinese lodgers and Mrs. Wedderburn actually comes to like them. While Ma Wei nurses his unrequited passion for a scornful Mary, Mr. Ma and Mrs. Wedderburn develop an understanding that almost leads to matrimony. Sadly the pressure of social prejudice proves too strong for that: “You know Mr Ma,” says Mrs.

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Wedderburn, “the English are such a proud people, and . . . what they can’t stand above all is having foreigners touch their womenfolk . . . we can’t fight racial prejudice, and it’s not worth risking the attempt.”108 While Lao She portrays the insidious racist ideology that underwrites the many prejudices that Westerners have against the Chinese, he does not attribute all of China’s ills to foreign aggression. China is weak because the old decadent order still prevails. Mr. Ma was, beyond all shadow of doubt, an “old” element of the “old” nation . . . He knew nothing about business . . . The honourable way of making one’s fortune was by becoming a mandarin . . . earning one’s money by one’s own sweat and blood. That was ignoble! Vulgar!109

For this reason Mr. Ma has no respect for the student Li Tzu-jung who works part time in the antique shop. Li Tzu-jung is the absolute opposite of Mr. Ma and a model on whom Ma Wei wishes to pattern himself. He is the author’s ideal of a truly patriotic young man and represents the hope of modern China. Apart from the shop work, he supports his studies by translating legal documents for the East End Chinese because “the police investigate them at the drop of a hat.”110 He also writes advertisements for British firms trading in China and has won a prize for an article on modern Chinese labor conditions for Asia Magazine.111 When Li Tzu-jung earns a day out, he takes Ma Wei on an educational visit to Welwyn Garden City, an inspirational model of post-War British social technology.112 “Everything in this town was kept close to Nature but the maintenance of this closeness to Nature all depended on Science.”113 For Lao She, youth must be selfless and sacrifice the luxury of falling in love, setting these things aside for a later stage in the development of China. Ma Wei, in the torment of his unrequited obsession for Mary, neglects his patriotic duty. Li Tzu-jung’s superiority of character is evidenced by self-denial. He avoids Chinese restaurants because: “Eat one meal like that and I’ll want another. Too expensive a habit.”114 Lao She echoes Schopenhauer’s emphasis that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires in order to achieve tranquility. Schopenhauer also proposed aesthetic contemplation as a mode of transcendence, although few people, he acknowledged, manage to achieve this ability. We might recall that at the moment Ma Wei has run away from his troubles, Li Tzu-jung loses himself in the beauty of the sparkling river beneath his Limehouse window.115

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While patriotic Chinese youth like Li Tzu-jung put love on hold, forward-thinking young people in Britain are also reappraising the old ways. Lao She explains how after the Great War thinking people made new appraisals of the old ideas of morality and . . . sought to throw off the fetters of old powers and influences, and to create a new humanity that would live in peace . . . Marriage, family, morals, religion and politics all were turned upside down by such new ways of thinking.116

Rev. and Mrs. Ely have two children, Paul and Catherine, who represent two very different “kinds of young person of the post-War period.”117 Their childhood was spent in China, where Mrs. Ely “kept aloof from the Chinese and on no account would she permit her children to play with Chinese children.”118 If the moment they opened their mouths children learned inferior languages such as Chinese and Hindi and so on, you could be certain they wouldn’t grow up with a fine and noble mentality.119

Catherine manages to teach herself a fair bit of Chinese behind her mother’s back and is eager, now Ma Wei has arrived, to learn more. Visiting the Ely family home, Ma Wei blushes to see that Paul has on display in his room symbols of China’s shame, “an opium pipe” and “a new pair of shoes of the type worn by the Chinese women with tiny bound feet.”120 Paul is “for both war and patriotism” and “the preservation of the existing forms of marriage and religion.”121 Catherine is “for peace and freedom, against marriage and religion, and wanted nothing of narrow patriotism.”122 She “quite unperturbably” goes to live with her boyfriend because she and he loved one another . . . What need was there for them to go to church and stroke the bible? Why should she have to take on his surname? To all these questions Catherine gave a smile.123

Catherine’s outlook “was the result of study,” while Paul’s opinions were constructed on the basis of his nature and instinct . . . Always and everywhere with that smile of hers she was doubting things, while always and everywhere he was going round, pipe in mouth passing cut and dried judgments.124

Catherine, who shakes off the weight of outmoded traditions of oppression, embodies the radical post-War thinking of Western

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intellectuals that might provide a model for the new China. The close friendship between Catherine and Ma Wei is illustrative of the connection between the Bloomsbury Group, and the sexual and social freedoms pioneered by their thinking, and the new self-expression sought by the May Fourth writers in China. Patricia Laurence’s groundbreaking study, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China, draws attention to the shared aesthetic and political paradigm of the two movements and gives a thorough exploration of their myriad cultural connections.

Piccadilly The denouement of Er Ma is brought about by actual events, contemporaneous with Lao She’s last year in London. In March 1928, W. C. Ch’en, the Charge d’Affaires at the Chinese Legation, complained to the Foreign Office about no less than five current plays which represented Chinese people in a “vile and objectionable” way.125 The complaint was dismissed because there were not seen to be any “objectionable political references” and in such cultural matters there was nothing the Lord Chamberlain was prepared to do.126 The following month, the renowned English novelist, Arnold Bennett, was approached by Thorpe of British International Films, and Dupont, the German director of Vaudeville and Moulin Rouge . . . about writing a film story about Piccadilly under the title Piccadilly.127

E. A. Dupont (1891-1956) had made his reputation by capturing on film the exotic decadence and elegant splendor of the best nightclubs of Paris and Berlin and was now commissioned to do the same for London. It took Bennett less than a fortnight to come up with a script about which both producer and director were “extremely enthusiastic.”128 Bennett’s scenario for Piccadilly (1928) gave London the edge of Paris or Berlin by drawing on the supposed connection between the night world of the West End and Chinese Limehouse. H. V. Morton’s metaphor for Limehouse, “that dirty tentacle which the East has flung into London,” expressed the idea of Chinatown’s insidious reach into the West End, a link which Sax Rohmer’s stories had made explicit.129 According to popular mythology, drugs smuggled into London’s docks from Far Eastern ports by Chinese arch-criminals were stored in underground riverside warehouses and distributed to the fashionable salons and night-clubs of the West End. In 1924, Chinese businessman, restaurateur, and nightclub entrepreneur, Brilliant Chang, had been

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famously deported after a series of scandals concerning West End chorus girls and cocaine rings run from his “lair” in Limehouse.130 Such was the notoriety of Chinese Limehouse by the mid-twenties that Thomas Cook laid on charabanc trips for tourists and it was commonplace for West End revelers, after a couple of champagne cocktails, to go slumming “down Chinatown way.”131 Arnold Bennett’s journal for those years recounts a giddy whirl of fashionable pursuits: first nights, dinners at the Savoy, yachting weekends, and the requisite trip to Chinatown. On Tuesday, April 28, 1925, Bennett recorded: I went to Chinatown last night with Beaverbrook [Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express] and Ashfield [Lord Ashfield] . . . It took us exactly fifteen minutes to drive there from Ciro’s [one of the most exclusive and expensive dinner and dance clubs in the West End]. Great change in a short time.132

Bennett’s journal entry relates the usual observances and reiterates the usual stereotypes. “Nearly all houses closed. Some windows, said the Chief Inspector, were always shuttered. ‘They don’t like the light.’”133 There are Chinese gambling at “Fantan” and some “nice-looking” prostitutes, in Pennyfields, “Jewesses mainly.” They visit a Chinese Music Club, where four men were playing Mah Jong and one [was] strumming a sort of Chinese guitar . . . a suggestion that they should sing was not well received. They were very polite but didn’t want us. We were to have seen the Chinese Chapel where the religion of Confucius is practised; but it was locked up.134

Responses to the actualities of Limehouse were invariably of disappointment (which is why Thomas Cook’s went to the trouble of staging hatchet fights). Bennett’s was no exception: “On the whole a rather flat night.” Still, despite having seen “no vice whatsoever,” when he came to write Piccadilly, the legendary Limehouse gloom provides a foil for the glitter and dazzle of the West End.135 The nightlife setting moves between the upmarket glamour of the Piccadilly Nightclub, probably modeled on Ciro’s, and the lower-class squalor of Shosho’s Limehouse lodgings. Shosho, played by Anna May Wong, is a scheming Chinese scullery maid whose exotic “oriental” dance routine outshines the outmoded shimmy of Mabel, the fading star of The Piccadilly. Shosho’s wily Chinese charms supplant not only Mabel’s livelihood but her place in the heart of Valentine Wilmot, the club’s proprietor.136 Wilmot’s subjection to Shosho’s contract demands sends him to the back alleys of

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Limehouse where he is to buy her an authentic dancing costume. The location puts Wilmot in a disorienting space where roles are reversed and the power shifts to Shosho’s intimidating countrymen who demand £80 for the costume: “It is the most beautiful Chinese dress in Limehouse—in London . . . It came from the Imperial Palace at Pekin—after the trouble there. It is very cheap at eighty pounds” . . . “That will be my costume,” Shosho repeated, dully.137

Wilmot finds himself agreeing to the price, as if he is under a spell: Valentine heard a voice murmuring “I only did it to please you, my dear.” It was his own voice he heard; the voice of a man in a trance . . . she gave him a celestial smile, a smile which endured perhaps three seconds and then vanished utterly from her features.138

He “stumbles” out into “the narrow street, up which he wandered in a daze . . . ‘Was it a conspiracy?’ he thought. ‘What was it? Where have I been? What am I doing?’”139 He has been in the Limehouse of Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, its twisting streets metonymic of the occult operation of the Orient on the Westerner and naturalized in Bennett’s realist prose. The love triangle is complicated by the jealousy of Shosho’s Chinese boyfriend, Jim. In the end Shosho is murdered, Mabel is suspected, but it transpires that Jim is the murderer. Jim was played by King Ho-Chang who was not an actor, but, according to the film credits, “a well known Limehouse restaurant owner.” The complicity of London Chinese as extras in films was a political issue and one that Lao She addresses in Er Ma with typical irony. Rev. Ely’s brother-in-law is a “bull-necked, baldheaded,” crimson-faced, cigar-smoking, ill-mannered old blunderbuss and ex-trader in China.140 He approaches Mr. Ma with the offer of a spot of work . . . Filming. Savvy? . . . I’m giving a film company a hand now . . . Me having been out East for a good many years, I’m more of an expert than the rest of em . . . no good knowing something if you can’t turn it into cash.141

They want “a decent looking old Chinaman” to play the part of a rich Chinese merchant:142 Not much acting or expression needed. As long as the fellow’s presentable-looking, and can stand there like a proper human being, that’ll do! . . . Easy, eh what? Pick up fifteen pounds for doing damn all! . . .

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Limehouse, Bloomsbury, and Piccadilly They’ve raked together a crowd of Chinamen from the East End. Flatnosed, slit-eyed creatures the lot, what. Just for the crowd scenes, of course. For forming mobs and rioting. To make the film look like the genuine China . . . Farm scenes need a flock of sheep and filming Shanghai scenes you need a flock of Chinamen.143

The prospective film in Er Ma parallels Piccadilly in the polarity of its Anglo/Chinese setting: The film was set in Shanghai . . . One street represented the Foreign Concessions, and another represented the Chinese part of the city. The former was clean, beautiful and orderly, and the latter was filthy, chaotic and thoroughly dark and dismal.144

The film unambiguously references Piccadilly in that it had been written by one of England’s most celebrated literary figures. This gentleman was perfectly well aware that the Chinese are a civilised people, but to suit others’ mental attitudes, and for the sake of literary art, he none the less depicted the Chinese as cruel and sinister. Had he not done so he would have found it impossible to earn people’s praise and approbation.145

Despite misgivings at having to rub shoulders with “that bunch of East End creatures,” Mr. Ma takes the part.146 Margaret Trenta’s essay, which follows this one, discusses the experience of colonized subjects “performing the colonial,” that is buying into the idea of the colonizer as civilizing influence. In Er Ma, just as they had done in London earlier that year, Chinese students agitate against the film: The Chinese students . . . requested the Legation to make a protest. The Legation made a protest, and the following day the literary man who was the author of the film said some very nasty things about the Chinese Legation in the newspapers. Saying nasty things about another nation’s legation should in fact call for stern intervention, but since China would never dare start a war why intervene?147

The students organize those patriotic East End Chinese who have refused to appear in the film to smash up Mr. Ma’s shop in protest at his participation, but after one brick Li Tzu-jung manages to talk them out of it by pretending the shop belongs to him. The lunch-time editions of the newspapers blow up the incident nevertheless:

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EAST END CHINESE RIOT AT ANTIQUE SHOP, EAST END CHINESE LAWLESS, GOVERNMENT MUST TAKE STEPS TO CONTROL CHINESE.148

An interview “quotes” Mr. Ma: “Me no say. Me no speak . . . Although Mr. Ma had used no such language.”149 That evening extra squads of policemen are drafted to the East End and a Member of Parliament questioned the Home Secretary as to why he didn’t expel all Chinese from the country.150

This too was topical. Since 1919, after colour riots against negroes and Chinese at Cardiff and Liverpool, the British Government had decided to repatriate as soon as possible aliens who came to England during the war.151

The “people principally affected . . . who will be dealt with as soon as the necessary shipping is available,” promised reports, are first the Chinese, when permission to stay will only be accorded in very exceptional circumstances to Chinese who have acquired businesses in Great Britain.152

In an ironic twist the publicity does wonders for the shop’s falling profits, but in the long term, with Li Tzu-jung having left to pursue his studies, and Ma Wei having run away, Mr. Ma’s future is left in the balance. Only if he manages to follow the example of Li Tzu-jung and learns to take on the responsibility of running his business, might Mr. Ma be assured of success. Just as Er Ma was a cautionary tale for its Chinese readership, so was Piccadilly for the Western viewer. A “talkie” prologue which was tacked onto the start of the silent version accentuates this message. Framing the film in a flashback, Wilmot, now the reclusive landlord of a country pub, is recognized by an inquisitive customer who sounds him out by relating how he has just returned from the East, “Shanghai and that sort of thing,” and tells him how badly he missed London, “my God how I long for it, Piccadilly . . . I don’t think I should ever have left China if it hadn’t been for Piccadilly.” Right on cue Wilmot returns, “I don’t think I’d have ever left Piccadilly if it hadn’t been for China.”153 Wilmot plainly regrets having ever been involved with Chinese people and, by implication, the viewer should keep his experience in mind. Piccadilly has recently been restored and re-released to widespread acclaim. An essential correlative to

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the polarized account of jazz-age London offered by the film is the contextual portrayal presented in Er Ma. In aiming to correct the imperialist gaze, Lao She finds himself inevitably compromised by the form of narrative realism borrowed from the more “advanced” West. What emerges is a text that self-consciously registers this struggle—it is part traditional narrative, part polemic. In his analysis of Lao She’s fiction, David Der-wei Wang notes that he complicates realism. Wang argues that the emotional charge of melodrama and the absurdities of farce in Er Ma are modes of excess, which are actually an ironic approximation of realism and expose its limitations. 154 I would suggest too that it is not just through “the prism of excessive tears and laughter” that Lao She brings a reflexive dimension to the supposed objectivity and impartiality of realism.155 Lao She deplores China’s poor image in the West but he sees it as the responsibility of the Chinese to address. At regular points he intrudes into the novel to appeal directly to his countrymen: In this twentieth century, people are judged according to their nation. The people of a powerful nation are people. And the people of a weak nation are . . .? –Dogs! People of China, you should open your eyes and take a look around . . . Yes it’s time you opened your eyes. You should straighten your backs. Unless that is, you wish to be dogs forever.156

The story points outside itself to unjust forces in contemporary society that have contributed to the troubled state of the world of the story. Its interplay of contemporary reportage and stringent satire complicates its “realism” marking it as a modernist text. Authorial intrusion or “narrative interruption” of this kind, argues James Buzard in Disorienting Fiction, opens a new path between nineteenth-century realist and modernist narrative forms and “constitutes the formal signature of novels devoted to metropolitan ‘autoethnography.’”157 As Patricia Laurence and Zhaoming Qian have argued, the writings of Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, need to be read in terms of the metropolitan engagement with its imperial colonies and the flexible dynamic in which British and “Oriental” subjectivities were being made and remade. Similarly, the narratives of East Asian and Indian writers in London in the early twentieth century construct a “hybrid subjectivity” from their encounter with the imperial metropolis that accords with the values of modernism. In their challenge to the realist structures of reference and attitude that naturalized British imperial dominance, the writings of Lao She, Mulk Anand, Rabindranath Tagore,

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and others offer self-fashioning negotiations that prefigure a later postcolonial subjectivity.

Selected Bibliography Archival Sources British Library, London. Lao She. “Mr. Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London,” unpublished trans. William Dolby. Edinburgh, 1987. Museum of London Library. Limehouse file, newspaper clippings. Tower Hamlets Central Library, Local History Archive. Chinatown File, newspaper clippings. Piccadilly, DVD. Directed by E. A. Dupont. 1929; London, BFIVIDEO, 2004.

Published Sources Armfelt, Count E. “Oriental London.” In Living London, edited by George Sims, 81-87. London: Cassell and Co., 1902. Bennett, Arnold. “Piccadilly” Story of the Film. London: The Readers Library Publishing Company, 1929. Bickers, Robert A. Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-1949. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. —.“New Light on Lao She, London and the London Missionary Society, 1921-1929.” Modern Chinese Literature 8 (1994): 21-39. The British Empire Exhibition Official Guide. London: Fleetway Press, 1924. Burke, Thomas. Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown. London: Daily Express Fiction Library, n.d., London: Grant Richards, 1916. Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth Century British Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Chiang, Yee. The Silent Traveller in London. London: Country Life, 1938. Chou, Tso-jen. “Humane Literature.” In Chou Tso-jen, edited by Ernst Wolff, 97-105. NY: Twayne Publishers, 1971. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.

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Cohen, Paul A. The Boxer Uprising: A Narrative History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Deen, Stella, ed. Challenging Modernism: New Readings in Literature and Culture, 1914-1945. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. De Quincey, Thomas. China: A Revised Reprint of Articles From “Titan,” with Preface and Additions. Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1857. —. Confessions of An English Opium Eater. 1822. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes. Letters From John Chinaman. London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1901. Flower, Newman, ed. The Journals of Arnold Bennett: 1921-1928. London: Cassell and Company, 1933. Forman, Ross G. “Peking Plots: Fictionalizing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.” Victorian Literature and Culture 22, no. 13 (1999): 19-47. Gawsworth, John, ed. The Best Stories of Thomas Burke. London: Phoenix House, 1950. Goldman, Merle, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds. An Intellectual History of Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Goldring, Douglas. The Nineteen Twenties: A General Survey and Some Personal Memories. London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945. Hagedorn, Jessica, ed. Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1993. Hardy, Rev. E. J., Chaplain to H.B.M. Forces. John Chinaman At Home. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907. Hay, Stephen. Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Hevia, James L. “Loot’s Fate: The Economy of Plunder and the Moral Life of Objects ‘From the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China.’” History and Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1994): 319-345. Hodgson, Barbara. Opium: A Portrait of the Heavenly Demon. London, San Francisco: Souvenir Press, 1999. Holmes, Colin. “The Chinese Connection.” In Outsiders and Outcasts, edited by Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes, 71-94. London: Duckworth, 1993. Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-Morrow. 1902. London: Faber and Faber, 1946. Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917-1957. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

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Hu, Jinquan. Lao She he tade zuopin (Lao She and His Works). Hong Kong: Wenhua shenghuo chubanshe, 1977. Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. King, Hu. “Lao She in England.” Translated by Cecilia Y. L. Tsimin. Rendition 10 (Autumn 1978): 46. Kohn, Marek. Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992. Knox, Israel. The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936. Lai, Ming. A History of Chinese Literature. London: Cassell, 1964. Laurence, Patricia. Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Lee, Gregory B. Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism and Hybridity in China and Its Others. London: Hurst and Co., 1996. Lim, Jessie, and Li Yan, eds. On Another Province: New Chinese Writing from London. London: Lambeth Chinese Community Association and Si Yu Chinese Times, 1994. Major, John S. “Asia Through a Glass Darkly: Stereotypes of Asians in Western Literature.” Contemporary Literature 5 (1986): 4-8. May, J. P. “The Chinese in Britain, 1860-1914.” In Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, edited by Colin Holmes, 111-124. London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. Mitchell, Rev. George H. Sailortown. London: Jarrolds, 1917. Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Jurgen Osterhammel, eds. Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities. London: German Historical Institute, 1986. Morton, H. V. The Nights of London. London: Methuen, 1926. Ou-fan Lee, Leo, ed. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Parker, David. Through Different Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995. Porter, Bernard. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Procter, James, ed. Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. London: Palgrave, 2000. Qian, Zhaoming. Modernism and Orientalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

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Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin Books, 1978. Sala, George. Living London: Being “Echoes” Re-echoed. London: Remington, 1883. Sims, George. Off the Track in London. London: Jarrold and Sons, 1911. Spence, Jonathan D. Chinese Roundabout: Essays in History and Culture. New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992. —. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980. London: Penguin Books, 1982. Tyau, Min-Ch’ien T. Z. London Through Chinese Eyes, or, My Seven and a Half Years in London. London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920. Van Ash, Cay, and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer. Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Vohra, Ranbir. Lao She and the Chinese Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Witchard, Anne. “Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the ‘Glamorous Shame’ of Chinatown.” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2, no. 2 (September 2004). http://www.literarylondon.org. Wong, Maria Lin. Chinese Liverpudlians. Merseyside: Liverpool Press, 1989. Yip, Wai-Lim. Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Zia, Helen. Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000.

Notes 1

See Barnor Hesse, “Black To Front and Black Again,” in Writing Black Britain, 1948-1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 78-82. 2 See Hesse, “Diasporicity: Black Britain’s Post-Colonial Formations,” in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), 96-120. Hesse suggests that one failure

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of the appropriation of Windrush for Black British historicity is in its implication that the development of racism in Britain simply arose from the fact of post-war migration. 3 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Language and Politics, ed. Michael Shapiro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 114. 4 Raymond Thorp, Viper: The Confessions of a Drug Addict (London: Robert Hale, 1956), from the afterword written by Thorp’s ghostwriter, Derek Agnew. He goes on to propose imprisonment as a substitute for immigration control: “We cannot stop them entering Britain.” Quoted in Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1992), 181. 5 Robert Fabian, London After Dark: Stories from the Casebook of Superintendent Fabian of Scotland Yard (London: Naldrett Press, 1954), 26. 6 House of Commons, Hansard, October 29, 1958, cols. 198-9, quoted in Paul Gilroy, “Blacks and Crime in Postwar Britain,” in Procter, 73. 7 See Douglas Jones, “The Chinese in Britain: Origins and Development of a Community,” New Community 8, no. 3 (Winter 1979): 398. The Aliens Act of 1905 made entry to Britain discretionary rather than a right. A tougher British Nationality and Status of the Aliens Act introduced in 1914 to standardize confusing naturalization procedures throughout the empire required aliens to register, restricting movement and imposing deportations. In 1919 another Aliens Act allowed the authorities, among other things, to deport aliens involved in industrial disputes. Under the Aliens Order of 1920, Chinese were arbitrarily deported for opium smoking or gambling. The Chinese population would have increased dramatically in the port areas had not these Acts halted this first wave of immigration. Between 1921 and 1931 numbers dropped from 2,419 to 1,934. For a table derived from the national census returns for England and Wales 1881-1931, see John Seed, ‘“Limehouse Blues’: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-1940,” History Workshop Journal 62 (Autumn 2006): 63. During the Second World War numbers increased because 10,000 Chinese enrolled in the British Merchant Navy. 8 The diasporic moment marked by Windrush followed on the passage of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which reaffirmed the rights of British citizenship to subjects born in the colonies. This included Singapore, Hong Kong, and the New Territories. 9 See David Parker, “The Chinese Takeaway and the Diasporic Habitus: Space, Time and Power Geometries,” in Hesse, Un/settled Multiculturalisms, 75. 10 Ibid., 73. The divisive “model minority” myth was the right-wing response to civil rights activism in the United States. Success depended on effort and initiative, implying the failure of other minorities due to lack of these attributes rather than the systematic racist structures within society. 11 Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), see chapter five “Organize the ‘Hood Under I-Ching Banners,” 126. More recently the Los Angeles riots of 1992 exposed burgeoning racial tensions among “minority” ethnic groups. Apparent conflict between Korean and African Americans based on

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economic divisions emerged as one of the more visible issues of contemporary urban America. See E. T. Chang, “America’s First Multiethnic Riots,” in The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Boston: South End Press, 1994). Also see David Parker, Through Different Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995), 214. 12 Hansard Commons, June 13, 1990, cols. 419-21, quoted in Parker, 73. 13 Jessie Lim and Li Yan, eds., On Another Province: New Chinese Writing from London (London, Manchester: Lambeth Chinese Community Association and Si Yu Chinese Times, 1994). 14 Five omnibus editions are published by Allison and Busby. The dustjacket blurb (Sax Rohmer, The Fu- Manchu Omnibus Vol 2 (London: Allison & Busby, 1997)) from Christopher Fowler’s Time Out review reads: “These long-awaited reprints make my heart sing: they should find generations of new readers.” Gregory B. Lee comments in response: “Maybe it’s about time for British people to put aside the silly jokes, to silence the echoes of Yellow Peril . . . and to stop reprinting the offensive Fu Manchu.” See Gregory B. Lee, “Aladdin, Miracles and Contagion: British Representations of Chineseness,” Nightwaves, Radio 3, February 19, 1998. See also Lee, Chinas Unlimited: Making The Imaginaries of China and Chineseness (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003). 15 This description is from the first in the series, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (London: Methuen and Co., 1913). 16 Jessica Hagedorn, ed., Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1993), Introduction, xxii. See also, John S. Major, “Asia Through a Glass Darkly: Stereotypes of Asians in Western Literature,” Contemporary Literature 5, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 4-8. 17 Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 75. 18 See Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000). 19 George Sala, Living London: Being “Echoes” Re-echoed (London: Remington, 1883), 425. 20 Ibid., 426. 21 The Boxer uprising was a rebel movement to rid China of foreigners and foreign influence. The Boxers got their name from descriptions submitted by missionaries to the English language North China Daily News. At their rallies they demonstrated spirit trances and supernatural resistance to bullets, poison, and the sword. Their Chinese name was The Society of the Fists of Righteous Harmony. See Ross G. Forman, “Peking Plots: Fictionalizing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1999): 19-48. 22 The Times, July 17, 1900, 9. 23 Ibid. 24 Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 57.

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Paul A. Cohen, The Boxer Uprising: A Narrative History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xi. 26 While an integral part of the military and economic history of British imperialism, China is rarely a focus of post-colonial study in Britain. See Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth Century China: Towards A Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: German Historical Institute, 1986), 290-309. 27 In 1850, the Navigation Act, which stated that crews must be no less than seventy-five percent British, was repealed. This allowed shipowners to exploit cheap sources of labor. Chinese were paid less than half the wage of British seamen. See Maria Wong, Chinese Liverpudlians (Merseyside: Liverpool Press, 1989), 29. 28 Count E. Armfelt, “Oriental London,” in Living London, ed. George Sims (London: Cassell and Co., 1902), 84. “All the established Chinamen have married Englishwomen . . . Their children look healthy and are comfortably dressed, and most of them are very nice-looking. These dark-haired, black-eyed boys and girls, with the rosy cheeks and happy looks, are real little pictures.” 29 Herman Scheffauer, “The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem,” London Magazine, June 1911, quoted in Wong, 466. 30 See Kohn, 57. He cites Ng Kwee Choo, The Chinese in London (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1968). 31 Rev. George H. Mitchell, Sailortown (London: Jarrolds, 1917), 109. 32 Evening News, October 5, 1920. Chinatown File, Local History Archive, Tower Hamlets Central Library. 33 Thomas Burke, Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (London: Daily Express Fiction Library, n.d. (London: Grant Richards, 1916)). 34 See Preface, The Best Stories of Thomas Burke, selected with a foreword by John Gawsworth (London: Phoenix House, 1950), 8-9. 35 Journalist, George R. Sims, was the first to use the term “Chinatown” with regard to London’s Limehouse. “In Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs,” chapter 11, Off the Track in London (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1911). Originally published in The Strand, July 1905. See my “Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the ‘Glamorous Shame’ of Chinatown,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 2.2 (September 2004), http://www.literarylondon.org. 36 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). Said demonstrates how imaginings of the East have functioned according to the requirements or dictates of Western desire. 37 During the General Election of 1906, Britain’s Chinese community was much discredited by the efforts of Labour councillors who had been pressing the government to compel shipping companies to engage British-only crews and to strengthen the Aliens Act of 1905. See J. P. May, “The Chinese in Britain, 1860-

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1914,” in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. Colin Holmes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), 121. 38 Kohn, 66. 39 Colin Holmes, “The Chinese Connection,” in Outsiders and Outcasts, ed. Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1993), 85. 40 C. L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 179. 41 See Stephen Hay on the “synthesis of East and West in Chinese Thought” in Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 136. 42 In 1966, during China’s Cultural Revolution, Lao She was found dead in Beijing’s Teiping Lake following humiliations suffered at the hands of the Red Guards. He either committed suicide or was dumped there having been beaten insensible by his persecutors. Today he is regarded as a humanitarian writer of comic genius and one of China’s noted twentieth-century novelists. 43 See Zhaoming Qian, Modernism and Orientalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 44 Innes, 179. 45 Founded 1909, now the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). 46 First published in 1929, in Short Story Monthly (Hsiao-shuo yueh-pao), the organ of the Literary Studies Association, which was spearheading China’s new literary movement, establishing Lao She’s reputation in China as a serious novelist. There are three published translations of Er Ma in English, Ma and Son: A Novel by Lao She, trans. Jean M. James (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center Inc., 1980); The Two Mas, trans. Kenny H. Huang and David Finkelstein (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1984); and Mr. Ma and Son: A Sojourn in London, trans. Julie Jimmerson (Beijing: Beijing Foreign Languages Press, 1991). A fourth, and in my opinion the best as it captures the London idiom in a way that none of the others do, is “Mr. Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London,” unpublished trans. William Dolby (Edinburgh, 1987). This is the translation I have used for this essay. It is held in the British Library. 47 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 8. 48 C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917 -1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 5. 49 Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980 (London: Penguin Books, 1982), 96. 50 Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, ed., An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2002), 13. See also Gregory B. Lee, Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers: Lyricism, Nationalism and

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Hybridity in China and Its Others (London: Hurst and Co., 1996), chapter 3, “Chinese Modernism, Western Colonialism,” 64-92. 51 He repeatedly emphasizes his childhood poverty, see Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 167, n. 3. 52 Robert A. Bickers, “New Light on Lao She, London and the London Missionary Society, 1921-1929,” Modern Chinese Literature 8 (1994): 26. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibsen, Hardy, and Tolstoy were admired for their ability to foster love and sympathy in their depiction of ordinary lives. See “Humane Literature” by Chou Tso-jen, brother of Lu Hsun, in Chou Tso-jen, ed. Ernst Wolff (New York: Twayne, 1971), 97-105. 55 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 6. 56 See Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds., Modernism and Empire, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3. 57 The British Empire Exhibition Official Guide (London: Fleetway Press, 1924), 79. 58 Ibid. In fact pigtails had been abolished by revolutionary edict back in 1907. During the 268 years of Manchu rule, numerous rebellions had occurred because of the infamous “queue order,” which forced the Han Chinese to adopt the Manchu hairstyle whereby the hair was shaved off the front skull of the head and the remaining hair tied into a long pigtail. 59 Ibid. 60 Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in London (London: Country Life, 1938), xvii. 61 Vohra, 38. 62 King Hu, “Lao She in England,” trans. Cecilia Y. L. Tsimin, Renditions 10 (Autumn 1978): 46. 63 China’s reformers followed the West in their awareness of the formative role of fiction in strengthening positive national identity and began their foreign studies in earnest after Japan’s 1895 victory over their country. See Lai Ming, A History of Chinese Literature (London: Cassell, 1964), and Goldman and Ou-Fan Lee. 64 Lao She, “Wo zuijingai de zuojia—Kang Lade” (Conrad—my most favorite writer), quoted in David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth Century China, Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 330, n. 55. 65 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 14. 66 Lao She, Lao-niu p’o-ch’e (Old Ox and a Broken Cart) (Hong Kong: Yuchou shu-tien, 1961), 18-19, Lao She’s memoir quoted in Vohra, 38. 67 There were many, typical is Rodney Gilbert’s What’s Wrong With China (1926). 68 Douglas Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties: A General Survey and Some Personal Memories (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945), 63. 69 Speakers’ Corner at the Marble Arch entrance to Hyde Park is a place symbolic of the British democratic tradition. Since the right of free assembly was recognized in 1872, people have gathered there to speak, among them, Karl Marx, William Morris, George Orwell, the Pankhursts, and Vladimir Lenin.

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Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 1. Ibid. 72 Ibid., 3. 73 Burke, Limehouse Nights, 91. 74 Ibid., 223. 75 Ibid., 63. 76 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 5-6. 77 Wai-Lim Yip, Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues between Chinese and Western Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 108. 78 Ibid. 79 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 6. 80 Ibid., 7, 1. 81 Burke, Limehouse Nights, 19. 82 Lao She, “Wo zuijingai de zuojia-Kang Lade,” quoted in Wang, 330, n. 55. 83 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 15. 84 Lee, Troubadours, Trumpeters, Troubled Makers, 193. 85 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 8. 86 Ibid., 8-9. 87 Ibid., 8. 88 Ibid., 10. 89 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 185. 90 Chambers’s Geographical Readers, Standard 1 (1883), 64, quoted in Ibid., 185. 91 Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 19001949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 23. 92 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 11. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 17. 95 Hay, 170. 96 Spence, 215. 97 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 23. 98 Thomas De Quincey, China: A Revised Reprint of Articles from “Titan,” with Preface and Additions (Edinburgh: James Hogg, 1857), 104. 99 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 73. 100 Lao She criticized the lack of national pride that allowed the razing of the Summer Palace. He uses the incident in the second novel he wrote in London to provide a cause worth fighting to the death for: “Let me ask you, if the Chinese were to set fire to an ancient British monument wouldn’t the English people risk their lives [to protect it]?” Thus Spake Master Zhao (Zhao Zi Yue), 205; published in serial form in the fiction journal, Xiao Shuo Yue Bao (Shanghai: 1928), quoted in Vohra, 34. 101 See James L. Hevia, “Loot’s Fate: The Economy of Plunder and the Moral Life of Objects ‘From the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China,’” History and Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1994): 319-45. 71

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Description de l’Egypte, 23 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie imperiale, 1809-28). Said, 87. 104 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 23. 105 Ibid., 27. 106 Ibid., 28. 107 Ibid., 63. 108 Ibid., 173. 109 Ibid., 33. 110 Ibid., 53. 111 Ibid., 111. 112 See Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (London: Faber and Faber, 1946). He pioneered the building first of Letchworth and then Welwyn Garden Cities. 113 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 179. 114 Ibid., 121. 115 Israel Knox, The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 129. 116 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 175. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 65. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 70. 121 Ibid., 175. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 176. 124 Ibid., 175. 125 See Bickers, “New Light on Lao She,” 33. 126 This echoed a complaint, similarly dismissed, made by Chinese students in 1913 about the play Mr. Wu, which they feared “might engender prejudices unfavourable to the Chinese in their midst,” see Min-Ch’ien T. Z. Tyau, London Through Chinese Eyes (London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920), 294, and Bickers, “New Light on Lao She,” 33. 127 Newman Flower, ed., The Journals of Arnold Bennett: 1921-1928 (London: Cassell and Company, 1933), 263. 128 Ibid. 129 H. V. Morton, The Nights of London (London: Methuen, 1926), 45. 130 See Kohn, 162. 131 The Sphere, May 8, 1926, 164. 132 Flower, 87. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Wong’s appearance on screen did indicate a significant move away from white actors made up in “yellow face,” such as Richard Barthelmess in Broken Blossoms (1918), D. W. Griffith’s film of Thomas Burke’s story “The Chink and the Child.” 103

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Yet Wilmot and Shosho’s kiss was cut by the censors. British film codes matched American injunctions against mixed-race kissing on screen. 137 Arnold Bennett, “Piccadilly” Story of the Film (London: The Readers Library Publishing Company, 1929), 95-97. On the provenance of the costume see Hevia. 138 Ibid., 101. The film includes scenes drawn directly on the Limehouse of Thomas Burke. 139 Ibid. 140 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 66. 141 Ibid. 142 Ibid., 145-6. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 193. 145 Ibid., 192. The blurb for the published screenplay of Piccadilly boasted: “The fact which undoubtedly gives the greatest distinction to this film is Arnold Bennett’s authorship of its story.” 146 Lao She, “Mr. Ma and Son,” 146. 147 Ibid., 193. 148 Ibid., 190. 149 Ibid., 191. 150 Ibid. 151 Min-Ch’ien T. Z. Tyau, London Through Chinese Eyes, or, My Seven and a Half Years in London (London: The Swarthmore Press, 1920), 317. 152 Ibid. 153 Extras, “Prologue from the sound version of the film,” Piccadilly, DVD, directed by E. A. Dupont (1929; London, BFIVIDEO, 2004). 154 Wang, 16. 155 Ibid. 156 Lao She, Mr. Ma and Son, 8. 157 James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7. Buzard draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s use of the term “autoethnography,” see her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge: 1992), 7. “I use these terms to refer to instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.”

CHAPTER SEVEN THE NOBLE SAVAGE AND THE SAVAGE NOBLE: MULK RAJ ANAND’S DECONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN CONVERSATIONS IN BLOOMSBURY MARGARET LUCILLE TRENTA

In his book, Conversations in Bloomsbury, Mulk Raj Anand recounts several of his encounters with members of the British Modernist Bloomsbury group. The British Modernist Bloomsbury group included such literary greats as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf as well as their prominent friends such as C. E. M. Joad, Bonamy Dobrée, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf. While the stories of the time Anand spent with the members of the Bloomsbury group are in themselves appealing to those interested in the British culture of the early twentieth century, Anand’s presentation of these meetings, including his own thoughts and the dialogues he shared with the group, reveals an intriguing construction of the identities of both the colonized/colonial Indian and the colonizing British. A mostly Western construction/ perception of the concept of colonial identity during the colonial era seemingly centers the notion of identity. In such a construction of identity, prevalent among the colonizing culture of Britain, the colonized and the colonizer both had an assumed stable, fixed, and singular identity based upon their roles in the process of colonization. However, Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury suggests otherwise, presenting more than one image of both the colonized and the colonizer, and giving authority to no one specific image. Creating his own images of the colonized and offering images of the colonizer from the perspective of the colonized, Anand also reverses the colonial gaze in order to claim its power for himself.

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Anand’s book itself also serves to challenge such singular and definite distinctions, resisting easy categorization into either the colonial or postcolonial genre by challenging the temporal distinctions between colonial and postcolonial. With its content clearly taking place during the colonial era and its creative history occurring notably after decolonization, Conversations in Bloomsbury cannot be neatly placed in either the colonial or postcolonial categories. Through the content and creation of Conversations in Bloomsbury, Anand decenters decolonization, Indian independence, and the arrival of West Indian immigrants in England by way of the Empire Windrush as temporal markers which separate the time of colonization from a postcolonial and multicultural period. This notion of a multiplicity of identity(ies), while usually a post-modern/poststructural/postcolonial idea, permeates Conversations in Bloomsbury, challenging not only the solidity of colonial identities but also the distinction between colonial and postcolonial. Anand’s book, on a basic level, is simply a recounting of his encounters with the Bloomsbury group presented through a series of “memoiresque” short stories. However, Conversations in Bloomsbury does more than tell a nice story about a colonial Indian student encountering the Bloomsbury group. In writing Conversations in Bloomsbury roughly fifty years after the events he is recounting, Anand allows himself the freedom to re-present the history of Britain in the 1920s as his history. More importantly, as Makarand Paranjape points out in “T. S. Eliot through Indian Eyes,” Anand’s entire project becomes doubly meaningful, not simply as a personal encounter between a major Indian writer and the greatest English poet of his time, but as a political act, the struggle between two cultures, between the colonized and the colonizer.1

The story of Anand’s encounters in Bloomsbury, then, becomes the story of India’s encounters with Britain in Britain. In writing such a project from a temporal distance, Anand is able to detach himself, and thus his project, from the dominant ideologies of the modernist era as well. K. D. Verma writes in “Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury” that the “past, the otherness, that Anand creates as a function of literary history is the deep reservoir of cultural commingling, of diffusion and discovery of identity.”2 By waiting approximately fifty years to write Conversations in Bloomsbury, Anand allows himself the opportunity to combine the cultural attitudes from both the colonial and postcolonial eras and create a past which has been underrepresented, perhaps even unrepresented, thus questioning Western

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(specifically British) notions of nationhood, identity, and literary culture and the ways in which those notions are constructed. The concept of identity, for postcolonial literature and culture, is one that has, to use Derridian language, undergone a change—the move from a colonized culture to a decolonized or postcolonial culture—or encountered an “event”—decolonization—most aptly described as a rupture (in that postcolonialism has broken open the seemingly fixed field of colonial identity to allow for play) in the cultural construction of identity. Up to this event, the structure of identity had been given a center—in the case of Anand’s colonized Indian homeland, that of British colonization—whose function, as Jacques Derrida points out in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” was “to orient, balance, and organize the structure” as well as and “above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit . . . the play of the structure.”3 In the colonial world that Anand presents in Conversations in Bloomsbury, the “colonized” was firmly defined as “non-colonizer” while the “colonizer” was likewise understood as “non-colonized.” Such a construction of identity, with colonization as its solidly placed center, allowed for no play involving that center—colonization must be the basis for all identity. Though controversial within the field of postcolonial studies, V. S. Naipaul points out in The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad that to “be colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world.”4 Naipaul’s remark rightly notes the fixedness of identity in a colonial regime where the notion of play was limited at best and frequently not allowed at all. Such a closed notion of colonial identity was reinforced by the British literary portrayal of both the colonized and colonizing worlds. British authors, including members of the Bloomsbury circle,5 presented the colonized as precisely that, colonized. Following the structure of the limited construct of identity, authors such as Kipling and Conrad write about a colonized subject who is in some way inferior to or at least less favorable than the colonizing counterpart. One such popular portrayal has come to be known as “the noble savage” who is juxtaposed with the portrayal of the colonizer as the civilizing and educating savior of the savage. While “the noble savage” represents a comfortable and popular portrayal of the colonized during the era of colonization, other, perhaps less offensive, images of the colonized did exist, though all of these literary images did make use of the idea of the colonized as the “other” of the colonizer. Paranjape notes that “India accepts Eliot because he becomes the West’s other, an image of ourselves functioning as a minority voice swamped by the secular and materialistic culture that represents for us the usual face of the West as oppressor and

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predator.”6 But even T. S. Eliot’s use of India in The Waste Land relies on the mystery and mystique of the Indian “other.” With the rupture of decolonization, the seemingly solidified structure of cultural identity became decentered and the notion of identity, which previously seemed beyond play, encountered the multiplicity allowed by play. Homi K. Bhabha writes in The Location of Culture that with the decentering of colonization in the discourse of identity, “that familiar alignment of colonial subjects—Black/White, Self/Other—is disturbed.”7 Bhabha’s assertion of the disruption of the “familiar alignment” of identity implies the need for other—though not necessarily alternate—methods of viewing identity. More than one mode of identification is necessary after such a decentering, and, so that no one image becomes privileged, each image must become substitutable for the others. Just as Derrida concludes that meaning is infinite within the finite world of language, Anand, by presenting his colonial self/selves in a book published in 1981—well after the colonizing British left India—and incorporating both the colonial and postcolonial notions of identity, shows that identity, as well, is, and has always been, infinite within the finite world of culture, thus blurring the lines between colonial and postcolonial. From the first story Anand recounts, his portrayal of himself to the British seemingly buys into and reinforces the British perception of the colonized Indian. The very first words Anand speaks in his own book, “I am a naïve poet—just arrived from India,”8 position Anand as unknowing and lesser than his hosts. Anand connects his status as a “naïve poet” to the fact that he has only recently left India and arrived in Britain. He seems to say that time in Britain is what he needs in order to become educated as a poet and make himself less naïve, thus buying into the idea of the colonizer as the educator and civilizing influence for the colonized. While Anand’s initial portrayal of himself may appear counterproductive to the upward movement of Indians within the colonial regime, Antoinette Burton points out in At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain that such a portrayal is not unheard of or even unusual among Indians in Britain. In discussing Indians in England during the colonial period, Burton writes that colonial subjects frequently “engaged in performing ‘the’ colonial as ‘the Indian’ either willingly or resistantly.”9 She explains this typical reaction from Indians in Britain by stating that although it was axiomatic from the eighteenth century onward that even slaves were free once they set foot onto British soil, Indians were not at liberty to wander Victorian Britain without facing barriers thrown up by the exigencies of Britain’s role as an imperial power and, more

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specifically, by the dictates of the civilizing mission that a variety of Britons believed to be their specific gift to colonial peoples.10

While Burton notes that Indians in Britain encountered the imperialist attitude all over the country, Anand’s specific location, London, plays an even larger role in his desire to assimilate and the difficulty he encounters in doing so. Anand writes, in Chapter Two, “Lions and Shadows in the Sherry Party in Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop”: Suddenly, I felt that there was an uncanny gap between me and people, as though I was inferior and others were superior. I realized that all of them being older than me, and part of a metropolitan world, had been privileged to take part in a living culture, whereas, apart from two Shakespeare plays and Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, I had read only the books of poetry which Professor Harvey used to lend me in Khalsa College, Amritsar.11

Living in the London metropolis among the members of the Bloomsbury group, Anand feels not only his own inferiority but also the superiority of the group. The group, which he envies and reveres, has had the privilege of being not only British but also part of a metropolitan world, a world from which Anand himself feels cut off and in which Anand wants to take part. Thus Anand, who, as he later reveals, resisted British rule and stereotyping at home in India, finds resisting the imperial attitude and stereotypes in London much more difficult and so, at least initially, accepts his stereotypical role as the colonized Indian who needs help from colonizing British. As Paranjape points out, colonial Europe’s bastard offspring, the cultural mullatoes [sic], were allowed into its parlours in the liberal twenties, but that didn’t make their shame, rage, and thirst for recognition less painful.12

Anand finds himself, then, in the “parlours” of London, acknowledged but still thirsting for recognition. As Anand continues his story, he again speaks of India as less than Britain while his Indian friend, Nikhil, simply compares the two countries. Discussing the institution of public and private bars in pubs, Nikhil says to Anand: “It is the same in our own country remember.”13 Anand’s response, rather than a mere confirmation of the cultural similarity, is the more derogatory: “We are worse.”14 While Anand’s remarks do not necessarily or even intentionally position India as inferior to Britain, they do nothing to negate or even contest the stereotypical British idea of India and Indians as inherently inferior. Anand’s self-deprecation reinforces the

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idea of India portrayed in British literature, where, as Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, one has Kipling’s fiction positing the Indian as a creature clearly needing British tutelage, one aspect of which is a narrative that encircles and then assimilates India, since without Britain India would disappear into its own corruption and underdevelopment.15

Anand does not always speak in such a (self-) deprecating fashion—at times he even protests the British notion of India, though with reservation: I would have made faux pas, so I studiedly began to be what I was expected to be, a fool. I turned to Eliot and said: “You know, Sir, we have obeyed too long. Dissent is important, as it is in The Waste Land.”16

Despite such moments of rebellion, Anand’s speech, in dialogue with members of the Bloomsbury group, throughout the book is characterized by a subservient or inferior tone. Though Anand feels rebellious, and even speaks with undertones of dissent, he does indeed play the “fool” in favor of allowing his British “teachers” to “educate” him. Playing along with the idea that he, as an Indian, has much to learn from the British, Anand, at one point, looks to the Western novel for education. Anand seeks to become “civilized” through the novel, through a seemingly Western entity. In “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Homi Bhabha sees the “English book—‘signs taken for wonders’—as an insignia of colonial authority and a signifier of colonial desire and discipline.”17 Thus, the book, specifically the novel, represents, for Bhabha, colonialism itself. Anand states, in the section of his book entitled “Talk Over Coffee and Brandy with Valentine and Bonamy Dobrée, Nikhil Sen and Irene Rhys, in Francis Meynall’s Flat,” that I have only realized through novel writing that the debunking of Indian hypocrisy is possible in fiction, because the novelist is forced to ask questions and mention the unmentionables, about men and women and heaven as well.18

With such an attitude Anand reveals that he feels the Western novel to be the key, or at least the only way he has found, to debunk Indian hypocrisy. Anand accepts not only the need for such a debunking, stereotypical of the British attitude toward India, but also the idea that its catalyst is, and, according to the imperial attitude, must be, found in the West. With such sections of narrative and lines of dialogue Anand presents himself as “the noble savage,” needing British guidance toward civilization and

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enlightenment, incapable of being anything other than the colonizers’ inferior “other.” While Anand’s presentation of himself to each of the members of the British Bloomsbury group reinforces the colonial, and therefore fixed, notion of the identity of the colonized, Anand’s narration presents a rather different image of himself. At the end of his second story, “Lions and Shadows in the Sherry Party in Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop,” Anand lets his rebellious identity poke through the veil of the inferior Indian he presents to his British hosts as he writes: The humiliation for being inferior seemed like a wound in my soul, which would never heal. The more I licked it the more it became tender. And I decided in my mind that I would fight for the freedom of my country forever, though I may admire these English writers for their literary skills.19

With this second identity, one that challenges the idea that India needs Britain to civilize it, Anand breaks out of the mold of colonial identity. By presenting himself to his reader as something other than merely savage or subservient, Anand rejects what Said calls “the inclusive cultural forms dealing with non-European settings.”20 Said notes that such a form “effectively silences the Other, it reconstitutes difference as identity, it rules over and represents domains figured by occupying powers, not by inactive inhabitants.”21 Though Anand does not during the time of the narrative act out against his colonizer, through his narrative and in the time of narration, he does challenge the authority of the identity assigned to him by the colonizer. That is, Anand as a character in his own book accepts his British-assigned identity without rebelling. However, as the author of the book, Anand contests his colonial identity through writing Conversations in Bloomsbury. Anand’s narration of his encounters with the Bloomsbury group, like his dialogues with them, is not uniformly characterized by the rebellion against and resistance to his assigned identity. At points, Anand’s narrative identity even resembles his identity presented in the dialogue with its inferior opinion of the Indian. However, such occurrences are interrupted by the narrative image of the rebellious Indian. As Anand meets T. S. Eliot, he recounts: I realized for the umpteenth time how the irrepressible Indian in me was always putting his foot into his mouth by saying too much. But the naïve poet had silenced much high falutin’ talk of his fellow students, by bringing the frank, open manner of an enfant terrible, of an Indian spoilt

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Even when his narrative offers an inferior view of the colonized Indian, Anand manages to bring the narrative back around to present the image of a frank and rebellious Indian. The servility Anand presents during his narration seems to stem from a deep-seated respect for the literary achievements of the Bloomsbury authors and not from an acceptance of colonial stereotypes that they hold. Anand, recognizing this servility in himself, reflects, “I was too overwhelmed by the presence of these legendary literary men. I felt that they did not know very much about my country, and what they knew was through Kipling, or through superficial impressions.”23 As Anand realizes that there is an “irrepressible Indian” in him, he also seems to accept that the Indian in him does not need to be nor should it be repressed. Though Anand again refers to himself as a “naïve poet”—a phrase he earlier used to show that he was in need of education and civilization—he does so in a positive manner, emphasizing the effects he has had upon his fellow students. As an “enfant terrible”—another phrase which seems diminutive, but is instead used positively—Anand has managed to knock his fellow students off their self-assigned pedestals. With such a move, it is Anand and not the colonizing British who sets the standards and takes an active role in British culture. Thus Anand himself becomes the educator of both his peers at school and the members of the Bloomsbury group in terms of “what India is” and in terms of “who an Indian is.” These two images of the colonized Indian—the image Anand presents to each member of the Bloomsbury group and the image he offers to his reader—work together with the images of the Indian presented by other people in the book to create postcolonial and multiple identities for Anand. The method of presenting these identities that Anand employs emphasizes the Derridian notion that no singular identity ever maintains central status in the system of identification. Anand incorporates images of himself that challenge the identity assigned to him by the British as well as images of himself participating in that British-assigned identity. Through this move, Anand exposes the deconstruction of these categories (frequently used in postcolonial rubrics to classify literary works and their authors),24 showing them to be insufficient in defining both himself and his book. Each of the images of Anand presented in Conversations in Bloomsbury is part of his identity, and at any given moment can serve as his identity. However, no single image represents the sum of his identity and even the sum of the images presented cannot portray a whole or total identity. Anand, the

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rebel, may replace Anand, the subservient Indian, who may in turn replace Anand the author. The possible substitutions are endless and no one image or combination of images can present a unified identity. Similarly, Anand presents multiple identities of the colonizer. Through his subservient identity portrayed in his dialogue, Anand also presents the benevolent and civilizing colonizer. These sections provide the reader with an image of the British as the great teachers and civilizers of the savages. Discussing the educating role Britain has played in his life, Anand says: “Strange, it had to be an Englishman to open our eyes to our culture. We Indians are often philistines.”25 Again demonstrating his need for Western education and civilization, Anand states, “I learned some European etiquette from the poet Iqbal, who was my teacher and had been to Germany. But I find it difficult to be good mannered.”26 Anand not only expresses the need for a Western education in how to be civilized, but also mentions that his Indian mentor could not provide him with such an education. For Anand, the necessary education could only come from Britain itself. Even with his limited, second-hand education in Western etiquette, Anand finds it “difficult to be good mannered” for he has not yet become the civilized Westerner he, on at least one level, envies and emulates. Anand’s emulation of the British in an attempt to become more “civilized” is complicated slightly when taking into account the group with which he is interacting. Anand does not just wish to emulate the British in general but rather more specifically the British Bloomsbury group. His reverence for the achievements, especially the literary achievements, of the group’s members leads him to excuse what he would otherwise see as their stereotypical imperialist attitude toward India and Indians. Of his first encounter with Bonamy Dobrée and their discussion of T. S. Eliot, Anand writes: I did not know much about T. S. Eliot. Certainly, whatever he was, he was a great poet . . . And it didn’t matter if both Eliot and our friend agreed about Kipling. I accepted that most Englishmen believed in the Pax Britannica . . . These intelligent men and women were perhaps allergic to Gandhi, because he only wore a loin cloth. But they were far more liberal and broad-minded than the white Sahibs in India.27

Revealing his own “Britishness,” Anand reveres British literature and its great authors, a traditional mark among Britons of what makes Britain great.28 Though Anand continues to disagree with Dobrée and Eliot over Kipling, his reverence for their literary greatness seems to diminish his dislike of their imperialist attitude. Seeing Dobrée and Eliot as “more liberal and broad-minded” than other Westerners he had encountered,

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Anand excuses their belief in the Pax Britannica in favor of revering their literary greatness—a greatness that he himself hopes to someday emulate. As with himself, Anand presents a counter-identity to the stereotypical identity of the colonizer. While Anand portrays himself as the rebellious, anti-colonial Indian in his narrative sections, he also knocks down the image of the civilizing and educating colonizer. Antoinette Burton notes: Colonial travelers worked to transform themselves (variously, temporarily, and often unstably) from objects of metropolitan spectacle to exhibitors of Western mores, and displayed for audiences (both public and private, Indian and British) exactly how unmannered and coercive Western “civilization” could be, particularly where imperial benevolence was concerned.29

Though this is not Anand’s only, or even his main, project in Conversations in Bloomsbury, he does provide a counter-identity for the British in his book, one that follows Burton’s suggestion of the display of an “unmannered and coercive Western civilization.” For the colonizing British in Anand’s book, this counter-identity is that of the oppressive conqueror who ignores the needs and wants of the colonized, favoring only what is best for the Empire—a sort of savage noble. Anand notes in his second chapter, “Lions and Shadows in the Sherry Party in Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop,” that each member of the Bloomsbury group had his or her own stereotypical notions of the colonial Indian, writing, I had entered a world of conflicting personalities, involved in various ways of transcending dailiness. I was distressed that there were lurking prejudices in all of them about the East.30

Again generalizing about the prejudices of the Bloomsbury group, Anand states, in “How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot”: They probably still had, in spite of the industrial revolution, a nostalgia for the “Merry Old England,” of the days of beef-eating, drinking beer and dancing around the Maypole. In fact, I could see strains of paganism among most of the English, underneath the long lined faces of the “melancholy gentlemen,” as I called them behind their backs and sometimes in front of them.31

By mentioning the British nostalgia for the pagan “Merry Old England” Anand again points out the savageness of the nobles. While Anand mentions generally the prejudices of each member of the group, his specific references to certain members of the group focus on

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T. S. Eliot and Bonamy Dobrée. Though Dobrée frequently defends Anand and India, even he, at points, displays the stereotypical British opinion of imperialism, stating: “Come, come, the British did give you roads—and justice,”32 as though Indians could not have achieved these things for themselves without British aid. Later, in “How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot,” Anand recounts another moment of Dobrée’s imperialist attitude, writing, I looked at him, then bent my head down. After a while, Dobrée said: “That is what I have told this rebel. Look at the unity we have given you. And the railways.”33

Dobrée not only implies Indian inferiority, but also calls upon the stereotypical image of the rebellious Indian. Eliot, in one of his many displays of the imperialist attitude, states: “Sometimes, I feel the Indians should pursue their culture and leave government to the British empiricists,”34 suggesting a British superiority and an Indian lack of capability. Disappointed in the Bloomsbury notion of India, Anand writes, I moved towards the sherry tray, surprised that two of the most selfconscious writers should be so removed from the actualities of India. Maybe they were for noble thoughts and could forgive Kipling everything for his lilts.35

With such thoughts Anand emphasizes the savageness of the noble British attitude toward India based solely upon, at best, second-hand accounts of India which were biased and inaccurate. As Edward Said points out in Orientalism, the “Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.”36 With the Orient serving in contrast to the West, as the Oriental subject of the “noble savage” stereotype grows more “noble”—more educated, more Westernized—it follows that the Western opposite, the British nobleman, can and will grow more savage. However, while the noble savage may grow more noble, he will never lose the “savageness” of his identity. Chinua Achebe states in “Colonialist Criticism” that the colonizer created the “man of two worlds” theory to prove that no matter how much the native was exposed to European influences he could never truly absorb them; like Prester John he would always discard the mask of civilization when the crucial hour came and reveal his true face.37

Similarly, the savage noble, though acting, in Burton’s terms, unmannered and coercive, can never lose his nobleness or the (centering) power

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structure of colonialism would be turned upside down. Anand himself takes up the project of restoring the nobleness of the savage when he writes, in his story “Crumpets with Nancy Cunard,” I realized that the intelligentsia here was a race apart. In spite of the divide between East and West, some brave spirits were always knocking down walls.38

Interestingly, the nobles Anand finds to be the most self-redeeming are the women of the Bloomsbury group, who are themselves socially below the colonizing Western man as well. Because the colonizing Western man is less self-redeeming for Anand, Anand takes it upon himself to restore the nobleness of the savage noble. The at least dualistic nature of the identities Anand presents in his book not only challenges the (Western) stereotypes of the colonized and the colonizer, but is also a necessary portrayal because, as Said points out, “it is the case that no identity can ever exist by itself and without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions . . . The opposite is certainly true as well.”39 Anand’s portrayals of both himself and the British are not only rebellious in their own way, but also necessary and, according to Said, more accurate than either the stereotypical portrayal of colonized and colonizer by Anand’s contemporary British authors or Anand’s inverted portrayal of both could be on their own. While the motives behind Anand’s inclusion of the image of himself as the subservient or inferior Indian may never be known, it seems that the work of both Edward Said and Jacques Derrida are useful in helping to prove the necessity of this inclusion. Such an inclusion may be seen as derogatory and detrimental to the aims of postcolonial studies because it perpetuates the use of negative stereotypes of the colonized. However, Said points out the necessity of an “array of opposites,” the use of both the stereotype and an inverse representation, and Derrida the need to include the entity being deconstructed in the process of deconstruction. Derrida states: We can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.40

In order to present himself as something other or more than the subservient, colonized, “noble savage,” Anand must include this image in his presentation. To move beyond the colonial identity, given to him by the colonizing British, Anand must first acknowledge that colonial

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identity. As Ayub Sheik states in “Identity and Dislocation”: These stereotypical descriptions are antithetical evaluations which are crucial to colonial discourse as an apparatus of power. It is an apparatus that turns the recognition and disavowal of racial, cultural and historical differences. It also creates the space for a “subject people” through the production of knowledges in which surveillance is exercised and control is guaranteed.41

The power of the colonizer over the colonized lies centered in this image of the colonized as inferior, and so, in order to take the power from the colonizer, Anand must claim the image as his own. By presenting his own images of the colonizer, Anand reverses the colonial gaze—typically represented outside of postcolonial studies as the colonizer gazing at the colonized—so that it is he who gazes at the colonizer. As Paranjape states, such challenges to colonial dominance generally “take place on native soil, but Anand’s project acquires an aspect of daring because he has taken the fight against the West to the West itself.”42 Anand’s reversal of the colonial gaze, then, gains more power because of the fact that Anand is interacting with the colonial British in Britain itself. As Bhabha claims, it is always in relation to the place of the Other that colonial desire is articulated: the phantasmic space of possession that no one subject can singly or fixedly occupy, and therefore permits the dream of the inversion of roles.43

By moving to the place (London) of his Other (the colonizing British), Anand is able to eject the colonizer from the space of possession and fulfill “the dream of the inversion of roles.” Anand claims for himself a place of power in London and reverses the colonial gaze in an inversion of roles. However, reversing the colonial gaze is not enough to gain control over his own identity and so Anand also presents his own images of himself. Thus, by reversing the colonial gaze—by gazing at the colonizer—and presenting his own images of himself, including the image(s) originally offered by the colonizing British, Anand claims control over both his own identity and the identity of the colonizer, placing himself in the seat of power in terms of the construction of identity. Claiming this power as his own, however, is not enough to ensure a postcolonial, multiple identity. If Anand hopes to oust the colonized/colonizing stereotype from its powerful position, he must abandon the structuring center of identity—colonization.44 The play of

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identity, the free exchange of one identity for another while not privileging any one of the multiple identities over the others, must be allowed to proceed in Conversations in Bloomsbury. The multiple selves—and others—which Anand presents in Conversations in Bloomsbury are equivalent to the multiple meanings found within language for Derrida, and the play of language is also the play of identity. Derrida notes that “what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute archia.”45 What must happen then for Anand to claim an identity of his own is a decentering of colonization and the colonial identity. This decentering is the rupture of decolonization. After decolonization, Anand and all colonized subjects are no longer subject to a structure of identity with colonization at its center. With this “structuring center” removed, the formerly colonized writer gains access to the play of identity, and so must present multiple self-identities, endlessly substitutable for each other, in order to avoid a return to the oppression of a centered system. Thus the colonial, fixed (and Western) identity and the postcolonial, multiple identities which Anand presents in Conversations in Bloomsbury are necessary for such a book. The singular identity he presents to each of the Bloomsbury members and the multiple identities he presents to his reader combine to make Anand’s text a postcolonial rejection of the imposed colonial identity. Such a move, though common in postcolonial texts, serves an important role in developing and maintaining a postcolonial identity. As Burton remarks, most important, [it] remind[s] us how critical it is for historians to acknowledge the need for multiple pasts and to embrace what Ann Stoler calls “the scrambled categories in which people lived,” not just under colonial regimes but in the postcolonial present as well.46

While this rejection and Burton’s emphasis on its importance to postcolonial literature and history in general imply a clear split between colonial and postcolonial, Conversations in Bloomsbury complicates such a distinction through its unique history of creation. Though Anand never states in Conversations in Bloomsbury just when he is in London encountering the Bloomsbury group, the stories he relates indicate that these events must be taking place during the 1920s and 1930s. While the back cover of the Oxford India Paperback edition of Conversations in Bloomsbury claims that “Anand met these writer-friends during the nineteen forties,” the 1940s are much too late for events Anand describes in his stories. The most helpful information in the book itself for

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situating the book’s events temporally comes from Virginia Woolf during her conversation with Anand. In “Tea and Empathy from Virginia Woolf,” Woolf says to Anand, “I am writing a novel, Orlando.”47 Orlando was published in 1928 and so Anand’s encounter with her must have taken place before, though not long before, 1928. While the precise date is not mentioned, the clues from the stories themselves as to when these events took place are enough to place the events roughly twenty years before India’s independence in 1947 and thus make the content of Conversations in Bloomsbury unquestionably colonial. Anand, however, did not publish Conversations in Bloomsbury until 1981, thirty-four years after the British withdrew from India and thirtythree years after Windrush landed in Tilbury Docks. Conversations in Bloomsbury, then, despite its colonial content, is itself a postcolonial creation. Thus the book itself, like the images of both colonized and colonizer which Anand incorporates into the text, carries both a colonial and a postcolonial identity. As K. D. Verma mentions, the process of recovering truth by evoking memory and history after a prolonged period of about fifty years and by examining it from two perspectives, the perspectives of the 30s and the 80s, defines the structural principle of Conversations.48

While the distinction between colonial and postcolonial in Conversations in Bloomsbury may appear rather straightforward, the distinction between colonial and postcolonial in regards to Conversations in Bloomsbury is less clear. Whether intentionally or not, Anand creates through Conversations in Bloomsbury a temporal decentering of colonization. As Bhabha points out, the struggle against colonial oppression not only changes the direction of Western history, but challenges its historicist idea of time as a progressive, ordered whole.49

Anand’s temporal decentering of colonization carries with it the implication that the concepts of history and time must also be reconsidered, for if the distinction between the ideas of colonial and postcolonial is temporally unstable, then the concept of time itself and the concept of history which is based in time, are most likely also unstable. Through such a decentering, Anand highlights the importance of multiple histories, offering another story, another history—what Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Stitt call a “prehistory”—of the development of modern England and the identities associated with it.50 Burton emphasizes the

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importance of “questioning approaches to colonialism that insist on a binary axis between colonizer and colonized because they do not do justice to the complexity of colonial relations.”51 While Anand does question such approaches, he goes even further and questions the binary relation between colonial and postcolonial as well. Sara Suleri points out in The Rhetoric of English India that the “necessary intimacies that obtain between ruler and ruled create a counter-culture” and that the narrative of English India questions the validity of both categories to its secret economy, which is the dynamic of powerlessness at the heart of the imperial configuration.52

Because his book cannot be clearly and unquestionably placed in either the colonial or postcolonial category, the two categories become inadequate and thus invalid. Neither the term “colonial” nor “postcolonial” can completely and accurately define Conversations in Bloomsbury, and so, while both categories are part of the book’s identity, the book itself takes part in the multiplicity of identity which Anand presents in the book. Thus, the power (or powerlessness) that was once part of the colonial/postcolonial binary is no longer relevant because the binary itself does not hold up. Through both the content and the publication and creative history of Conversations in Bloomsbury, Mulk Raj Anand challenges the distinctions between the colonial and postcolonial and celebrates the multiplicity of identity. Employing the notion of multiplicity in his book, Anand decenters colonization in the structure of cultural identity. Taking into account critics and theorists such as Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Antoinette Burton, and Jacques Derrida, Anand’s book can be read as not only challenging but also moving beyond the colonial notion of the “noble savage” and similar colonial identities of the colonized in terms of Indian identity and the benevolent colonizer in terms of the British. Anand succeeds in offering other images of both Indian and British, including the educated(-ing) Indian and the savage/noble British. More important than claiming multiple identities for the people portrayed in Conversations in Bloomsbury, however, Anand’s book also claims multiple identities for itself. By defying easy classification into either the category of colonial or the category of postcolonial, Conversations in Bloomsbury itself contributes to the decentering of colonization in terms of the structure of identity and in the field of third-world literature. Conversations in Bloomsbury, neither colonial nor postcolonial—but also both colonial and postcolonial—suggests that the classificatory categories used to describe third-world literature are inadequate. Anand suggests that colonization

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cannot be the term to which third-world people and literature are related and that such people and literature must be seen as more than simply colonial or postcolonial since the line between the two is blurry at best.

Selected Bibliography Achebe, Chinua. “Colonialist Criticism.” In Ashcroft, 57-61. Anand, Mulk Raj. Conversations in Bloomsbury. 1981. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Postcolonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. —. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Naipaul, V. S. The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad. New York: Knopf, 1980. Paranjape, Makarand. “T. S. Eliot through Indian Eyes: Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury.” The Literary Criterion 24, nos. 3-4 (1989): 50-68. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. —. “Orientalism.” In Ashcroft, 87-91. Sheik, Ayub. “Identity, Dislocation and Loss in B. D. Lalla’s Poetic Trilogy, The Black Coolie (1946), The Ugly Duckling (1947) and The Epic Struggle.” In Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, edited by Rajendra Chetty and Pier Paolo Piciucco, 187-197. Johannesburg: STE, 2004. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Verma, K. D. “Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury.” Journal of South Asian Literature 29, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 1994): 83-111.

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Notes 1

Makarand Paranjape, “T. S. Eliot through Indian Eyes: Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury,” The Literary Criterion 24, nos. 3-4 (1989): 58. 2 K. D. Verma, “Ideological Confrontation and Synthesis in Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury,” Journal of South Asian Literature 29, no. 2 (Summer-Fall 1994): 87. 3 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278. 4 V. S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad (New York: Knopf, 1980), 216. 5 For example, E. M. Foster, T. S. Eliot, and Leonard Woolf. 6 Paranjape, 52. 7 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 40. 8 Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 2. 9 Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 19. 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Anand, 12 (emphasis added). 12 Paranjape, 57. 13 Anand, 3. 14 Ibid. 15 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 167. 16 Anand, 44. 17 Bhabha, 29. 18 Anand, 157. 19 Ibid., 24. 20 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 166. 21 Ibid. 22 Anand, 133. 23 Ibid., 23. 24 See the introduction to this anthology. 25 Anand, 26. 26 Ibid., 42 (emphasis added). 27 Ibid., 8 (emphasis added). 28 See the introduction to this collection. 29 Burton, 3. 30 Anand, 18. 31 Ibid., 46. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Ibid., 50.

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Ibid., 16. Ibid. (emphasis added). 36 Edward Said, “Orientalism,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 87. 37 Chinua Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism,” in Ashcroft, 58. 38 Anand, 37. 39 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 52. 40 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 280-281. 41 Ayub Sheik, “Identity, Dislocation and Loss in B. D. Lalla’s Poetic Trilogy, The Black Coolie (1946), The Ugly Duckling (1947) and The Epic Struggle,” in Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty and Pier Paolo Piciucco (Johannesburg: STE, 2004), 191. 42 Paranjape, 66. 43 Bhabha, 44 (emphasis added). 44 Or, more aptly, recognized as non-center. 45 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 286. 46 Burton, 23. 47 Anand, 111. 48 Verma, 84. 49 Bhabha, 41. 50 See the introduction to this anthology. 51 Burton, 22. 52 Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3. 35

CHAPTER EIGHT C. L. R. JAMES: KNOWING ENGLAND BETTER THAN THE ENGLISH W. F. SANTIAGO-VALLES

Dedicated to Robert Wedderburn There have been people of African origin in Britain since sometime between 193 CE1 and 210 CE.2 Even before the English invaded Africa and the Caribbean, displaced migrants from these regions had begun to make their way to the islands off Europe’s western coast. By the 1760s the black population from Africa and the Caribbean in London alone was about 20,000.3 They had brought with them centuries of experience about the racialization of class, empires, enslavement, colonialism, capitalism and globalization. Those who, like Ottobah Cuguano and Robert Wedderburn, came to Britain from Africa and the Caribbean also brought news about struggles for self-emancipation, independence, and the end of capitalist production for the world market. Since the eighteenth century such memories and news providing a sense of totality (once shared across the ports of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean) became references for national and regional social movements. Such interpretations and representations based on a history of popular confrontations with the State and workplace were the cultural basis for an alternative literary heritage. These ways of verifying abstract ideas through the direct actions of mass movements used participatory research to connect the economic, military, and political sphere in order to learn from previous experiences and then to turn that analysis into fiction or non-fiction to teach readers how to seize strategic initiatives against the global order of the day. In the 1920s people in the British territories who went to school studied English history and were trained to place it at the center of their world. That kind of training has since changed somewhat as a result of the production, distribution, and analysis of work by members of the

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alternative and radical tradition that is the subject of this anthology. The purpose of this specific essay is to contextualize a contribution to that community of method by one particular radical thinker, C. L. R. James, who came to Britain from the Caribbean, the region from which Una Marson, and Amy Jacques Garvey also made the same trip. This concept of “community of method” is discussed later in the section on The Black Jacobins. Like A. Gramsci, and J. C. Mariategui, C. L. R. James (as well as Claudia Jones and Jan Carew after him) examined histories of collective practices organizing daily life in order to identify means of mobilizing groups with shared interests against the causes of their urgencies.4 For the groups in Britain with whom James worked, the cultural ferment in which consent was withdrawn and domination pushed back was not only the object of their research and the content of their practice but the purpose of their writings. As we move through this essay, the reader will learn about the transition of someone from the colonies who initially thought of himself as a metropolitan intellectual and the exchanges that made him an anti-colonial cosmopolitan, who knew that it was the underdevelopment of the colonies that developed Britain. It was not only industrialists, merchants, and bankers who invested in the slave trade, for example, but the royal family as well.5 Through studying the work of the collectives in which James moved and their organized practice, we can learn to appreciate the central issues of the last century and how their premises were challenged. One of those issues is selfemancipation and James’s contribution to this subject in particular is his history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins, written in the context of British anti-colonial activism in the late 1930s. It is a history of conscious organization, a history in which people showed themselves willing to destroy everything they had been forced to build in order to win their sovereignty. At the beginning of The Black Jacobins, James describes the contrast between the behavior of the Haitian slaves during the working day and their conversations around the supper fire.6 Using the notes of eighteenthcentury travelers in the French colony, James contrasts the apparent docility of the slaves with their lively and intelligent exchanges among themselves. The slaves taught one another about new plants, told stories wherein skill defeated force, and exchanged ideas about their future freedom. Around the evening fires of the plantation barracks and the mountain communities, the participants in such conversations created a common representation of their new situation, in a process of oppositional adaptation repeated across the region. Through such efforts, borrowed

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cultural materials were changed and reworked so as to ensure the survival and continuity of a shared critical consciousness. By bending and qualifying dominant ideas and ways of thinking—though without leaving visible traces of the process—the humanity and freedom of the enslaved were nurtured, despite persecution. According to Sylvia Wynter, this strategy of survival also succeeded in changing the slavers’ mode of communication by injecting into it the tension of an opposition that was unpredictable.7 That tension was felt in the daily activities of the slaves on the plantations and the free mountain communities as well as in the subversive exploits of the domestic servants. Their actions included destroying machinery, poisoning animals and wells, storing supplies for the Maroons, spying on slavers, forging travel documents for the messengers who connected subversive groups (including recaptured Maroons/runaways), purchasing weapons, and executing masters. The very meanings of European words were altered by the dominated, who used their newly learned languages to connect the opposition to slavery, dispersed among slaves, house servants, and mountain villagers, into a social movement. Identifying the means of expression collectively developed by the dominated was continued by some writers and activists during the colonial period. By the 1920s, both European and North American representations of the Caribbean, as well as social theories and research methods, were being borrowed, “translated,” and incorporated into the region’s radical traditions.8 The Caribbean is a region where, for centuries, European-imposed capitalism assumed the form of colonial slavery. Each colony was a commercial enterprise which produced merchandise for the international market and in which production units were militarized so as to contain rebellion among waged and unwaged workers. The unwaged were recognized only as slaves; their humanity was denied. With the advent of humanist capitalism, according to Jesús Ibáñez, the humanity of the waged was recognized but their enslavement was denied.9 The Caribbean was also the region where the organized practices of pluralism and nationalism against the colonial state were pioneered by Maroon communities. According to George Lamming, all of us need to study that history to confront the consequences of bonded work, indentured labor, and slavery.10 C. L. R. James and other activist intellectuals worked in groups studying a history in which an examination of popular cultures was central, as was an understanding of the making of those cultures. Like the Maroons before them, the groups of activist intellectuals in Britain and the social movements with which they worked also became protagonists of the political history in the metropolis and the colonies both.

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My focus in this essay is on the processes of communication that take place in the midst of conflicts determined by unequal relations of force and that challenge the dominant representation of the existing order. They stem from efforts to change the relations of inequality. For the nonassimilated colonized, who faced a fundamentally similar problem to the rebellious slaves, mastery of the dominant culture might not have explained local crises but it could be used to access metropolitan discussions about the exercise of sovereignty.11 Communication as a social practice here means participation in collective actions, intended to question, understand, and transform, prevailing social relations. What held my attention in The Black Jacobins was James’s description of popular movements becoming historical subjects as they teach one another, as they learn together and intervene consciously in their own shared interests. Participants in such social movements teach one another while engaged in the redefinition of power relations. Part of that process is the constant updating of a shared way of thinking that distinguishes communities of liberation from the forces of domination.12 Maroon communities represented the organized will to confront plantation society in terms which both parties could understand. More than just the product of resistance to the unequal relations of the day, Maroon communities represented the altering of those relations. In time, “Maroon” became synonymous with the tradition of voluntary collective work for the community’s benefit; work that could not be used against the social interest. The world of the Maroon communities was that of the escaped, who created new solidarities from the mixture of Africans, Black Creoles, aboriginals, escaped European convicts, and Sephardic Jews who sought freedom. Since the time of those first “new world” struggles for selfemancipation, the continuity of Marooning has depended on the circulation of shared memories about the choices that can be created.13 The Maroon communities did organize economic and cultural production in a way that negated plantation society, liberated territory, and sustained a separate nation. As self-emancipated groupings, they also evinced a central quality of social movements: they were organized communities that sustained conscious actions over an extended historical period. For the small, radical research-cum-activist groups of 1930s, this was essential. Acknowledging the history of Marronage in popular cultures represented an opportunity to reorient Caribbean societies toward their own realities and to organize the lives of the Caribbean migrants living in Britain. This is one of the many levels at which The Black Jacobins proved successful. The historical investigations, undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s, into Maroon victories took the Maroons as a symbol

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of the cooperation needed to survive and as a means of examining the possibilities for colonial independence.14 The Maroon communities stood not only for courage and determination but were also models of institutions that encouraged production for self-sufficiency and generated support for their ideas and approach. Symbolic of a cultural opposition whose existence called into question the dominant rationale, these effective demonstrations of sovereignty were the direct result of the historical conditions that existed in the Caribbean. According to Sylvia Wynter, the fact that the region’s cultural genesis was in the slave trade presented some very specific choices for ways of struggling. Either original cultural identities had to be denied if participants were to feature in the official “story” of the region or the accepted, instituted conceptualization of that story had to be redefined as a generalization that did not fully express the interest or experience of the majorities.15 This is what the Maroon communities represented; the collective rejection of an assigned role that denied the slaves’ history before captivity and an affirmation of prophetic memories that bound direct experience to the oral tradition.16 Another set of cultural practices evoked by the discussion, during the 1930s, of the Maroon experience in the Caribbean had to do with the creation of regional information networks. One of the obstacles to slave revolts and Maroon campaigns was that information about events outside the plantation was limited, as was knowledge extending beyond the colonial system that operated in the region (variously controlled by Holland, Denmark, France, England, Portugal, and Spain). Yet there were exchanges of information at the docks between sailors and stevedores, and between sailors and crafts-people, so that news made its way to the inland markets where slaves could talk to one another and where the Maroons had spies (who also sold farm products). Similar information networks operated within each colony, using Nsibidi ideograms, Arabic and European languages, as well as the cover to meet and mingle provided by public events.17 Since the beginning of the twentieth century, some intellectuals from the region have identified agricultural workers, descended from the Maroons, as being central to the development of new identities that evoke cultural continuity. I use the concept of Marronage to mean the efforts to overcome isolation and achieve a secure environment; to create associations based on shared solutions to common problems; and to sustain organized transgression against oppression and exploitation.18 Sometimes the slave revolts had more radical goals than the Maroon communities, sometimes Maroon communities even joined with the

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slavers against the slaves or other Maroon republics, but what is pertinent is how Marooning survived in the collective memory as a model of transgression sustained through cooperation.19 Recourse to memories of Maroon communities was certainly a means of rehabilitating symbols of popular opposition to domination, but the way that members of the small radical groups of the 1930s from the Caribbean, Europe, and North America used knowledge of these traditions may reveal other intentions. Social forces that made a cultural impact could, in this light, also be appreciated as political protagonists. The activistintellectuals of the 1930s recognized that there had been an ongoing process of excluding collective memories that effectively linked the insurgent territories in the Caribbean region. If the obstacles created by that exclusion process were to be overcome in the period between the world wars, it would be necessary to develop an understanding of how the organization of work and coercion interacted with the efforts of the people to regain control over their lives through both confrontation and negotiation.20

The African Bureau With this in mind, let me say something about one of the groups against the backdrop of which The Black Jacobins was written. The consolidation of the Italian occupation of Ethiopia during 1936 revealed the limitations of liberal decolonization and of the international institutions of governments with colonies. The League of Nations had proved itself incapable of defending Ethiopia’s sovereignty, and, in this, raised once again the experience of the Haitian Maroons, which was that the colonized had to rely on their own methods and resources. In response to the occupation, the International African Friends of Abyssinia was reorganized in March 1937. The process of seeking a new understanding of the situation encouraged Maroon intellectuals in London to regroup and redefine both the direction of their research on the colonial question and a range of collective actions that could stimulate mobilization. What James, Padmore, and others were looking to was to put together a volunteer force which could help expel the invaders and, ultimately, help to end the feudal system in Ethiopia. While James’s research into Haiti suggested the need to intervene simultaneously in the colonies and the metropolis, Padmore, a member of the same group, continued to encourage the separatists. The new organization was called the International African Service Bureau (IASB) or African Bureau for short. Whenever an important event took place in the colonies, its members would call a meeting, pass a

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resolution, and present a copy to the Colonial Office and another to the media; at minimum, the African Bureau made sure that events that took place in the African colonies were publicly noted. Its general aim was to ensure that the commercial media and participants in public debate paid as much attention to Africa as to Europe and South Asia.21 The Bureau also used its activities for mobilizing public opinion as a basis for questioning the premises of the existing order both in Moscow and London. It applied radical social theory to the colonial world, recuperating the insurgent traditions of European social movements so as to propose them as models in campaigns of education or solidarity.22 The African Bureau used the news and research materials it received through its international network as well as information supplied by correspondents in Africa, with whom Padmore constantly exchanged letters. Since the members of the Bureau were connected with organizations of migrants, students, dock workers, and university-trained professionals, news items could be circulated and confirmed or corrected by reference to different sources. In addition to written and verbal exchanges, the members of this small radical group used education campaigns and their work as foreign correspondents to explain how events in the colonial world affected the peoples of Europe and North America. In Britain, the African Bureau proved indispensable for those who wanted to understand the global dimensions of the social system. Although the African Bureau, with which James worked, left the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in October 1936, the continued collaboration of some of its members with the ILP eventually resulted in the creation of a British center against imperialism and the ILP’s own office of colonial affairs. For African and Caribbean activists interested in fashioning strategies and policies for national liberation, the African Bureau became an essential stopping off point on arrival in Britain. By March 1937, this small group, which had undertaken to incorporate issues of economic sovereignty, decolonization, and direct democracy into Pan-Africanism, had undergone its third reorganization since 1934. With the occupation of Ethiopia fresh in their minds, the circle of radical PanAfricanists in London decided to study the colonial question in order to mobilize an international network that would support its resolution in Africa. In addition to those already mentioned, the core group included Fritz Braithwaite (Barbados); Arnold Ward, from the London Negro Welfare Alliance (Barbados); Chris Jones, ex-Communist (Barbados); I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, trade unionist (Sierra Leone); Jomo Kenyatta; C. L. R. James; George Padmore; and two recent recruits, Dorothy Pizer Padmore (Great Britain) and T. Ras Makonnen (British Guiana), who were

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at the center of the African Bureau’s activities. Pizer Padmore worked on translations and provision of hospitality and Ras Makonnen hired meeting halls and raised funds. The latter ran a boarding house in London and several restaurants where the schooled migrants from Africa and the Caribbean met regularly. Arthur Lewis (St. Lucia) and Eric Williams (Trinidad) were among the university students on the periphery of the African Bureau. Arthur Lewis went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics and Eric Williams to become prime minister of his country. During the spring and autumn of 1937, James continued to work on the role of the intellectual in the Haitian popular revolution. By identifying the connections between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean at that critical juncture, he was also trying to answer questions being debated in the 1930s, such as the means of communication across social movements and their mobilization, or the reluctance of intellectuals to throw their lot in with the popular sectors that could transform the crisis. I concentrate here on the work of C. L. R. James because he was the common link between several small groups, including the African Bureau, the New Marxist Group, the ILP, and the League of Coloured Peoples. In addition, James centered the discussion on decolonization in the mediations between the colonies and the metropolis.23 To understand the encounter between Africans and Europeans in the Americas, as well as its consequences, James argued that it was necessary to explain the contradictory relations between all the parts.24 At the same time that James was working on the Black Jacobins manuscript, he was translating Souvarine’s biography of Stalin. Souvarine was a French Bolshevik who had been in Russia during the Revolution and had remained to work with the international networks of the labor movement and the frequent conferences of labor leaders held in Moscow. From him, James, while in Paris, learned about the importance of the oral tradition for historical research and understanding. He also learned in depth about the anonymous protagonists of the workers’ movement, in particular in the self-organizing councils (1905-20) that had been excluded from the official history. The possibility of explicating that marginalized intellectual tradition and cultural history was one of the lessons James drew from his conversations with Souvarine. The Black Jacobins evidences James’s intention to raise awareness about the multiplicity of catalysts in daily life as part of a redefinition of those cultural forms through which collective actions could be organized. But that initial effort by James might have benefited scholars and practitioners even more had it referred at length to the popular assemblies from which leaders came who did not collaborate with the occupation or who went further than

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reiterating Toussaint’s proposal of dominion status for Haiti. It is interesting to speculate that, had Souvarine worked more closely with those who participated in the debates that preceded Jacobins, more time and space may well have been given to the ways that the insurgent leaders who were Toussaint’s contemporaries communicated and acted: Boukman Dutty, Georges Biassou, Cecile Fatiman, Jean François, Jeannot Bullet, Hyacinthe, Docoudray, and Halou. This period, 1937-38, was an extraordinarily productive one. Not only was The Black Jacobins nearing publication, James was also spending time on the Souvarine translation and attending the meetings of the African Bureau and the “new” Marxist Group. In June 1938, James, together with William Harrison, a black American, must also have been finalizing the first issue of the African Bureau’s journal, International African Opinion, which began monthly publication in July. The purpose of the journal was to make its readers aware of events in the colonies, and to discuss the tactics and policies best suited to resolving the colonial question.25 It was intended to complement the Bureau’s occasional pamphlets about the Caribbean, the League of Nations’ trust territories, and North America, as well as the books written by its members.26 International African Opinion was followed, in August, by an issue of the NAACP publication, The Crisis, in which George Schuyler wrote about the imminent war and its likely impact on colonial struggles against foreign intervention. Titled “The Rise of the Black Internationale,” the article referred to the growing awareness of common interests among those seeking liberation in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, as well as to colonialists’ concerns about the governability of the occupied territories. Then in September, the African Bureau published Europe’s Difficulty is Africa’s Opportunity, a pamphlet in which the group discussed a similar “community of interests” with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and some Congress Party leaders from India. All agreed that the colonized should take advantage of the anticipated war—in which the empires would be busy with one another—to promote decolonization. It was to prove to be a war in which the imperial powers, forced to arm the colonized, created options difficult to contain. Another pamphlet, which appeared in September, illustrated the stages of such collective discussions: from private meetings to research organized in groups; from activities in meeting-halls where manuscripts were discussed to critical editing among co-thinkers in an international network; and, finally, publication. Some pamphlets were aimed at educating and informing the media and MPs, others were for distribution in the colonies.

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September also saw the publication by FACT (the ILP magazine) of James’s monograph, History of Pan-African Revolt. (Padmore had been initially approached by the ILP to write this, but was unable to take it on.) This provided another opportunity to situate the self-emancipating efforts of black people among the radical tendencies that changed world history and appeared at a time of continuous uprisings in the Caribbean and Africa. Haiti had been in revolt since 1929; there was a miners’ revolt in 1935 in Rhodesia and there had recently been a transport strike in the Gold Coast. This was the kind of publication made available at railway stations, press stands, and coffee-houses to counter the interpretation of the mainstream and official media. In addition to putting current events in the context of historical tendencies, The History of Pan-African Revolt is significant for several reasons. First, James’s participation in radical movements within British politics was supported by his research on the French, Haitian, and Russian revolutions, which suggested that organized efforts of self-emancipation in the colonies had a better chance of success when the “sans-culottes” were also establishing direct democracy in the metropolis.27 Second, as with other publications from the members of the African Bureau, The History of Pan-African Revolt proposed that it was necessary to end colonialism to defeat fascism, and that there were historical precedents for co-operation between workers that cut across differences of race and national origin. By 1938, James had recognized and understood that there were multiple economic, cultural, and mental catalysts for the colonial uprisings and that these deserved the attention of readers interested in identifying and drawing on such historical precedents.

Black Jacobins and Colonial Liberation The discussions that took place in the African Bureau, about civil disobedience or warfare, about alliances with metropolitan ruling classes or self-sufficient organizations in the colonies, bore fruit most notably in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, published in 1938. This book helped the non-expert reader in Great Britain to grasp the economic interdependence between Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean that had been institutionalized during the era of forced labor. James’s uncovering of the levels of cooperation among enslaved Africans and Creole Maroons (whose lives depended on identifying and then creating the means to such cooperation in a foreign context) was intended to serve as an example for African separatists operating at home in the 1930s.

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James had begun to acquire the French materials for his research while still in Trinidad; in Lancashire, he continued to pursue the subject. Once he was in London, his research was nurtured by conversations with other Maroon intellectuals who were similarly interested in historical cases where self-organized workers’ armies in the colonies had seized on opportunities created by metropolitan upheavals. As others have pointed out, it was the organized praxis of the small research group that made it possible for them to identify contemporary opportunities for selfemancipation on the basis of the historical examples studied.28 In his essay about the years James spent in England, Robert A. Hill wrote the following about the conclusion of The Black Jacobins: This was no Utopian vision. It was based ultimately on the facts of history and directly on the organized political activity which had started among a handful of Black men but which would subsequently become encompassed in the political motion of the African peoples themselves. It was the very apotheosis of realization for the “small political organization.”29

What this passage suggests is that, much as Caribbean migrants in New York City in the early 1920s could, in their persons, represent the whole region from that one location, so the small groups in London, drawn together from different backgrounds in the late 1930s, could come together to recognize and analyze certain historical tendencies. A “community of method”—by which I mean the particular way of organizing information and experiencing and interpreting reality that characterizes a “thought style” evolved during that period.30 It was shared by a network of groups that gathered information, researched, wrote and edited manuscripts, working as an intellectual collective whose analysis could be confirmed by mass actions. In The Black Jacobins, James paid attention to the cultural tradition of self-organization and to the oppositional nature of the thought styles current among the social movements in Haiti, and to the dominant ways of thinking and acting to produce knowledge in Europe. In this text, James also, in describing the causes and consequences of Toussaint’s authoritarian behavior, referred to the communication system created by the Maroons and their intellectuals. According to James, one of the attributes of Caribbean societies was that the levels of competence and mastery shared by unschooled people allowed them not only to understand the mediations connecting most parts of the whole but how it could be transformed.31 It was not till after 1791 that communication between West African slaves and French slavers

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could go beyond the issuing of instructions at the mills and plantations— beyond the requirements of exploitation—when the French were forced to recognize the mastery of the Haitians’ popular organizations. Long before the Marxist Group or the African Bureau developed such a strategy, the insurgents from Haiti had an international network of contacts (with abolitionist groups, Maroon confederations and black corsairs), gathering information needed to make decisions in Haiti and in Paris.32 By concentrating attention on the manual worker’s capacity for rapid cultural adaptation and creativity, James also proposed a reading of the historical record that reflected his arguments in the ongoing discussions at the African Bureau. The purpose of the book was to demonstrate the historical relationship between the constraints imposed by context and the capacity of the popular to create possibilities that responded to the majority’s needs. The obstacles surmounted by the Africans—who managed to defeat the might of Europe’s armies shortly after being enslaved—are often contrasted with the conditions for African self-emancipation in the 1930s. The acquisition of a strategy through which opportunities for action could be identified was evaluated through an examination of the cooperation between the literate house servants and the Maroon communities, which had been in existence since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The analysis of the metropolitan dependence on the colonies as one of the contextual constraints on action was revealed through an investigation of the relationship between the French bourgeoisie, production on the slave plantations, and the contingent industries located at the center of the empire. The attitude of indifference toward the colonial question in the 1930s can be seen as analogous to the prevalent attitude toward slavery in eighteenth-century Britain, an attitude which altered only after Haiti had become productive and the North American colonies sovereign. What the passages exploring these issues suggest is an effort to structure the agenda for research and discussions among the activist-intellectuals in the small groups of the 1930s: where was the wealth created, who were the allies of the wealth’s producers, which groups were adversaries under the existing order? James argued that, as the conflict between the industrialists and the aristocracy during the French Revolution had helped the rest of the metropolitan population develop a strategic conception of the possibility of change, similarly, the slaves in Haiti became conscious of the opportunities for change during the conflicts there between white and brown slavers. The point of such analysis was that, in the 1930s, the anticipated world war could be used to mobilize the colonized more

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effectively if lessons could be drawn from historical precedent. In 1931, Padmore had suggested that, in the current situation, the workers in Europe and North America should educate workers in the colonies and, in 1936, that support for decolonization could be found among the propertied as well. But James, drawing lessons from history, argued that when the mulatto slavers demanded their rights as citizens, the whites (republicans and monarchists in Haiti and in France) joined against the colonized— despite their common interests as property owners. (It was in this context that James asked whether property ever listened to reason.33) Whether at the Marxist Group or the African Bureau, or further afield in the dissident Trinidadian magazine, the Beacon,34 the historical research that was pursued asked questions of the past that would organize the answers needed in the 1930s. By demonstrating in The Black Jacobins how the dominant in the metropolis refused to support liberation, James proposed a self-sufficiency that would enable the colonized of the contemporary era to seize the initiative during periods of social crisis in Europe. In 1791, the organizations of radical democrats who were in favor of debating the colonial question and recognizing the mulattos as citizens were destroyed by the factory owners—even as armed confrontations between the slavers demonstrated to the slaves how freedom could be taken. In tandem with his reconstruction of public events, James demonstrates how groups of slaves gathered at night to compare the printed news from France and their direct observations of the civil war. This again demonstrated how, for the colonized, they too should use any opportunities to create institutions in which the news could again be read against the grain, with the benefit of direct observation. During the eighteenth century, the plantations in the northern plains were the hub of Haiti’s economic activity as well as the site of Cap Français, the colony’s political and cultural center. The hundreds of workers brought together in the plantations and sugar mills in the north of Haiti were not property owners requiring parliamentary recognition; these black laborers organized themselves to take their freedom. There, production was structured in such a way that the slaves were far more like an industrialized labor force than any of their contemporaries. As such, they planned and carried out a national insurrection, communicating through the network of their religious organizations; through what James C. Scott, in a discussion of self-organization, has termed the “hidden transcript.”35 The intellectuals contributed the contextual perspective, while the manual workers created the policies and institutions of their sovereignty.

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Given their 200 years of experience with the methods through which power was exercised, the northern slaves were able to organize themselves to intervene in ways that would be understood both by the popular and the dominant. The leadership that emerged included those initiated in religious practices, some domestic servants, former slaves, and Maroons. The intensification of the racial terror by the slavers made it easier to win the support of the undecided slaves. According to James, it was the existence of an organized insurrection among the Haitian slaves that encouraged the workers and peasants in France to support the most inclusive solution to the colonial question—abolition of the way that work was organized. But the monarchists and the factory owners would not negotiate. By the autumn of 1794, the conservatives had regained control in Paris and made an alliance with the British in order to restore slavery in all the colonies—it had been abolished in France in February of that year. When the British forces occupied Haiti, after slavery had been abolished but before its reimposition, they were confronted by an organized population that proposed radical solutions to the problems of daily life. Even as James was writing this in 1938, the western democracies were recognizing fascist claims to colonial territories, and the Soviet Union was supporting “democratic” empires such as those of France and Great Britain. For my purpose here, the defeat of the British, Spanish, and French armies in Haiti is less important than James’s treatment of the communication systems that were the bones and sinews of the liberation process. This is the bridge between the historical events in Haiti and what he was trying to propose for policy discussions in London. The popular assemblies and the military control of northern Haiti were the outcome of negotiations among workers in a region that was the country’s economic motor. The demands and slogans that mobilized them to go to war were identified at these negotiations; leadership and initiatives emerged from these experiences of emancipatory communication. Through the exercise of their cultural capacities, Africans, Creole slaves, and Maroons together produced the defeat of Europe’s greatest armies. Their rapid adaptation to the demands of the conflict was considered by James to be a function of the popular information systems through which they discovered the intentions of the dominant.36 By 1802, the war had, among other things, become a means of identifying and verifying the possibilities for social movements to act as intellectual collectives, developing their own solutions and ways of proceeding. It was a testing ground of the insurgents’ communication strategies. It was in the popular assemblies in the northern mountains that rebellion was organized against Toussaint’s generals and new leaders

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emerged out of shared dialogues through which they learned the cooperation on which their lives depended. As race, color, class, nation, and religion became intertwined, black and mulatto insurgents realized that, even under Dominion or Commonwealth status, slavery could be restored. So, in actions characterized by their assumption of cultural and economic sovereignty, Haitians denied the expeditionary forces any of the fruits of forced labor by creating a desert, burning crops, and poisoning wells.37 This was the first successful uprising—against three European empires—by Africans and black Creoles. The result of the first war of liberation in the Americas was a new people who were the product of mixture and adaptation, whose sovereignty depended on their selfsufficiency. In 1938, under more consciously advanced conditions of struggle in which dominant premises had been rejected, colonial subjects in Africa were better prepared to procure their sovereignty and James submitted the Haitian example to them for their consideration. In the period between the first and second editions of The Black Jacobins (1938 to 1963) the praxis of such small radical organizations evolved, integrating manual and mental work. In an appendix to the second edition, James noted intellectual and social movements in Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad during the 1920s and 1930s. First in Cuba and Haiti (1927), then in Brazil, Surinam, and Trinidad (1931), other small groups faced the challenge of coming to terms with events that disrupted their understanding and connectedness to the wider world by revealing the relations of force. However, limitations of time and space prevent me from commenting here on Jacques Roumain and the social movements in Haiti or Surinam and Anton DeKom that were the forerunners of the groups in which James participated. A comparison of their activities with those discussed here will have to wait until another time. In closing the 1963 appendix, James reviewed the collaboration between manual and mental workers as the crucial Caribbean intellectual tradition that resulted from sharing with others the experience of bringing about solutions to the region’s problems. The gap between material conditions and our awareness of them can be probed in literature, art, the commercial media, urban life, and the study of history, but James suggests that the burden of the Caribbean intellectual tradition is to explore that gap by explaining the institutions that sustain, reproduce, and exercise power.38 It is that tradition that James traced to the mountains of northern Haiti, to the people in the popular assemblies learning together. In The Black Jacobins, James succeeds in putting the Caribbean region at the center of world events, and makes it possible to contrast the

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construction of domination’s official history with the careful exclusion of the insurgents’ collective memory. During the period between 1932-1938, when he was in Britain, James published three biographies, three history books, a novel, a play, and a treatise for Trinidad self-government; wrote a regular sports column; edited two newspapers; and participated in the leadership of two political organizations, each with its own international network of people who collected historical documents and current newspaper clippings. His participation in this collective reconstruction of the past was undertaken to address at least two needs of the 1930s: to explore how solidarity can overcome repression and how to create an autonomous version of events in the colonies that puts empires in a holistic perspective.39 Under the current doctrine of globalization, invasions, occupations, colonization, and enslavement still occur and they impose the forced displacement of migrants first to the urban slums of the South and then to the North. The transnational networks that these present-day migrants create against economic apartheid can still benefit from learning about those Haitian Maroons who were not following Europe’s lead, and how James and his friends brought the exclusions of the empire (as a way of appropriating unpaid work) to Britain. As Jocelyn Stitt reminds us in her chapter about gender in this anthology between the time British homes were first lit with gas and the ascent of Disraeli, the crisis of community and the place of the black poor in it is still the question of the day.40

Postscript In one of the lectures James gave at the Institute of the Black World in 1971,41 he discussed how he would rewrite The Black Jacobins. First, he would describe the forced work carried out by the enslaved on the basis of their own testimonies, complementing this with statements about slavery from the common people in France. Second, he would explain, as from within, the conflicts that resulted both in the division of the Paris Commune in 1793 and in the rank and file soldiers’ revolt against Toussaint (when Republican armies tried to re-establish slavery). Third, he would contrast this stage of the revolution with the guerrilla wars in Spain and Russia against Napoleon’s forces. Fourth, he would explain the causes of Toussaint’s defeat. Fifth, he would attend more to the historical evidence found in the songs of the social movements, as well as the stories and ideas they exchanged. Those suggestions are still there for the taking if we are to understand more deeply the interconnections between the Caribbean, North America,

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Europe, and Africa through the epoch-making example of those first willing to pay the full price of freedom.

Selected Bibliography Arrom, Juan Jose. “Cimarron: Apuntes Sobre sus Primeras Documentaciones y su Probable Origen.” Anales del Caribe 2 (Havana: Centro Estudios del Caribe-Casa las Americas, 1982): 174185. The same article is also available from Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana 13 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1983): 47-58. Bebel-Gisler, Dany. Leonora: The Buried Story of Guadeloupe. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Benitez Rojo, Antonio. La Isla Que se Repite. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989. Beth, Hanno, and Harry Pross. Introduccion a Las Ciencias de la Comunicacion. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1987. Bogues, Anthony. Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James. London: Pluto, 1997. Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Chaudhuri, Nupur, and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Dash, J. Michael. Edouard Glissant. NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995. De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. NY: Swerve, 1991. Drayton, Richard, and Andaiye, eds. Conversations with George Lamming: Essays, Addresses and Interviews, 1953-1990. London: Karia, 1992. Fleck, Ludwik. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Fo, Dario. Trumpets and Berries. London: Pluto Press, 1984. Fontenot, Chester J. Frantz Fanon: Language as the God Gone Astray in the Flesh. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education. Cambridge, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain Since 1504. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984. Geiss, Immanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974.

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Genovese, Eugene. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Glissant, Edouard. L’Intention Poetique. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969. Hall, Stuart. “A Conversation with C. L. R. James.” In Rethinking C. L. R. James, edited by Grant Farred, 15-44. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Harris, Wilson. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. Georgetown: History and Arts Council/Ministry of Information and Culture, 1970. Hazelwood, Nick. The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkins, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking of Human Souls. NY: Harper, 2004. Hill, Robert A. Afterword to American Civilization, by C.L.R. James. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993 —. “In England, 1932-1938.” In C. L. R. James, His Life and Work, edited by Paul Buhle, 61-80. London: Allison and Busby, 1986. Hiro, Dilip. Black British, White British. NY: Monthly Review, 1973. Hooker, James R. Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970. Ibáñez, Jesús. Mas Alla de la Sociologia. El Grupo de Discussion: Tecnica, y Critica. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. NY: Vintage, 1963. —. “Black Scholar Interview.” The Black Scholar 2, no. 1 (Fall 1970): 3543. —. “Civilising the Blacks; Why Britain needs to Maintain her African Possessions.” New Leader 29 (May 1936): 5 —. The Future in the Present, Selected Writings. London: Allison and Busby, 1977. —. “Lectures on the Black Jacobins.” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 65112. LeBlanc, Paul, and Steve McLamee, eds. C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994. Levi, D. E. “C. L. R. James: A Radical West Indian Vision of American Studies.” American Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1991): 486-501. Linebaugh, P. “A Little Jubilee? The Literacy of Robert Wedderburn in 1817.” In Protest and Survival : Essays for E. P. Thompson, edited by

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John Rule and Robert Malcolmson, 179-220. London: New Press, 1993. Linebaugh, Peter. “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook.” Labour/Le Traveilleur 10 (1982): 87-121. Louise, Rene. “Le Marronisme Moderne.” Antilla 51(1983): 37. Martin Barbero, Jesus. Comunicacion Masiva: Discurso y Poder. Quito, Ecuador: CIESPAL, 1977. Martin Santos, Luis. “Mediacion.” In Terminologia Cientifico-Social: Aproximacion Critica, edited by Roman Reyes, 595-600. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988. Martin Serrano, Manuel. “La Epistemologia de la Comunicacion, a los Cuarenta Anos de su Nacimiento.” Telos 22 (June-August 1990): 6575. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. NY: Vintage/Random House, 1977. Mattelart, Armand and Piemme, J. M. “23 Notas Para un Debate Politico Sobre la Comunicacion.” In Sociologia de la Comunicacion de Masas Vol. 4: Nuevos Problemas y Transformaciones Tecnologicas, edited by Manuel de Moragas Spa, 81-99. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1986. Maximim, Daniel. Lone Sun. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Ormerod, Beverly. “Discourse and Dispossession: Edouard Glissant’s Image of Contemporary Martinique.” Caribbean Quarterly 27, no. 4, (1981): 1-12. Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism. NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1972. Parry, Benita. “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance or Two Cheers for Nativism.” In Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, 37-54. London: Routledge, 2004. Also in Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iverson, 172-196. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994. Phaf, Ineke. “Caribbean Imagination and Nation Building in Antillean and Surinamese Literature.” Callaloo 11, no. 1 (1988): 148-171. Pierre-Charles, Gerard. El Pensamiento Socio-Politico Moderno en el Caribe. Mexico, D.F.: UNAM/Fondo de Cultura, 1985. —. “Introduction to Presence de Jacques Roumain.” Recontre 4 (Port au Prince, Haiti: CRESFED, 1993): 5-6. Quintero Rivera, Angel. “El tambor en el Cuatro: La Melodizacion de Ritmos y la Etnicidad Cimarroneada.” In La Tercera Raiz: Presencia Africana en Puerto Rico, edited by Lydia Milagros Gonzales, 43-55. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Centro Estudios Realidad Puertorriquena, 1992.

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Raboteau, Albert L. Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. NY: Oxford University Press, 1978. Rodney, Walter. A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Schwartz, Stuart B. Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Schwartz-Bart, Simone. Between Two Worlds. Oxford: Heinemann, 1992. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Walvin, James. The Black Presence: A Documentary History of the Negro in England, 1555-1860. London: Orbach and Chambers, 1971. Webber, A. R. F. Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1989. Williams, Raymond. “Literature and Sociology: In Memory of Lucien Goldman.” New Left Review 67 (1971): 3-18. —. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980. Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond the World of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles.” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 637-647. —. “Talk about a Little Culture.” In Carifesta Forum: An Anthology of 20 Caribbean Voices, edited by John Hearne, 129-137. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and CARIFESTA, 1976.

Notes An earlier version of this essay appeared in the London based journal Race and Class 45, no. 1 (July 2003): 61-78. I wish to thank the editors for their comments, and add here my gratitude to Pallavi Rastogi and Jocelyn Stitt for the suggestions, which informed the significant changes added here. 1

Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British (NY: Monthly Review, 1973), 1-2. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain since 1504 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1984), 1-2. 3 Peter Linebaugh, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Traveilleur 10 (1982): 115. 4 See Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 208-258, for more on the subject of C. L. R. James. 2

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See Nick Hazelwood, The Queen’s Slave Trader: John Hawkins, Elizabeth I, and the Trafficking of Human Souls (NY: Harper, 2004), for more information on the subject of Queen Elizabeth I as a 16th century slave trader. 6 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963), 17-21. The public appearance of challenges to dominant modes of thought, action, and cultural practice, such as religions, ways of dressing, and rebelling, was preceded by means of communication propagated by nomadic heretics, traders, artisans, and healers. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 127. 7 Sylvia Wynter, “Talk About a Little Culture,” in Carifesta Forum: An Anthology of 20 Caribbean Voices, ed. John Hearne (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica and Carifesta, 1976), 137. 8 As Wilson Harris points out, the historical connections were not necessarily retraced in a linear manner but through cultural activities that activated common memories among the dominated. Being able to reassemble the representations so that they are recognizable by the different cultures that co-exist in the Caribbean was what distinguished the popular from the colonial empire. See History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas (Georgetown: History and Arts Council/Ministry of Information and Culture, 1970), 8-9. 9 Jesús Ibáñez, Mas Alla de la Sociologia. El Grupo de Sicusion: Tecnica y Critica (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1986), 46. 10 Richard Drayton and Andaiye, ed., Conversations with George Lamming: Essays, Addresses and Interviews, 1953-1990 (London: Karia, 1992), 124, 164. See also A. R. F. Webber, Those That Be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux, 1989) and Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) about indentureship. 11 J. Martín Barbero, Comunicación Masiva: Discurso y Poder (Quito, Educador: CIESPAL, 1977), 13-15; Chester J. Fontenot Jr., Frantz Fanon: Language as the God Gone Astray in the Flesh (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 2333. For Martín Barbero, the value of an explanation of communication processes lies not in its logic but in its capacity to make sense of social transformations. 12 Manuel Martín Serrano, “La Epistemología de la Comunicación, a los Cuarenta Años de su Nacimiento,” Telos 22 (June-August 1990): 70; Hanno Beth and Harry Pross, Introducción a las Ciencias de la Comunicación (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1987), 109, 125. Freire’s ideas on what Pross calls the conditions of participation in public life are discussed in The Politics of Education (Cambridge, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1985), 104 and 175-184. The conditions for communication as a political act are discussed in the context of creating a new community. In 1974, Dario Fo, Italian playwright and actor, discussed the same subject in a conference on popular culture in Milan. See Trumpets and Berries (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 71-5. See also Raymond Williams, “Literature and Sociology: In Memory of Lucien Goldman,” New Left Review 67 (1971): 3-18, and “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture

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(London: Verso, 1980), 62; and A. Mattelart and J. M. Piemme, “23 Notas Para un Debate Político Sobre la Comunicacíon,” in Sociología de la Comunicación de Masas, Vol 4: Nuevos Problemas y Transformación Tecnológica, ed. M. de Moragas Spa (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1986), 93. 13 Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Quintero Rivera, “El Tambor en el Cuatro: La Melodización de Ritmos y la Etnicidad Cimarroneada,” in La Tercera Raíz, Presencia Africana en Puerto Rico, ed. Lydia Milagros Gonzales (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Centro Estudios Realidad Puertorriquena, 1992), 54, quoting Juan José Arrom, “Cimarrón: Apuntes Sobre sus Primeras Documentaciones y Su Probable Origen,” Anales del Caribe II (1982): 184; Simone Schwartz-Bart, Between Two Worlds (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992), 40; René Louise, “Le Marronisme Moderne,” Antilla 51 (1983): 37. 14 J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 168; Beverly Ormerod, “Discourse and Dispossession: Edouard Glissant’s Image of Contemporary Martinique,” Caribbean Quarterly 27, no. 4 (1981): 3; Robert A. Hill, “In England, 1932-1938,” in C. L. R. James, His Life and Work, ed. Paul Buhle (London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1986), 75. 15 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the World of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4 (1989): 638, 642-4. 16 On the subject of the memories of the future or the prophetic vision of the past see Edouard Glissant, L’Intention Poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 40-90, discusses Maroon communities as models of syncretic hybridity which also created a way of perceiving through their spiritual perspective. Raboteau also explains why blacks and whites had less cultural contact in the Caribbean than in the United States and Canada; Gerard Pierre-Charles, introduction to “Présènce de Jacques Roumain,” Rencontre (1993): 5-6. 17 Peter Linebaugh, “A Little Jubilee? The Literacy of Robert Wedderburn in 1817,” in Protest and Survival: Essays for E. P. Thompson, ed. J. Rule and R. Malcolmson (London: New Press, 1993), 204-9; C. L. R. James, “Black Scholar Interview,” Black Scholar 2, no. 1 (September 1970): 42; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 88. Genovese refers to the shift in the goals of the slave rebellions and the Maroon wars during the French Revolution. See also Ineke Phaf, “Caribbean Imagination and Nation-Building in Antillean and Surinamese Literature,” Callaloo 11, no. 1, (Winter 1988): 157. Phaf speculates about the possibility of information exchanges between the Maroons in Surinam and the Haitians at the time of the French Revolution. In my judgment, the best description of information networks is in James’s The Black Jacobins, when the slogans to mobilize the peasants in the north are negotiated (between 1791-1792 and again between 1801-1803). 18 Dany Bebel-Gisler, Leonora: The Buried Story of Guadeloupe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 262-7; Gerard Pierre-Charles, El Pensamiento

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Socio-Politico Moderno en el Caribe (Mexico, D.F.: UNAM/Fondo Cultura Economica, 1985), 24. 19 One of the reasons why the cultural practices of the Maroon communities survived in the collective memory of the popular, as a model of transgression sustained through cooperation, is that there were also examples of Maroon confederations to expel the colonialists altogether (the Guianas, 1768-1791), and alliances between Maroon republics and rebel slaves to overthrow the central government (Demerara, 1772-1775; Haiti, 1791-1804; Venezuela, 1795). 20 Benita Parry, “Resistance Theory/Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 37-40. Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Swerve, 1991), 20, 84. The historical centers of this activity had been Brazil, Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Surinam. See Genovese, 77; Raboteau, 90, explains the ratio of whites to blacks and work conditions in the five regions noted above. 21 Stuart Hall, “A Conversation with C. L. R. James,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Grant Farred (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 25-6. 22 C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present: Selected Writings, Volume 1 (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), 65-8. 23 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1977), 166-170, 173. Mediations are about getting behind the secret of merchandise to understand the social relations between the workers and the investors as ones of interdependence, which characterize this mode of production. See Luis Martín Santos, “Mediación,” in Terminologia Cientifico— Social Aproximación Crítica, ed. Roman Reyes (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988), 595-600. Through studying the exchanges that clarified the relations of inequality connecting the parts, the social movements could turn abstract representations of conflict into mediations that stressed the interests in conflict. 24 Darrell E. Levi, “C. L. R. James: A Radical West Indian Vision of American Studies,” American Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1991): 489-490, 499. After the eighteenth century, the indentured slaves from Asia were also part of the Caribbean encounter. 25 Hall, 26. James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore’s Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970), 49; Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement (London: Methuen, 1974), 355; George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1972), 129. 26 Among the pamphlets produced by the African Bureau were The West Indies Today by George Padmore and Arthur Lewis; Hands Off the Protectorates; Kenya, Land of Conflict; African Empires and Civilizations; The Negro in the Caribbean; White Man’s Duty; The Voice of the New Negro; The American Negro Problem; The Native Problem in South Africa; The Voice of Coloured Labour; Europe’s Difficulty is Africa’s Opportunity. Among the books written by members of the African Bureau were: Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mt. Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); George Padmore, Africa and World

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Peace (London: Secker and Warburg, 1937); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938). James had been introduced to the publishers by the editor of New Leader, Fenner Brockway. 27 C. L. R. James, ‘“Civilising the Blacks’: Why Britain Needs to Maintain her African Possessions,” New Leader 29 (May 1936): 5. In this review of Padmore’s How Britain Rules Africa (1936), James responds to the author’s contention that there are sectors of the dominant classes interested in ending colonialism. 28 A. Bogues, Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C. L. R. James (London: Pluto, 1997), 47; P. Le Blanc and S. McLemee, eds., C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 215-217. 29 Hill, 77. 30 Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 64. 31 Hall, 22; Robert A. Hill, “Afterword” to C. L. R. James, American Civilization (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 65. Hill notes that the sense of having mastered what is necessary is acquired by the colonized in spite of the official order. I agree with Hill that James’s perspective on culture was informed by his experience as a colonial subject. 32 Antonio Benítez Rojo, La Isla Que se Repite (Hanover, New Hampshire: Ediciones del Norte, 1989), 294. Vincent Oge, Victor Hugues, the British consulate in Havana, and the fleet that operated out of the French and Swedish islands in the Eastern Caribbean in 1790s can be mentioned as examples. 33 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 69-70. 34 The Beacon ran from 1931 to 1933. It was produced by a multiracial group concerned with the lower classes and rejected by the Trinidadian elite. It provided the only context in which its members could meet as equals. Though the underlying causes of conflict were seldom identified in its pages, it nonetheless consistently and as a matter of policy published material on Caribbean working people. It commented on national, regional, and international issues and reprinted material from banned journals such as New Republic and Negro World. The editors used the publication to identify references for popular resistance and to commission and guide research on workers’ living conditions. It was thus an important attempt to understand contemporary society. 35 See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 5, 127. 36 See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins, 276, 281-8. 37 Ibid., 300-6, 356-62. 38 Ibid., 408, 413-8. 39 Another way to access unrecorded memories is to start with the conscious oral traditions of victorious Maroons and return to the past through them. That has been done in Daniel Maximin, Lone Sun (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) about events in Guadeloupe that occurred at the same time as the Haitian revolution.

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See Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 41 See C. L. R. James, “Lectures on The Black Jacobins,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000).

CONTRIBUTORS

Julie Codell is professor of art history at Arizona State University and faculty affiliate in Asian studies, film and media studies, English, and women’s studies. Her interdisciplinary articles on Victorian culture and India under the Raj have appeared in many scholarly journals such as Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Art History, Journal of PreRaphaelite Studies (which she edited for 4 years), Journal of Victorian Culture, Book History, Oxford Art Journal, 25 anthologies, and 8 encyclopedias. She wrote The Victorian Artist (2003), edited The Political Economy of Art (2008), Genre, Gender, Race and World Cinema (2007), Imperial Co-Histories (2003) and special issues of Victorian Periodicals Review on the 19th-century press in India (2004) and Victorian art and the press (1991), and co-edited Encountering the Victorian Periodical Press (2004) and Orientalism Transposed (1998), now being translated into Japanese (2008). She is currently editing Photography and the Imperial Durbars of British India (2009) on colonial photography and preparing a study of Delhi coronation durbars, for which she received fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, and the Huntington Library. Pallavi Rastogi is assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. She teaches courses on colonial and post-colonial literature, concentrating on Africa and South Asia. Her research focuses on the South Asian diaspora, particularly in South Africa and in Britain. She has published articles on V. S. Naipaul, Cornelia Sorabji, Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, Bharati Mukherjee, and on South African Indian fiction in journals such as Women’s Studies, Prose Studies, Modern Fiction Studies as well as in various edited collections. Her book on the literature of the South African Indian diaspora, entitled Afrindian Fictions: Race, Diaspora, and National Desire, is forthcoming from Ohio State University Press. An essay on South African Indian writer, Ahmed Essop, was published in Research in African Literatures in 2008.

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Contributors

W. F. Santiago-Valles is associate professor at Western Michigan University, with graduate degrees in political economy and cultural history. His research interests include social justice movements in the African Diaspora, working class radicalism, and their research methods. Santiago directs a team working to inject African content into the public school and university curricula in the areas of migration and globalization, language policies, and African Islam in the Americas. He is currently editing an anthology on Maroon thought and social actions across the Americas, correcting a finished manuscript on radical social movements in the Caribbean, and beginning the research for a volume about Amilcar Cabral. Jocelyn Fenton Stitt is assistant professor of women’s studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has held positions as a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Michigan and as a fellow at the International Museum of Women in San Francisco. Her research interests include the intertwining of the familial and the imperial in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean from the nineteenth century to the present, British and Caribbean literature, Black British studies, feminist mothering, and feminist African Diaspora studies. Stitt teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on global feminism, international women’s studies, and mothering studies. Her scholarship on Romantic-era discourses of subjectivity and nationalism and their relationship to gender in contemporary Caribbean culture have appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Her essay on Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative appeared in Michigan Feminist Studies. With Pegeen Reichert Powell, she is currently co-editing an anthology of essays concerning women as agents of knowledge about mothering, how to theorize about mothering, and how to work within and against political and cultural institutions that constrain mothering. Stitt’s current project explores representations of slavery and West Indian colonialism in nineteenth-century women’s writing as early manifestations of a feminist critique of globalization. Michelle Taylor is assistant professor of English at Miami University of Ohio. She teaches nineteenth-century African American literature, nineteenth-century American literature, and feminist theory, and is currently working on a book, Emergent Identities: The African American Common Woman in U.S. Literature. Taylor also has an article forthcoming in New Essays on Charles Chesnutt.

Before Windrush

225

Stoyan Tchaprazov is a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. In his dissertation, The British Empire Revisited Through the Lens of the Eastern Question, he reexamines the importance of the Eastern Question to the study of the British Empire, revising current paradigms about the relation between Victorian Britain and the rest of the world at the end of the nineteenth century. His essay, “The British Empire Revisited Through the Lens of the Eastern Question,” is forthcoming in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Margaret Lucille Trenta received her BA in English with a minor in music performance (concentration in violin) from Kent State University (Kent, Ohio) in December 2003. She then moved to Baton Rouge and spent three years working toward a graduate degree in English at Louisiana State University. Her graduate work focused on 20th century British Literature, with a special emphasis on the Bloomsbury circle and postcolonial Literature. Her critical interests centered around Derridian deconstruction but branched out to include feminist as well as psychoanalytic theories. Her work in psychoanalytic theory, especially on the issue of the translation of Jacques Lacan’s works, was acknowledged by Alexandre Leupin, author of Lacan Today, in his February 2007 article “Babel ou la Cristallinité: Traduire Lacan” for the online journal Squiggle (www.squiggle.bc). She has also continued her musical career while in Baton Rouge, performing at several local venues as a singer/songwriter. She is currently working on several home-recordings of original songs in collaboration with her brother, Charlie Trenta, a musician from Akron, Ohio. In 2007, she left LSU’s English Graduate Program to pursue other interests but continues to enjoy the study of literature and critical theory. Anne Witchard received her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London. She teaches at the University of Westminster. Her research centers on images and perceptions of China expressed both in popular culture and by the avant-garde. Her book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Ashgate, 2008) sets out to contextualize the cult of London’s Chinatown in Limehouse in turn-of-the-century Britain. It examines an ongoing infatuation with “Chinese things,” looking at early translations of the Arabian Nights and eighteenth-century chinoiseries, nineteenth-century pantomime scripts of Aladdin, the sinophobic tracts of De Quincey and Dickens, the opium-den narratives of Victorian social “exploration,” and Edwardian “Chinese” Musical Comedy. It is a cross-disciplinary work that

226

Contributors

encompasses the critique of Orientalism and empire, theatre studies and gender studies. Her current project, A Forbidden Passion: China and the Gothic Imagination, aims to show how the cult of chinoiserie was a significant component of the Gothic aesthetic, its elision from any discussion of the genre making it the “doubly excluded” of the Enlightenment project.

INDEX

Absent Minded Imperialists, The (Porter), 156 Achebe, Chinua, 189 Africa, 26, 37, 56, 62, 104, 198, 204, 205-7, 212, 214 African Bureau, 203-10, 220n26 African identity, 1, 2, 50-51, 56, 62, 63, 147, 198, 201, 211 Anand, Mulk Raj, 4, 9, 148, 166, 179-97; Conversations in Bloomsbury, 9, 179-81, 18586, 188, 192-94 anti-Semitism, 117-19, 128, 131-32 Arabia, 118, 125-26, 128, 131 Asian: diaspora, 2, 15, 139n42, 144; heritage 119, 143; identity, 1, 4, 143-144; immigrants, 1, 11, 110, 117, 142, 144, 148; Indians, 4, 7, 8, 9, 88-110; 118126, 128, 131, 132, 147, 166, 179-94; writers, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13n2, 13n5, 15, 51, 94, 99, 114n12, 124, 137n26, 148, 161, 166; writing 2, 4, 7, 8, 13n2, 13n5, 88, 91, 92, 93, 103, 114n12, 117, 118, 131, 136n13, 138n29, 144, 148, 166, 184; stereotypes, 8, 93, 95, 97, 124, 125, 144, 148, 162, 172n16, 183, 186, 189, 190, 191; studies, 2, 8, 113n2, 148, 174n45 atopia, 91, 99, 102, 110 Austen, Jane, 6, 15, 17, 44n2, 44n7, 44n11; Mansfield Park, 15-16 Autoethnography, 104, 166, 178n157 Barthes, Roland, 81-82, 87n39 Beaverbrook, Lord, 162

Belinda (Edgeworth), 24-26, 37, 46n28, 46n29 Bennett, Arnold, 161-63, 178n145 Bhabha, Homi K., 88, 109, 182, 184, 191, 193, 194 Black British, 2-3, 5, 10, 12n1, 14n10, 54, 141-43, 170n1, 17071n2 Black British Literature, 3, 5, 10, 12n1, 14n10, 54 Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, The (James), 10, 199, 201, 203, 2058, 210, 212, 213, 218n6, 219n17; colonial question in, 203-4, 206, 209-11 Black Power, 143 Bloomsbury, 8-9, 155-56 Bloomsbury Group, 9, 161, 166, 179-80, 181, 183-90, 192 Boxer uprising, 145-46, 150, 172n21 Brazil, 212, 219n13, 220n20 British Chinese, 143-44 British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, 150 British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act, 143, 171n8 Brontë, Charlotte, 5, 16-17, 32-34, 36-37, 39, 40-41; Jane Eyre, 5, 16, 18-21, 24, 30, 32-41, 47n37 Burke, Thomas, 147, 153, 173n35, 177n136, 178n138, 223; Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown, 147 Burton, Antoinette, 12n2, 89, 92, 97, 114n12, 135n5, 135n8, 136n13, 136n14, 136n19,

228 137n23, 140n44, 140n45, 18283, 188-89, 192, 193-94 Buzard, James, 166, 178n157; Disorienting Fiction, 166, 178n157 canon, 2, 3-6, 11, 15-16, 32, 45n7, 54-55 Cap Francais (Haiti), 210 Caribbean, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12n1, 13n2, 28, 34, 41, 44n6, 47n43, 50-51, 53, 54, 55-57, 6061, 63-65, 68, 143, 198-207, 208, 212, 213, 218n8, 219n16, 220n24, 221n34. See also West Indian Carretta, Vincent, 2 Chang, Brilliant, 161 Ch’en, W. C., 161 Chinatown, 142, 146, 147, 153-55, 161-62 chinoiserie, 158 circum-Atlantic, 31 class, 8, 16, 17, 18, 21, 23-24, 27, 32-35, 47n37, 55, 61, 73, 76, 82, 89, 92, 94, 99, 102, 110, 117-23, 131, 135n3, 137n21, 145, 151, 155, 162, 198, 207, 212, 221n27, 221n34 Codell, Julie F., 7-8, 21, 87n40, 113n4, 113n7, 135n6, 136n9, 136n13, 137n20, 138n29, 151 colonial discourse, 23, 25, 125, 131, 136n10, 190 colonization, 5, 17, 37, 89, 127, 179-82, 191-94, 213 Confessions of an English Opium Eater (De Quincey), 157 Conrad, Joseph, 16, 138n35, 152, 154-55, 181; Heart of Darkness, 138n35, 154-55 Conversations in Bloomsbury (Anand), 9, 179-81, 185-86, 188, 192-94 Cook, Thomas, 93, 162 cosmopolitanism, 130

Index creole, 5-7, 15-17, 19-24, 26-28, 3032, 36-41, 46n19, 72, 73, 80-82, 201, 207, 211-12 “Creole, The” (Peacock), 19-21, 37. See creole Crimea, 72, 75-77, 79, 86n19 Crimean War, 6, 72-73, 76 Cuba, 73, 212, 220n20 Cuguano, Ottobah, 198 Dabydeen, David, 2 decolonization, 180-82, 192, 203-6, 210 De Quincey, Thomas, 157; Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 157 Defense of the Realm Act, 147 Defoe, Daniel, 76 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 90, 109, 18182, 190, 192, 194 Der-wei Wang, David, 166 Description of Egypt, The, 158 Dickens, Charles, 152; The Pickwick Papers, 152 Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics (Yip), 154 Disorienting Fiction (Buzard), 166, 178n157 dress, 22, 40, 92, 107, 122-23, 128, 137n21, 137n23, 163, 218n6 Dupont, E. A., 161 Durbach, Nadja, 119, 136n11 Dutt, Romesh Chunder, 4, 92; Three Years in Europe, 92 dystopia, 7, 89, 99, 101-3 East End (London), 8, 117, 130, 142, 144, 146-47, 153, 159, 164-65 Edgeworth, Maria, 6, 15, 19, 24, 26, 44n7, 46n25, 46n29; Belinda, 24-26, 37, 46n28, 46n29 Eliot, T. S., 9, 166, 179, 180-82, 184-85, 187-89, 196n1, 196n5 emancipation: from slavery 33-34, 47n43, 51-52, 85n4, 137n29; self-emancipation from

Before Windrush colonization, 198-99, 201, 2079; women’s rights 100, 138n29 Equiano, Olaudah, 50, 52-53, 64, 70n1 Er Ma, or Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Lao She), 8, 148-49, 150, 151-55, 158, 161, 163-66, 174n46 ethnography/ethnographer, 7, 88-91, 93-94, 102, 104, 114n12, 166, 178n157 Fisher, Michael, 13n2, 115n16 flâneur, 89 Foucault, Michel, 141, 171n3 Freire, Paulo, 218n12 Fryer, Peter, 12n2, 24, 48n49 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 81 gender, 5, 7, 15-16, 23-25, 36, 3940, 44n7, 46n29, 47n43, 53-55, 61, 63, 72-73, 75-76, 83, 86n9, 105, 117, 120, 138n29, 213 Ghose, Nagendra Nath, 97, 99 Gikandi, Simon, 14n10, 138n38 Gilroy, Paul, 1, 171n6 Goldring, Douglas, 152 grand tour, 89-91, 93 guest discourse, 7-8, 88-89, 106-7 Haitian Revolution, 50, 55-57, 199, 221n39. See also Black Jacobins Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 138n35, 154-55 Heathen Chinee, 145 Hicks, Emily, 104 history of Asian and black writing in Britain, 1-3, 4, 11, 12n2, 15-16, 40-41, 49-51, 88-90, 117-18, 144-45, 148-49, 174n46, 18081, 198-99 History of Pan-African Revolt (James), 207 Hong Kong Chinese, 143 hospitality, 8, 88-90, 103, 106-10, 112, 205, 114n9, 115n31, 115n34, 115n35. See also Derrida, Jacques hybridity, 3, 8, 77, 90, 143, 219n16

229

identity, 18, 31, 49, 64, 105, 130, 179-81, 186, 190; British national, 1, 6, 11, 40, 51, 60, 80, 105, 109, 119, 120, 130, 181; colonial 4, 6, 9, 74, 80, 120, 143, 179, 181-82, 185-87, 18992; Indian 8, 9, 88, 97, 103-5, 122-23, 185-88, 194; postcolonial 4, 9, 89, 143, 167, 180-82, 186, 192-94; Seacole, Mary and, 74, 77, 80, 82-84. See also Asian; Black British; Caribbean; West Indian Ibáñez, Jesús, 200 immigration, 1, 8, 16, 40, 129-30, 141-42, 145, 139n40, 171n4, 170n7 immigrants, 1-3, 117, 119, 130, 142, 144, 148, 180, 115n30, 174n37 India/Indian, 4, 7, 8, 9, 26, 33, 35, 37, 88-110, 114n10, 114n12, 114n13, 114-15n15, 115n21, 136n19, 137n20, 137n21, 138n29, 138-39n38, 118-26, 128, 131, 132, 143, 153, 157, 180-95, 206 Innes, C. L. R., 13n5, 148 intellectual collective, 208, 211 Invasion of Ethiopia by Italy, 203-4 Irish Home Rule, 101, 108 irony, 7, 88, 91, 97, 123, 156, 163 Jamaica, 6, 17, 22, 28, 30-31, 34-35, 39, 70n8, 73, 77-78, 80-81, 83, 220n20 James, C. L. R., 4, 9-10, 198-214, 217n4, 218n6, 219n17, 221n26, 221n27, 221n28, 221n31 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 5, 16, 18-21, 24, 30, 32-41, 47n37 Jee, Bhagvat Sinh, 92, 94, 100, 113n8 Jews, 8, 119, 128-31, 162, 201, 139n39, 139n43. See also antiSemitism Journal of A Visit to England in 1883 (Jee), 113n8

230 Koven, Seth, 135n3, 135n8 Lao She (Shu Chingqun), 4, 8, 148, 150-161, 163, 166, 174n42, 174n46, 175n51, 175n52, 175n62, 175n64, 175n66, 176n100, 177n104, 177n113, 177n116, 177n125, 177n126, 178n140, 178n146, 178n156; Er Ma, or Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London, 8, 148-49, 151-55, 158, 161, 163-66, 174n46 Laurence, Patricia, 161, 166, 174n43; Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China, 161 Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism and China (Laurence), 161 Lim, Jesse and Yan Li, 172n13 Limehouse, 8, 141-42, 144, 146-48, 153-54, 159, 161-63, 171n7, 173n35, 176n73, 176n81, 178n138 Limehouse Causeway, 146-47, 153 Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (Burke), 147 Linebaugh, Peter, 217n3, 221n17 London, 4, 7-10, 29, 49, 52, 54, 73, 75, 89-98, 101, 103-4, 107, 11721, 126-27, 129-31, 134n2, 135n3, 138n34, 138n36, 139n41, 142, 144-48, 150-52, 154-55, 161, 163-66, 173n35, 174n46, 176n100, 183, 191-92, 198, 203-5, 208, 211, London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Sandhu), 12n1, 13n5, 114n11, 136n12 Malabari, Behramji M., 4, 91, 92, 95, 97, 103, 105, 106, 108, 114n8 Malvery, Olive Christian, 4, 7, 8, 117-32, 134n1, 135n7, 135n8, 136n9, 137n26, 138n29,

Index 139n39, 139-40n43; The Soul Market, 8, 117, 119-20, 122-23, 126, 128, 129, 134n1, 135n8 Mansfield Park (Austen), 15-16 Maroon, 55, 70n8, 200-203, 207-9, 211, 213, 219n16, 219n17, 220n19, 221n39 Maroon Communities, 200-203, 209, 219n16, 220n19 marronage, 201-2 Marx, Karl, 121, 175n69, 220n23 May Fourth Movement, 149, 161 McLaughlin, Joseph, 136n12, 138n34, 138n36, 139n41 Morton, H. V., 161 Moulin Rouge, 161 Mukharji, Trailokyanatha. N., 9295, 97-106, 115n21; A Visit to Europe, 114n8 Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, The (Rohmer), 144, 163, 172n14, 172n15 Naipaul, V. S., 181, 196n4 New Light on Lao She, London and the London Missionary Society, 1921-1929 (Bickers), 150 Nightingale, Florence, 76 Notting Hill (London), 141-42 On Another Province: New Chinese Writing from London (Lim and Li), 144 Opie, Amelia, 15, 19, 29-31; Adeline Mowbray, 29-32 Opium War, 157 Orientalism, 8, 105, 113n4, 118, 121, 158, 173n36, 174n43, 189, 196n36 Padmore, George, 203-4, 207, 210, 220n25, 220n26, 221n27 Pandian, Thomas B., 92, 94, 99, 102, 106, 113n8 Paranjape, Makarand, 180-81, 183, 191 Paris, 95, 99, 158, 161, 205, 209, 211, 213 Peace Conference Versailles, 149

Before Windrush Peacock, Lucy, 6, 15, 19 Pennyfields (London), 146, 162 picaresque, 5, 6-7, 73-77, 81-83, 85n6, 85n7, 85n8, 89, 127, 138n32 pícaro/a, 6, 73, 74-76, 82-83, 85n6, 138n32 Piccadilly (Dupont), 8, 141, 161-65, 178n137, 178n145, 178n153 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), 152 pilgrimage, 93 popular cultures, 44n7, 45n11, 218n8, 218n12; social movements and, 200, 201, 220n19, 221n34 Porter, Bernard, 156; The Absent Minded Imperialists, 156 postcolonial, 1, 3-5, 7, 9, 11, 14n8, 32, 89, 143, 167, 180-82, 186, 190-95 Pound, Ezra, 166, 174n43 poverty: colonial, 7, 20, 83, 101, 175n51; London, 7, 91-92, 94, 101, 103, 109, 131, 134n2, 137n20 Powell, Enoch, 129, 139n40 Pratt, Mary Louise, 17, 104, 138n33, 178n157 praxis, 208, 212 Prince, Mary, 4, 6, 10, 49-68, 70n1, 70n12, 136n18; The History of Mary Prince, 6, 49-52, 54-55, 70n1, 70n12, 137n18 Qian, Zhaoming, 166, 174n43 race, 1-2, 5, 13n4, 17, 24, 34, 36, 45n10, 47n37, 47n45, 50, 52, 61, 71n19, 73, 80-81, 83, 86n9, 102, 104, 108, 119, 128-29, 137n28, 141-45, 147, 152, 156, 178n136, 190, 207, 212 racialized, 6, 37, 53, 126, 141-42, 156 Ram, Jhinda, 92, 93-97, 99-102, 105-7; My Trip to Europe, 11314n8

231

Ramakrishna, T., 91, 92, 95, 102, 103, 107, 114n8; My Visit to the West, 114n8 Rastogi, Pallavi, 1, 8, 21, 46n15, 89, 91, 113, 114n13, 117, 136n14, 193 reform, 4-7, 90, 100, 103, 109-10, 117, 119, 121-22, 127-32, 134n2, 135n2, 137n21, 15051, 175n63 Rohmer, Sax (pseud. Arthur Ward), 144-46, 147, 153, 171n17; The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, 144, 163, 172n14, 172n15 Romantic-era novel, 5, 15-26, 29, 31, 32, 33, 37, 41, 44n7, 45n11, 46n23 Said, Edward, 15-16, 121, 158, 173n36, 184-85, 189-90, 194 Sala, George, 145 Sandhu, Sukhdev, 12n1, 13n5, 92, 98, 101, 136n12, 138n37; London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City, 12n1, 13n5,136n12 Santiago-Valles, W. F., 9-10 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 159, 177n115 Schuyler, George, 206 Scotland, 102 Seacole, Mary, 4, 6-7, 10, 14n10, 72-83, 85n1, 85n2, 85n5, 85n6, 86n9, 86n19, 86n20, 138n32; The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, 6, 72-83 seeing, 30, 89, 92-97, 102, 109, 138n33, 187. See also witnessing Sheik, Ayub, 191 Silent Traveller in London, The (Yee), 151 Singh, Jagatjit, 93, 94, 95, 97-100, 103, 106-9; My Travels in Europe and America, 114n8 Sinophobia, 8, 148

232 slavery, 2, 5-6, 9, 16-19, 29-30, 3234, 36-37, 39, 40-41, 47n37, 4953, 56-67, 70n8, 70n20, 86n14, 136n11, 200, 209, 211-13, 219n13 Soul Market, The (Malvery), 8, 117, 119-20, 122-23, 126, 128-29, 134n1, 135n8 Speakers’ Corner, 153, 175n69 Spurr, David, 136n10, 139n38 SS Empire Windrush, 1, 3, 12n1, 16, 52, 68, 141, 142, 170-71n2, 171n8, 180, 193 Stitt, Jocelyn Fenton, 1, 5, 6, 7, 15, 89, 113, 193, 213 subjectivity, 8, 23, 33, 55, 59, 60, 64, 105-6, 166-67 Suleri, Sara, 194 Surinam, 212, 220n20 Tagore, Rabindranath, 157, 166, 174n41 Taoism, 154 Taylor, Michelle, 6, 31, 136n18 Tchaprazov, Stoyan, 6-7, 89, 135n6, 136n13, 138n32 thought style, 208 trans-Atlantic, 2, 6, 21, 49, 51, 5354, 71n17 transnational, 2, 10, 91, 213 travel, 1, 4, 6, 7, 30, 65, 88, 90, 95, 102, 103, 109, 114n12, 118, 200 travel writing, 2, 5, 7, 81, 82, 88-91, 93-94, 101, 103-104, 110, 113n1, 116n39, 118, 136n9, 138n33 Trenta, Margaret Lucille, 9, 114n13, 135n6, 164 Trinidad, 10, 205, 208, 210, 212213, 221n34 utopia, 7, 89, 91, 99-103, 110, 124, 151, 208 Vaudeville (Dupont), 161 Verma, K. D., 180, 193 Visit to Europe, A (Mukharji), 114n8 Visram, Rozina, 115n16, 145

Index Viswanathan, Gauri, 114n15 Walkowitz, Judith, 118-20, 126, 128, 131, 134n1, 135n3, 135n7, 135n8, 136n9, 137n24, 139n39, 139n43 Wedderburn, Robert, 198, 219n17 Wells, Helena, 6, 15, 27; Constantia Neville; or the West Indian, 27, 29, 33, 37 West Indian: characters, 16, 23, 40, 45n11; colonies, 1, 18, 30, 33, 36, 37; Creoles, 5-7, 15, 17, 19, 21-22, 24, 26, 30, 31, 37, 40, 46n19; culture of resistance, 55, 57-58, 67; immigrants, 1, 180; past, 53, 55, 58; people, 21-22, 24-25, 27, 31-32, 34-35, 40-41, 50, 53, 55; plantations, 16, 18, 26; slavery, 33, 37, 49, 53, 5659, 62, 64; wealth, 17-21, 23, 29-30, 32 West Indies, 4, 6, 15-17, 19-22, 2527, 29-30, 32-37, 39-40, 45n11, 46n19, 54, 56, 59, 64, 66, 86n9, 138n38, 220n26 Windrush. See SS Empire Windrush Windrush Achievement Award, 144 Winter, James, 117-18, 120, 126, 134n2, 135n8, 139n41 Witchard, Anne, 8-9, 21, 136n13 witnessing, 1, 31, 89, 95, 104 women, 16, 18, 20, 23, 25, 30-32, 39, 41, 59, 60, 67, 78, 95, 99, 110, 123, 128-29, 134n2, 147, 184, 187, 190; Arabian, 126, 128; black, 28, 30, 31, 49, 5355, 59, 61, 65, 67, 81; Caribbean, 35, 53, 65; Chinese, 144, 146, 160; colonized, 33, 125, 137n19; Creole, 6, 16, 28, 41, 72-73, 80; Eastern, 126; English/British, 16-20, 22, 2426, 30, 32, 37, 39, 92, 94, 100101, 106, 120-21, 122, 125, 138n29, 147, 159, 173n28; Indian, 8, 99, 100-101, 103, 121,

Before Windrush 123, 125-126, 128, 132, 135n19, 137n21, 138n29; middle-class, 17, 35; resistance and, 53, 70n8; Romantic-era, 15, 19, 24, 29, 41; slavery and, 28, 37, 47n43, 49, 53-54, 60-62, 65, 67; Victorian, 74, 81; West Indian, 47n43, 58, 67, 86n9; white, 18, 25, 33, 37, 61, 67, 122, 136n18, 136n19, 142, 145, 147; work and, 35, 47n43, 52-53, 55, 60, 62, 73, 121-22, 125, 128; working-class, 24, 52, 121, 125; writers, 5-6, 15-19, 23, 24, 29, 47n7; upper-class, 82, 121, 124 Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, The (Seacole), 6, 72-83

233

Wong, Anna May, 162, 177n136 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 32, 166, 179, 193 working classes, 8, 24, 76, 92, 11719, 121-22, 125-28, 130-31, 145, 155, 221n34 www.dimsum.co.uk, 144 Wynter, Sylvia, 200, 202 Yeats, W. B., 166 Yee, Chiang, 151; The Silent Traveller in London, 151 Yeh, Sarah, 144 Yellow Peril, 9, 141, 144-46, 172n14 Yip, Wai-Lim, 154; Diffusion of Distances: Dialogues Between Chinese and Western Poetics, 154