Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750-1850 9781474440363

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Migration and Modernities The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850

Edited by JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4034 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4036 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4037 0 (epub) The right of JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

Acknowledgments Contributor Biographies

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Introduction: A Literary History of Migration, 1750–1850 JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields

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I. Moving Voices: Competing Perspectives on Migration 1. Byron’s Ambivalent Modernity: Touring and Forced Migration in Don Juan Betsy Bolton 2. Diasporas: Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince Kenneth McNeil 3. Transatlantic Masculinities: Military Leadership and Migration in the South American Wars of Independence M. Soledad Caballero 4. At Home on the Prairie? Black Hawk, Margaret Fuller, and American Indian Dispossession Melissa Adams-Campbell

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II. Migrants as Cultural Mediators: Epistemes and Aesthetics of Mobility 5. “An Alien to my Country”: Migration and Statelessness in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer Patricia Cove

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6. The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity? Dragana Grbić

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7. Orientalism in Transit: Company Men, Colonial Historiography, and Other Handmaidens of Empire Olivera Jokic 8. The Turkish Refugee as Vagrant Slave: Spaces of Disconnection and Dispossession in Ishmael Bashaw’s Refugee Narrative Claire Gallien Index

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our contributors for sharing their research on the literary history of migration and for their belief in the importance of this collection. It has been inspiring to learn from their work. We’d also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous and thoughtful suggestions when the collection was still coming together. The editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press – Michelle Houston, Adela Rauchova, and Ersev Ersoy – have been wonderful to work with, and we appreciate their commitment to seeing this collection through to publication. We are also grateful for the institutional support afforded by our respective universities, Central Michigan University and the University of Washington, and the technical support provided by Nate Smith in compiling the typescript. Lastly, we thank our families for their patience and encouragement.

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Contributor Biographies

Melissa Adams-Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage (2015). Her other work has appeared in Settler Colonial Studies, Studies in American Fiction, and Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity (2017) among others. Betsy Bolton, Professor of English Literature and Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College, is the author of Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800 (2001). Other publications include essays in Studies in Romanticism, English Literary History, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. During the 2013–14 academic year, she was a Fulbright Scholar studying place-based writing in Morocco through community-based digital storytelling (maghrebi-voices.swarthmore. edu), an experience which heightened her awareness of contemporary crises in migration. A second Fulbright, to Bhutan in 2017–18, introduced her to a world where road permits were required for any travel outside of a home district. She is currently working on British Romantic Lyric and the Public Imagination, a project exploring the (gendered) turn from epic to lyric in the Romantic period and examining the public spheres shaped by those generic changes. M. Soledad Caballero is Associate Professor at Allegheny College. Recently, she published a scholarly edition of Maria Dundas Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824). Her work on the Gothic novel and nineteenth-century travel writing has appeared in journals and essay collections. In addition to her scholarly work, she is also a published poet. Patricia Cove is a Writing Advisor at the Dalhousie University Agricultural Campus in Nova Scotia. She began her current project on nineteenth-century British literary responses to the Risorgimento as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

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Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria in 2015–17. Her most recent publications appear in Journal of Victorian Culture, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Victorian Literature and Culture. JoEllen DeLucia is Professor of English at Central Michigan University and the author of A Feminine Enlightenment: British Women Writers and the Philosophy of Progress, 1759–1820 (2015). She has also published essays on eighteenth-century travel writing, women writers, Enlightenment historiography, and print culture in journals and edited collections. Claire Gallien is Associate Professor of English at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and a Research Associate at the CNRS (IRCL, UMR 5186). Her first book, L’Orient anglais (2011), deals with the interactions between popular and scholarly cultures of the East in eighteenth-century England. Her current book project From Corpus to Canon focuses on the elaboration of the category of “Eastern literature” (Arabic, Persian, and Indian) in England in the early-modern period and its entanglements with structures of European knowledge and power. She is also currently editing a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on the topic of refugee literature. Her research interests are anchored in the critical study of Orientalist discourse, in postcolonial, comparative, and world literatures and theories, as well as in decolonial studies and translation studies. Dragana Grbić is Lecturer at the University of Cologne in the Institute of Slavonic Languages and Literature and Research Associate in the Institute for Literature and Arts in Belgrade. She is the author of Alegorije Učenog Pustinoljubitelja: Postupak Alegorizacije u Opusu Jovana Rajica (Allegories of the Learned Hermit: The Allegorization Method in the Opus of Jovan Rajić, 2010) and VorEntscheidungen: Halle-Leipzig, Wendepunkt im Leben von Dositej Obradović (Prelude to a Voyage: Halle-Leipzig, Turning Point in the Life of Dositej Obradović, 2012). She has also published essays in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections on eighteenth-century literature and travel writing, the Enlightenment in the Balkans, and the history of newspapers. Olivera Jokic is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College CUNY. She is a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, gender, historiography, and textual interpretation. Her work has appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation,

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Essays in Romanticism, Literature Compass, Common-place, and elsewhere. Kenneth McNeil is Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. He is the author of Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760–1860 (2007) and several essays on Scottish literature of the Romantic period. He is currently working on a book on Scottish Romanticism and the making of collective memory in the British Atlantic. Juliet Shields is Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. She is the author of Sentimental Literature and Anglo-Scottish Identity, 1745–1820 (2010) and Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature (2016), a book that introduced her to the field of diaspora studies.

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Introduction: A Literary History of Migration, 1750–1850 JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields

Migration has featured constantly in the news in recent years. Families fleeing war-torn Syria and Sudan walk hundreds of miles to find shelter in makeshift refugee camps that are no cleaner or safer than the slums of Victorian Manchester; some seek to escape to the Mediterranean or Western Europe in boats as overcrowded as the slave ships of the eighteenth century. Children born to undocumented immigrants in the United States face possible deportation from the only country they’ve ever known; and the United Kingdom’s prospective departure from the European Union has compelled entire corporations to relocate from one nation to another, following the flows of capital. Although patterns, conditions, and experiences of mobility change, migration itself is nothing new. It’s not just a constant feature in the news; it’s arguably a constant of human experience. How might accounts of earlier migrations help us to better understand geographic mobility in our current time? Migration and Modernities brings together chapters that provide insights into the patterns, conditions, and experience of migration at a moment that we might characterize as the beginnings of modernity, an era that saw the emergence of urbanization, industrialization, and global capitalism. The growth of Western European imperialism and the advent of industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries triggered large-scale migrations. These socio-economic changes fostered new settler societies and expanded trade corporations, while also displacing indigenous people and propelling the slave trade. At the same time, revolutions across the Atlantic world introduced new concepts of citizenship and

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discourses of human rights. These revolutions created modern nationstates, and with them, political exiles. Recent discussions of migration by the political theorist Thomas Nail and the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty have reinforced the significance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to mapping a larger history of migration. These authors suggest that patterns and conditions of migration that are familiar to us today emerged in the late eighteenth century. Nail positions the figure of the migrant as constitutive of political regimes, which often seek to regulate motion and monitor the flow of people both within and outside the state. To understand the logic of “expulsion and expansion” upon which migration depends, Nail turns to Karl Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, which Marx famously developed through an analysis of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776).1 Although Nail sees this period as “one historical instance of a more general social logic,” the eighteenth century that Smith describes, a commercial age organized around a logic of expansion and expulsion that depends on a constant movement of not just goods but people, remains central to current “regimes of motion.”2 Chakrabarty similarly argues that the Anthropocene, which commenced with industrialization in the late eighteenth century, demands a shift in the focus of postcolonial theory from nation-states to the global economy and climate change. He links geophysical forces, which although created by humans are distressingly without an ontology, to “refugees, asylum seekers, illegal workers,” who have been displaced in large part because of the insatiable needs of the global economy and the “natural” forces it finds increasingly difficult to govern.3 Despite the centrality of the late eighteenth century to these influential theories of migration, and despite the centrality of the wanderer and exile as a figure in Romantic literature, there is relatively little work on the literature of migration prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Studies focusing on the Victorian era are more numerous simply because, as Jude Piesse’s work on periodical literature and British emigration demonstrates, the growth of literacy and the increasing availability and affordability of printed matter mean that accounts of migration from the mid-nineteenth century onward are more readily accessible than material from earlier periods.4 Several studies of the Victorian literature of migration have focused on the function of discourses of domesticity in migration and settlement.5 The earlier period covered in this collection documents a time before these narratives had coalesced, offering alternative narratives – ones that depend upon Romantic masculine adventurers as well as less

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virile commercial agents, vulnerable refugees, and solitary vagrants, in addition to early tourists and travelers who are forced to confront the ways in which mobility unsettles their own sense of self and challenges the cultural hierarchies that structure their existence. Our volume joins the smaller number of literary studies that explore an era for which fewer accounts and statistics are available, before the phenomenon of large-scale migration was “domesticated,” or integrated into the familiar fabric of everyday life.6 For, as David Eltis explains, “in no period before the nineteenth century is it likely that European migration – including indentured servants – exceeded a five year annual average of 10,000.”7 By contrast, the first two decades of the nineteenth century saw an average of about 50,000 Europeans migrate to North America alone.8 We focus on this period of rapid change, from roughly the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, the moment when the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions initiated what James Belich has described as a “Settler Revolution.” Focusing on both the historical and aesthetic dimensions of migrant literature, Migration and Modernities unpicks the migrant narratives woven into literary works, pieces together those stories dispersed in the archives, and reveals the literariness of accounts of migration that present themselves as histories.9 Literary history might seem like an odd lens through which to study migration, but one of the primary means of understanding the migrant experience, whether at our present moment or in the past, is through stories – whether those of historical individuals such as Turkish refugee Ishmael Bashaw and the former slave Mary Prince, or whether represented in literary works such as Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) and Byron’s Don Juan (1819–24). It is perhaps no coincidence that the earliest novels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1615) and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), for instance, told the stories of wanderers. In his work on early English fiction, Srinivas Aravamudan documents the transcultural and what he calls “translational” character of much early English fiction, arguing that popular genres like the Oriental tale, travel narrative, and pseudoethnography have been overshadowed by critics’ privileging of realism and the domestic novel.10 The stories of migration we gather here offer other alternatives to the domestic and realist fiction that shapes most studies of particular national traditions, especially in the Anglo-European context. These stories also alter commonplace understandings of migrant narratives, which are often perceived as having a departure point or beginning, and an arrival point or

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ending, with some vicissitudes or adventures occurring in between. Two variations of this narrative that still tend to shape representations of migration emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. One of these is a story of loss, whether through the irrevocable severing of ties to a homeland, or through failure to adapt to the conditions of an unfamiliar country. The other is a story of triumphant gain, in which the migrant transcends the difficulties of assimilation and prospers in a new land. Published before these variations had concretized fully, the examples gathered here offer a variety of more complex narratives that have been overshadowed historically by these dominant two. These narratives dwell on the messy middle state rather than the points of departure and arrival. Burney’s The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties and Bashaw’s The Turkish Refugee: Being a Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, Deliverances, and Conversion, of Ishmael Bashaw evidence the difficulty in imposing certain origins and endpoints in their very titles, which rely on vague plural nouns and arbitrary lists, suggesting recurring experiences and mobility rather than stasis as a normative state of human existence. These narratives of unbearable loss on the one hand and triumphant gain on the other have also inflected approaches to studying migration, literary or otherwise. For instance, Edward Said, in his “Reflections on Exile,” questions the ethics of celebrating migration for the great art and literature that some migrants have created, arguing that the experience of displacement or exile is “neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible” and that to think of it as “beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them.” He rightly objects to the transformation of exile into “a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture.”11 We might trace this motif to Romantic literary culture, which is peopled with characters who become exiles because of their powerful creativity – Byron’s Manfred or Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance – and which was created by writers such as Wordsworth and Southey, whose wanderings inspired their creativity, and yet who addressed the sufferings of vagrants and vagabonds in their works. While Nail also refuses to metaphorize migration, he takes a contrary position to Said’s, arguing against understanding migration in terms of lack. To study migration from a perspective that normalizes stasis and place-bound community membership is to effectively ignore the importance of migration as a “constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a whole.”12 Said and Nail describe the study of migration from very different perspectives: Said from

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that of the migrant, and more specifically of the exile who cannot return home even if she or he wants to, and Nail from that of political society, which constitutes its own identity through the expulsion and integration of migrants. These perspectives might be to some extent compatible, as the painful sense of unbelonging does not preclude the migrant’s inadvertent or purposeful participation in social change. A number of the chapters in Migration and Modernities bring together these perspectives, exploring the experience of displacement and mobility through the migrant’s eyes while also examining societies’ responses to the arrival or departure of migrants. If migrants’ narratives have shaped the way we approach the study of migration, mobility has also proved resistant to literary study because it disrupts the categories through which the field is organized. Migrants have existed historically in the ill-defined spaces between nations, regions, and ethnicities; and, as Stephen Greenblatt observes in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, “academic departments are routinely organized as if the division between English and, for instance, French were stable and timeless, or as if the Muslim and Christian worlds had existed in hermetic isolation from one another.”13 The literature of migration is “extraterritorial,” to borrow George Steiner’s phrase; yet even the broader frameworks of empire or the transatlantic suggest certain parameters and subject positions that migrants’ stories may disrupt or exceed.14 And if the national paradigms through which we organize literary study fail to adequately capture the geographic mobility of writers, texts, and cultures, so too do the arbitrary temporal markers dividing one literary period from another prevent us from seeing how the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies used to represent such mobility change or remain constant over time. As its title suggests, Migration and Modernities posits a mutually constitutive relationship between geographic mobility and the advent of modernity, which some have defined as a condition of estrangement – whether from self, community, home, or labor.15 As historians of migration have shown, the commencement of largescale overseas migration, whether coerced or voluntary, coincided with the consolidation of the modern nation-state, or the alignment of political, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries. If the nation-state fostered new concepts of political rights and civic participation, it also possessed powers of exclusion and expulsion. While dispossession and displacement have long histories, refugees, as Claire Gallien’s careful tracing of the term’s origin in this volume documents, came into existence only with the consolidation of the

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nation-state. Voluntary mass migration depended upon another aspect of modernity – the development of technologies of travel and communication that allowed migrants to maintain ties to home, whether through letters, as Olivera Jokic’s reading of the records of the East India Company details, or return voyages. The mutually constitutive relationship between mobility and modernity was also manifest in less tangible developments, particularly in the emergence of a modern subjectivity that Patricia Fumerton has described as “unsettled.” In early-modern Europe, wealth and land allowed the elite to define their identity through “sited physical artifacts”; but the lower orders, who were “without place” in the sense that their subsistence was contingent on factors beyond their control, interiorized their experiences of unsettledness, developing a sense of self characterized by “singularity and disconnection.”16 Fumerton explores the experience of living in a state of transience by turning to the accounts of itinerant laborers, vagrants, sailors, and soldiers – those who traveled for a living, or in search of a living. As geographic mobility became increasingly commonplace in the later eighteenth century, this unsettled subjectivity did not disappear; instead, as people traveled further and more frequently for pleasure, changed residences or workplaces more often from necessity, and grew accustomed to transnational and transoceanic voyages, a sense of rootlessness and alienation from place and people seems to have become normative. While recognizing that geographic mobility and modern subjectivity are interrelated, this volume also demonstrates that modernity developed unevenly around the globe and impacted various ethnicities, religious sects, and social classes differently. The travels of individuals and migrations of entire peoples helps to account for the uneven emergence of modernity, as Dragana Grbić’s chapter on Dimitrije Obradovic vividly illustrates. This itinerant scholar brought Enlightenment modes of thought and being – empiricism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism – to Serbia, epitomizing the cultural changes inaugurated by the great Serbian migration of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. European mercenaries and commercial agents, such as those described by Soledad Caballero and Jokic, participated in the consolidation of a modern form of masculinity that depended upon unfettered mobility instead of property ownership or anachronistic notions of honor. Revealing the disparate impact of modernization, Melissa Adams-Campbell’s account of Black Hawk, Kenneth McNeil’s of Mary Prince, and Gallien’s of Ishmael Bashaw detail the ways in which those who experienced

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forced migration were often asked to speak through editors and translators who framed their subjects’ experiences, and depicted the cultures for which they were made to stand synedochally, with alien genres as well as anatopistic analogies and allusions. The collaborative spirit of Migration and Modernities gives this collection a broader geographical, temporal, and methodological scope than a single-authored monograph might be able to achieve – certainly than its editors, both specialists in British literature, could have accomplished. While the British Atlantic and the Anglophone worlds remain over-represented in this volume, we have attempted to compensate for the limitations of our training by drawing on the expertise of our contributors, whose work traverses Europe, South America, the United States, Southeast Asia, and South Africa. Bringing together work on military migration to Peru, the commercial and literary enterprises of East India Company officers, and the removal of Native Americans from their lands in the United States, among other forms of mobility, this volume begins the work of piecing together a global literary history of migration and suggests a comparative framework for exploring the aesthetics of mobility. By grouping chapters topically instead of in relationship to a particular nationstate or literary period, our collection draws attention to the ways in which the migrant experience troubles the categories we have used to organize literary study. To this end, the first part illustrates how mobility makes visible competing perspectives of tourism, colonialism, and diaspora. The second part looks closely at how sojourners, refugees, and exiles shaped aesthetics and knowledge in the period, extending recent historical and literary conversations about migrants’ contribution to the developing episteme of ethnography and our contemporary understanding of culture. The first half of the collection explores positionality, featuring chapters that rely on contrasting perspectives to foreground the questions about power and privilege raised by migrants’ varying forms of mobility. In a reading of Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Bolton puts the perspective of Byron, the aristocratic tourist, in dialogue with the forced migration of his hero Don Juan. Other contributors understand migration as unsettling gender and racial hierarchies. McNeil argues that the abolitionist Thomas Pringle’s own experiences of displacement from Scotland to South Africa informed his contributions to The History of Mary Prince (1831), a narrative written by a former West Indian slave and edited by Pringle. Pringle’s identification with Prince as a diasporic subject and his distance, as a free white man, from her experiences as a formerly

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enslaved black woman galvanized the British anti-slavery movement. Caballero tracks the clash of British and Criollo masculinity by juxtaposing the leadership style of the Argentinian General San Martín with that of the British officers who participated in the South American Wars of Independence. And Adams-Campbell contrasts Black Hawk’s narrative of the Sauk people’s dispossession from their lands in Illinois with that of the Romantic-era tourist voiced by Margaret Fuller. Whereas the first half of the collection adapts a comparative framework, drawing attention to the transnational categories and identities created by economic, racial, and gender differences, the second half examines how exiles, expatriates, and refugees contributed to the development of the emerging discipline of ethnography. Historian Peter Burke suggests that early-modern migrant writers, who were uniquely positioned as mediators between cultures, created the framework for the impartial participant-observer in historical and journalistic discourse.17 According to James Buzard, narrators and protagonists in the realist novel turned the gaze of the participantobserver back on their own culture, transforming ethnography – the study of other cultures – into “autoethnography” – the study of one’s own culture as if from an outsider’s perspective.18 The chapters in this part of the collection bring together Burke’s and Buzard’s observations on ethnography, rhetoric, and literary form, highlighting migrants as cultural mediators, who fostered new epistemes and aesthetic practices. The second half of our collection suggests that migrant writing always employs both an ethnographic and autoethnographic perspective, as the migrant’s representation of “otherness” depends upon a comparison with, and often a reassessment of, the known or familiar. This part explores how forms of mobility including vagrancy, exile, and sojourning (temporary migration for military, commercial, or imperial purposes) contributed to the construction of “culture” as a field of study during the long eighteenth century. Cove shows that Burney’s The Wanderer – a novel featuring a political exile from France who turns out to be English – uses the experience of vagrancy to question the economic hierarchies that structure British cultural identity. Grbić’s chapter on The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradovic (1783) traces the experience of one Serbian migrant to demonstrate how diaspora and displacement helped to forge Serbians’ understanding of their cultural identity. Jokic explores the letters of a group of East India company agents to show how commercial expatriates charged with documenting imperial progress actually

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revealed the fragility of the nation-state from their position outside of Britain. Finally, in her analysis of Ishmael Bashaw’s The Turkish Refugee (1797), Gallien explores the ways in which the Muslim Bashaw’s experiences exceeded and challenged two popular late eighteenth-century Anglo-European genres: the Christian conversation narrative and the slave narrative. The two groups into which we have placed these chapters emerged organically from our focus on migration. However, it would have been possible to organize them in a number of other ways – for instance, around the now classic cultural studies triad of race, class, and gender. Women may have been more vulnerable to displacement and dispossession, as Cove’s chapter suggests, but even voluntary migration was by no means unproblematic for men. Jokic’s and Caballero’s chapters suggest that military and mercantile forms of migration challenged dominant conceptions of masculinity based on land ownership and honor, leading to the creation of a professionalized mobile masculinity that persists today. Several of the volume’s chapters remind us that racial or ethnic conflict as a driving force of migration has a long history, as does economic disparity. They suggest that there is perhaps no such thing as purely voluntary migration, although purely coerced migration certainly exists. Thus, Thomas Pringle’s reluctant move to South Africa, where he hoped to be able to support his family, may have informed his sympathy for Mary Prince’s history of slavery and forced migration even while he was prosperous enough to distance himself from the aspects of her experiences that he found unsavory. Bolton’s and Adams-Campbell’s chapters examine the ways in which the privileged perspective of the tourist during this period engaged with the perspective of the exile or vagrant – for instance, in the case of Margaret Fuller, with displaced indigenous Americans, and, in the very different example of Byron, with the precarity of his fictional vagabond Don Juan. Finally, as this is a collection about the literature of migration, we feel it’s important to emphasize the influence of migration on literary form, and of literary form on the representation of mobility. For example, Bolton’s chapter reveals how Byron’s deft use of the mock-heroic ottava rima stanza allowed him to contrast the elite perspective of the cosmopolitan narrator with the wanderings of the protagonist of Don Juan, creating what she calls a “poetics of precarity” and turning the epic, which is usually associated with nation-building, on its head. Gallien and McNeil take up the issue of voice, demonstrating how the narratives of their migrant subjects

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resisted and were also distorted by the genres through which editors mediated their stories. For example, Gallien uncovers Arabic travel literature, particularly the riḥlah and masālik, as a repressed intertext in Bashaw’s story, which is distorted by the Christian narrator’s use of conventions and tropes associated with the popular slave narratives published in Europe. Similarly, Adams-Campbell contrasts the narrative strategies of Black Hawk and Fuller, detailing the Sauk leader’s resistance, in Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-KaTai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, to the hierarchical rhetoric of colonialism and Fuller’s turn, in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, to the classical form of translatio studii et imperii (the transfer of knowledge and political power from one civilization to another) to authorize the transfer of power from indigenous Sauk people to newly arrived settlers in the American Midwest. Cove’s chapter presents the Romantic novel as a formal representation of unsettled subjectivity instead of a means of consolidating a national community, and Jokic’s chapter invites us to revisit epistolarity, using the archives of the East India Company to provide a new vantage on the ways in which the letter negotiates distance and subjectivity in both historical and literary studies. Finally, Grbić’s chapter evidences the mobility and transculturation of genre itself by uncovering how Dimitrije Obradovic adapted the Bildungsroman in his autobiography and, in doing so, provided a new narrative for the Serbian people’s experience of Enlightenment. Migration and Modernities begins the task of mapping a literary history of migration, suggesting the benefits of tracing not only how literary forms develop over time but also how they travel across cultures. By taking mobility rather than place as its focus, this volume brings together representations of tourists, settlers, exiles, and slaves, not to collapse these very different categories but to reveal the economic, racial, and gendered dynamics of mobility, dynamics that still inform migration today. The period covered by this collection, a time in which European countries expelled large numbers of citizens, sending them off to create new settler societies around the globe, might seem impossibly distant, but it is in many ways remarkably close: war, ethnic conflict, technological change, and uneven development still drive expulsion and resettlement in our contemporary world. By taking migration as a lens through which to see anew the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we hope to make space for conversations about literary history’s potential to help us see the present from new vantages.

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Notes 1. See Rosenberg and Yang, “The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” which introduces their special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. They discuss primitive accumulation and its relationship to the displacement of people in Britain and its empire. However, the framework of dispossession excludes the examination of forms of mobility that are enabled by privilege, by those who possess rather than those who are dispossessed. 2. Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 23. 3. Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies,” p. 8. 4. See Piesse, British Settler Emigration. 5. See, for instance, Archibald, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration; Myers, Antipodal England; Wagner, Victorian Settler Narratives. 6. See Bannet, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading; Fender, Sea Changes; Mazzeo, “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American”; Shields, Nation and Migration; and Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English; Wiley, Romantic Migrations; Sussman, “Epic, Exile, and the Global.” 7. Eltis, “Introduction,” p. 9. 8. Eltis, “Introduction,” p. 10. 9. Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 9. 10. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism. 11. Said, Reflections on Exile, pp. 137–8. 12. Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 13. 13. Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility,” p. 4. 14. Steiner, Extraterritorial. 15. See Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, pp. 15–19. 16. Fumerton, Unsettled, pp. xiii–xiv. 17. Burke, Exiles and Expatriates. 18. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, pp. 12–19.

Bibliography Aravamudan, Srinivas, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Archibald, Diana, Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002). Bannet, Eve Taylor, Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Berman, Marshall, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988). Burke, Peter, Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500–2000 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017). Buzard, James, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History, 43(1), 2010, pp. 1–18. Eltis, David, “Introduction: Migration and Agency in Global History,” in David Eltis (ed.), Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 1–32. Fender, Stephen, Sea Changes: British Migration and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Fumerton, Patricia, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Greenblatt, Stephen, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Stephen Greenblatt, with Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Níyri, and Friederike Pannewick, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–23. Mazzeo, Tilar J., “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review, 16(1), 2005, pp. 59–78. Myers, Janet C., Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009). Nail, Thomas, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Piesse, Jude, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Rosenberg, Jordana and Chi-ming Yang, “Introduction: The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 55(2/3), 2014, pp. 137–53. Said, Edward S., Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Shields, Juliet, Nation and Migration: The Making of British Atlantic Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Steiner, George, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: Atheneum, 1971). Sussman, Charlotte, “Epic, Exile, and the Global: Felicia Heman’s The Forest Sanctuary,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 65 (4), 2011, pp. 481–512. Tennenhouse, Leonard, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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Wagner, Tamara (ed.), Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011). Wiley, Michael, Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions (New York: Palgrave, 2008).

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Part I

Moving Voices: Competing Perspectives on Migration

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Chapter 1

Byron’s Ambivalent Modernity: Touring and Forced Migration in Don Juan Betsy Bolton

The work of George Gordon, Lord Byron, may seem an odd place to look for early discussions of migration and precarity. Why would we expect Byron – a landed nobleman and a poet renowned for his expansive knowledge of classics, politics, economics, and more – to understand the vulnerability of migrants and refugees? Yet Byron’s poetic musings on his experiences as a social outcast and sexual refugee from his native land anticipate many later theoretical discussions of refugee status and migration. Most concretely and compellingly, Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan (1819–24) offers a genealogy for the “regime of motion” Thomas Nail sees defining modern life. Working to “reinvent . . . political theory from the primacy of social motion rather than the state,” Nail argues that “The social compulsion to move produces certain expulsions for all migrants. . . . Migration in this sense is neither entirely free nor forced – the two are part of the same regime of social motion.”1 Byron’s revision of epic form suggests more specifically that modern epic must operate in a world ruled by what Cindi Katz calls “vagabond capitalism,” a world in which human beings are disabled as moral and political agents, displaced from the stable certainties ostensibly provided by religious and moral codes.2 Operating within the constraints of vagabond capital, Byron’s narrator (an aristocratic tourist) and his protagonist (the hapless vagabond Juan) appear strikingly different at first, but those differences dissolve over the course of the epic, as both figures suffer from precarity and strive to overcome it in different ways. Just as the plot of Don Juan undermines commonplace distinctions between tourists and vagabonds, so Byron’s formal

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innovations develop an early poetics of precarity, at once undercutting moral ideals and developing mobility into a mode of peripatetic resilience. The pages that follow pursue this argument through four steps. The chapter’s first section examines the political economy of Don Juan: in place of Buonaparte’s “noble daring” or Don Juan’s seductive powers, Byron presents the ruling power of bankers, loans, and shopkeepers as holding the key to a world redefined as prison for all. In this vision of modernity, the alternative to prison is migration, though migration’s illusion of freedom offers only a different experience of vulnerability. The next section examines two kinds of resilience explored in Byron’s epic satire: young Juan’s irrepressible resilience makes him a kind of homo beatus, the antithesis of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, while the narrator’s self-mocking performance as tour-guide offers a temporary escape from the generic position(s) he occupies. The third section argues that Juan’s encounter with highwaymen on Shooter’s Hill outside London underscores the narrator’s and protagonist’s common vulnerability in ways that accord with Judith Butler’s view of precarity rather than Zygmunt Bauman’s more antagonistic account of tourists and vagabonds. The chapter’s final section spells out Byron’s poetics of precarity, focusing on his revision of epic form and his comic use of ottava rima as a means of developing poetic and narrative mobility into a resource capable of sustaining human connections.

Vagabond Capitalism Produces Modernity as Migration While Thomas Nail proposed the term “regime of motion” for our contemporary experience of society in motion, Byron’s Don Juan both comically anticipates Nail’s emphasis on the “primacy of motion” and offers an implicit genealogy for that regime. Nail draws on the work of Henri Bergson to argue for “the primacy of motion”: Bergson insisted that when we imagine a static line running from A to B it is “already motion that has drawn the line” to which A and B are added afterward as endpoints. For Bergson and Nail, movement is “anterior to immobility” and “reality is mobility itself. . . . If movement is not everything, it is nothing.”3 This model of “the primacy of motion” offers a foundational and existential understanding of motion’s constitutive power. Byron’s version of the

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primacy of motion, by contrast, operates through a kind of paradoxical double-take: Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits, Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry, As going at full speed – no matter where its Direction be, so ’t is but in a hurry, And merely for the sake of its own merits; For the less cause there is for all this flurry, The greater is the pleasure in arriving At the great end of travel – which is driving.4

The first part of the passage does not cohere well, suggesting a certain speed in composition as well as in theme. “Spirits” are undercut by the comically weak rhyme with “where its.” The odd image of blood leavened with speed like curry leavened with cayenne stumbles over the fact that neither blood nor curry is usually “leavened” in the way bread is, for instance. Yet these issues with the image do not undo the sense of zest the lines communicate – nor do they erase the association of “curry” with the exotic food available to travelers. Overall, the stanza repeatedly promises an arrival which it repeatedly defers – until it finally refuses an arrival, an endpoint, altogether. The ottava rima’s closing couplet simultaneously performs and resists completion: “arriving” promises an end to travel, but the final line only delivers us back again, to the ongoing travel of “driving.” This poetic primacy of motion connects, as we shall see, to core concerns of Byron’s epic, including objections to contemporary constraints on both individual and national liberty. What creates this insistence on motion in Don Juan? What kind of genealogy does Byron offer for a regime of motion? In this epic satire, vagabond capital creates a world in which modernity and migration are indistinguishable. This focus on capital may seem anachronistic, but one might recall Byron’s claim that his “best Canto, save one on astronomy, / Will turn upon ‘Political Economy’.”5 One rationale for Byron’s focus on economics can be found in an early letter (1814) in which he announced, “I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments . . . . The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”6 In this analysis, poverty is politics – the only kind of politics that really matters. Thus, while Byron does not use

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the terminology of capitalism, much less vagabond capitalism, his analysis of early nineteenth-century political economy insists upon the structuring power of wealth (capital) over poverty. Cindi Katz coined the term “vagabond capitalism” to highlight the destructive effects of a dislocated capitalism. Katz argues that the economic system rather than individual people represents the true figure of the modern vagabond: The phrase vagabond capitalism puts the vagrancy and dereliction where it belongs – on capitalism, that unsettled, dissolute, irresponsible stalker of the world. It also suggests a threat at the heart of capitalism’s vagrancy: that an increasingly global capitalist production can shuck many of its particular commitments to place, most centrally those associated with social reproduction, which is almost always less mobile than production. At worst, this disengagement hurls certain people into forms of vagabondage; at best, it leaves people in all parts of the world struggling to secure the material goods and social practices associated with social reproduction.7

“That unsettled, dissolute, irresponsible stalker of the world” – this description sounds not unlike the darker side of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a man who preys upon women – especially since social reproduction is traditionally women’s work. Yet Byron’s young Don Juan is the bright inverse of this threatening figure. Byron’s hero may be unsettled, but he is unsettled by the actions of others (Donna Julia, his mother, Haidée, Ladro, Gulbayez, and so on) or by fate instead of his own destructive desires. Rather than dissolute, he is oddly righteous, at least in his conscious moments: he withstands Gulbayez’s sexual demands but falls in his sleep into a sexual encounter with Dudù. Rather than stalking the world, he is driven across the globe by his eager engagement with love and war, and eventually with commerce. Yet while Byron’s protagonist is the antithesis of the traditional seducer of the pantomime, the political economy sketched by his epic satire captures much of the dark energy Katz attributes to capitalism. In Don Juan, the machinations of capital appear sporadically but with powerful effects: destabilizing national and international politics, entrapping both the oppressor and the oppressed. Like Katz, the narrator of Don Juan insists on the unsettled, dissolute, irresponsible power of capitalism: “Every loan / Is not a merely speculative hit, / But seats a nation or upsets a throne.”8 Not only monarchies are subject to loans:

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Republics also get involved a bit; Columbia’s stock hath holders not unknown On ‘Change; and even thy silver soil, Peru, Must get itself discounted by a Jew.9

The form of government matters not: capitalism rules regardless of political structures. Bankers – Byron names “Jew Rothschild,” “his fellow-Christian Baring,” and “truly liberal Lafitte” – are “the true lords of Europe.” These are the names that answer and fill the awkward plural form of the inquisitive “Who?” Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign O’er congress, whether royalist or liberal? Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain? (That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.) Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all? The shade of Buonaparte’s noble daring? Jew Rothschild, and his fellow-Christian, Baring.10

Byron was criticized by his contemporaries for inappropriately admiring Napoleon’s “noble daring,” but here he presents capitalists as the shadowy side of Buonaparte’s imperial power. The analogy is not an empty metaphor: Rothschild, considered a “Napoleon of finance” by his brothers, was “the principal conduit of money from the British government to the continental battlefields on which the fate of Europe was decided in 1814 and 1815.”11 The Barings were bankers with a similarly powerful reach: their bank (Barings) “according to an apocryphal anecdote circulated as early as 1817, was the sixth great power in Europe following England, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia.”12 Part of the irony of the plural verbs combined with the interrogative “Who?” is that the reader’s struggle to make sense of the plural form seems comically excessive: the answer to “Who holds the balance of the world? Who reigns?” may not be a singular godlike power, but instead a tiny group of three men, identified by name. One might compare Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, in which Asia demands a single name (Jove) as the figure responsible for all human misery. In Byron’s cosmology, Jove has been rather comically usurped by the trinity of Rothschild, Baring, and Lafitte. Yet Byron’s cynicism exceeds Shelley’s revolutionary fervor. Where Shelley envisions a coming revolution capable of toppling oppressive force, Byron sees

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revolutionaries as well as reactionary forces dancing to the tune played by capitalism. While the narrator offers an omniscient (or nobleman’s) perspective on political economy, Juan the epic vagabond experiences its effects at ground level, as robbery. After a career that takes him from Spain to Greece to Turkey to Russia, he travels through northern Europe to arrive in England – and robbery, licensed and unlicensed, is the social experience dominating Juan’s arrival. Even before he lands, the English are defined as “Those haughty shopkeepers, who sternly dealt / Their goods and edicts out from pole to pole, / And made the very billows pay them toll.”13 Juan’s arrival in Dover is the occasion of multiple kinds of licensed robbery: the “custom house, with all its delicate duties,” the innkeepers with their “long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.”14 Those bills are stiff enough to merit an obscurely twisted reference to Britain’s reputation for standing against slavery. Cowper in The Task (1785) had claimed that “Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs / Receive our air, that moment they are free, / They touch our country and their shackles fall.”15 But Byron’s summary of young Juan’s dismay at the prices of goods and services in England makes mockery of such a noble claim: “But doubtless as the air, though seldom sunny, / Is free, the respiration’s worth the money.”16 This elusive oxymoron claims both that the air is free and that breathing is expensive. Of course, the air is not free in any functional way if breathing requires money: Byron deflates Cowper’s hopeful claims with an offhand phrase. On his approach to London, Juan’s musings further connect the licensed robbery of shopkeepers with the more straightforward assault of highwaymen on “Shooter’s Hill.” After killing one of the vagabonds attacking him, young Juan regrets his hasty action: “Perhaps,” thought he, “it is the country’s wont To welcome foreigners in this way: now I recollect some innkeepers who don’t Differ, except in robbing with a bow, In lieu of a bare blade and brazen front.17

Juan’s description of a general “country’s wont” or national habit connecting the work of both footpads and innkeepers is naively damning. Byron implies that commerce – identified by the poem as a key component of English identity and pride – is to a foreigner largely indistinguishable from robbery, and in this section of the

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poem, the legal acquisition of a man’s (or a nation’s) wealth slides gradually into the taking of a man or a nation’s liberty. While Juan’s perspective focuses on the taking of a man’s money (and, accidentally, the reciprocal taking of a man’s life), the narrator’s emphasis on political economy highlights capital’s capacity not only to topple governments, but also to hold both men and nations captive to its power. Indeed, Byron’s narrator makes this argument explicitly, after distinguishing himself from Juan’s pride at being among (and fleeced by) a race of “haughty shopkeepers.” Unlike his young hero, the narrator says, I’ve no great cause to love that spot of earth, Which holds what might have been the noblest nation; But though I owe it little but my birth, I feel a mix’d regret and veneration For its decaying fame and former worth. Seven years (the usual term of transportation) Of absence lay one’s old resentments level, When a man’s country’s going to the devil.18

The narrator’s seven-year absence from England does indeed match the usual sentence of transportation: he frames himself here as a convicted criminal who has done his time. That imaginary time served allows him a fresh start, beyond “old resentments,” with a neutral eye that authorizes judgment of “decaying fame and former worth.” England’s shortfalls in terms of justice make the nation a “False friend, who held out freedom to mankind, / And now would chain them, to the very mind.”19 But the narrator insists on the impossibility of freedom for any in a world based on slavery: Would she be proud, or boast herself the free, Who is but first of slaves? The nations are In prison, – but the gaoler, what is he? No less a victim to the bolt and bar. Is the poor privilege to turn the key Upon the captive, freedom? He’s as far From the enjoyment of the earth and air Who watches o’er the chain, as they who wear.20

The tensions of this stanza make for slow reading. First, a feminized England turns into a masculine gaoler. Second, the rhetorical

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question “what is he?” is answered with a sentence fragment, but it is tempting to complete that fragment by connecting it to the verb beginning the next line: “No less a victim to the bolt and bar / Is the poor privilege to turn the key.” And that erroneous sentence does actually summarize one part of the stanza’s argument: privilege is as captive to bolt and bar as imprisonment itself. The “He” who begins the next sentence “far” from enjoyment is indeed lost in the sentence’s deferrals – “he” is redefined as the gaoler (“who watches o’er the chain”) only after “enjoyment of the earth and air” has already passed by. We – vagabonds, tourists, jailers, prisoners, those with privilege and those without – have all lost our enjoyment of the earth and air. One alternative to this ubiquitous gaol sentence (as inmate or gaoler) is migration – but migration is only another face of human vulnerability in this epic satire. Not only does the narrator equate his travels with a sentence of transportation, but his hero Juan suffers almost every vicissitude imagined on his own wide-ranging travels. In a somewhat twisted anticipation of Michel Foucault’s analysis of governmentality, Byron suggests that states – suborned by capitalism in the form of bankers and shopkeepers – have the power to make stay or make move; individuals and nations, “chain[ed] . . . to the very mind,”21 have only the illusion of self-determination. Our regime of motion is far more regimented than it is mobile.

From Tourist-Narrator to Homo Beatus: Variants of the Migrant At this point, it may be worth remembering that Byron entered the public eye (and drew on the public’s purse) quite literally as a tourist, with his celebrated publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a poem understood to be based on his own experiences of a Grand Tour. Instead of exploring the traditional sites of France and Italy, Byron’s tour had been displaced by the Napoleonic Wars and his own desires to visit the eastern Mediterranean: the exoticism of his account of the Levant gave interest and piquancy to his narrative poem. The figure of Harold (the autobiographical nature of whom Byron would later disavow) was notable for his wandering far from home: indeed, Harold’s farewell to England (“Adieu! adieu! my native shore / Fades o’er the waters blue. / My native land, good night!”) was one of the most frequently quoted passages in the poem.22 Even more central to

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popular reception of Byron as exile was the description of solitary isolation produced by such wanderings: What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.23

Byron as a celebrity figure was seen in many ways as the quintessential exile, offering a sublimation of all that might be vulgar in touring. As James Buzard argues, Byron’s touch of “solitude and spirituality” (as Said put it) made him a paradoxical icon of nineteenth-century British tourism.24 Byron’s exquisitely solitary, half-spiritual, half-sexual aura as an exiled traveler defined a particular, mostly elite, approach to tourism for British travelers in the mid-nineteenth century. If Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage seemed to epitomize public impressions of the exiled poet’s sensibilities, the narrator of the later cantos of Don Juan offered a more ironic and retrospective view of touristic tropes and feelings. Yet this new sensibility was anchored once again in the celebrity figure of Byron himself. While the narrator of the first two cantos archly denied any relation to Byron (asserting, for instance, “I’m a humble man and in a single station”), the autobiographical content of those cantos produced widespread public outrage, undercutting the narrator’s claims of innocence and difference.25 In the later cantos, the connection between narrator and author was more simply acknowledged, as when the narrator describes in the first person Byron’s attempts to revive the military commandant shot outside Byron’s rented house in Venice. Most of Byron’s published work relied in some way on his public persona: as John Scott complained in the London Magazine, the “main interest” of Byron’s literary works “is derived from awakening a recollection of some fact of the author’s life, or a conviction of an analogy to the author’s own character.”26 That character, as figured by the narrator of Don Juan, married Byron-the-traveling-exile with Byron-thesatirist-of social-convention. In Canto 5 of Don Juan, for instance, Byron’s narrator mocks the popularity of travel literature – a mode of writing that was busily nurturing new cultural practices of tourism – even as he goes on to participate exuberantly in the very modes of description he ostensibly disdains. “I won’t describe; description is my forte,” the narrator begins, and even the claim “description is my forte” has an ironic

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undertone, since the term was used a few stanzas earlier to criticize long-windedness:27 Some speakers whine, and others lay the lash on, But more or less continue still to tease on, With arguments according to their “forte”; But no one dreams of ever being short.28

Don Juan, ostentatiously long-winded, alternately teasing and laying on the lash, is a poem that can dream of anything, it would appear, except being short. At this moment, however, the narrator abjures description, simply because it has become a mode desperately over-used: I won’t describe; description is my forte: But every fool describes in these bright days His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise – Death to his publisher, to him ’t is sport; While Nature, tortured twenty thousand ways, Resigns herself with exemplary patience To guide-books, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations.29

Of course, Byron himself is the most celebrated traveler “in these bright days” to describe his “wondrous journey to some foreign court.” Not only Childe Harold but also Byron’s “Oriental tales” set off a craze for poetical travel writing: “guide-books, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations” all stretching Nature’s patience. Conversely, the tension between the poet’s sport and the publisher’s death seems specific to Don Juan, with Murray’s anxieties forming a counterpoint to Byron’s delight in excess. Byron’s oxymoronic excess of restraint here is little more than an introduction to a suitably Byronic extravaganza of description, one that spins the reader from pillar to post as Byron the touring satirist takes aim at the compulsion to consume. As Bauman names that compulsion to consume as one key element of globalization differentially driving the motion of both tourist and vagabond,30 so the tourist-narrator of Don Juan takes advantage of Juan’s abjection in the seraglio scenes to satirize travel literature’s vicarious investment in conspicuous consumption. Byron’s description moves from guard post through grand but empty galleries, to musings on the melancholy of solitary splendor, to discussions of sacred versus secular architecture

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(including the tower of Babel and Queen Semiramis, with rumors of her erotic liaisons with horses which might have inspired Byron’s turn to Russia’s Catherine), to Horatian morals, to a stanza that reduces visual splendor to sheer and silly aural pleasure: At last they reach’d a quarter most retired, Where echo woke as if from a long slumber; Though full of all things which could be desired, One wonder’d what to do with such a number Of articles which nobody required; Here wealth had done its utmost to encumber With furniture an exquisite apartment, Which puzzled Nature much to know what Art meant.31

What is desired is defined as that which is not required. At the end of the stanza, the over-the-top rhyme between “exquisite apartment” and Nature’s puzzling over “what Art meant” further unravels both the apartment’s claim to classy décor and the classical reference to the relationship between Nature and Art: meaning is cut short by the rhyme as “meant” struggles to rhyme with “ment.” Yet Byron’s satire gradually points beyond its own mockery of conspicuous consumption to a more transcendent experience of novelty and difference. No sooner is decoration dismissed as excess than it comes back into the poem through an entrance into yet another range of chambers where The movables were prodigally rich: Sofas ’t was half a sin to sit upon, So costly were they; carpets every stitch Of workmanship so rare, they made you wish You could glide o’er them like a golden fish.32

The shift to the second person is half comic here, as the rhyme scheme moves us from “rich” to “fish” while the narrator projects onto the reader a bizarre desire to become a goldfish in order to swim on these finely worked carpets. The very next stanza, however, treats this “wondrous journey” in “some foreign court” more seriously by stressing the eunuch’s disinterest along with the wonder of the enslaved Europeans, Juan and Johnson: The black, however, without hardly deigning A glance at that which wrapt the slaves in wonder,

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To be walking on the milky way with all its stars: this is an image capable of turning travel into transcendence. With moves like these, Byron’s nimble narrator manages to have his cake and eat it too: he mocks the conventions of “guide-books, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations” while performing and transforming those conventions with dizzying speed and skill. Objecting to the way conventional travel literature describes and orders the world for easy consumption, Byron’s narration at once mocks its own generic facility and gestures toward a larger world in which we might all identify with the “sojourner” or vagabond of the Hebrew psalms. Our hero Don Juan is far less adept. By the time he reaches the siege on the banks of the Danube, Juan has already been as hapless a migrant and refugee as one could imagine. Temporarily exiled from his native country for sexual misdeeds, Juan has been shipwrecked, washing up penniless on a foreign shore. Rescued by the pirate princess Haidée and raised to prominence on an island enriched by her father’s looting, Juan seems to have landed on his feet – until the return of Haidée’s ruthless father Ladro. Saved only by Haidée’s intervention – which costs her life, that of her unborn babe, and apparently the prosperity of the entire island – Juan is again cast off, shipped over to Constantinople to be sold into slavery. After a lascivious cross-dressed sexual encounter in the seraglio, Juan, purchased by the sultana Gulbayez for her pleasure, refuses to submit to her desire for his expressions of devotion. He and his companion Jack Johnson (plus the hapless Dudù, with whom Juan spent the night) are apparently sentenced to being bagged and thrown into the sea – and their survival and arrival on the outskirts of Ismail remain unexplained. Shipwreck, slavery, sexual exploitation: Juan is Every Migrant, or perhaps a Migrant for All Seasons. Yet while Juan suffers many of the exigencies faced by migrants, he experiences them comically, with little apparent suffering. Indeed, as a comic foil, the occasion for numerous jokes, Juan seldom seems fully present to his own experiences. If anything, he appears to offer a comic (in)version of Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer or sacred/ accursed man. Drawing the figure from archaic Roman law (a man who is banned and may be killed by anyone but not sacrificed in a religious ritual), Agamben describes homo sacer as

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excluded from the religious community and from all political life . . . . What is more, his entire existence is reduced to a bare life stripped of every right by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him without committing homicide; he can save himself only in perpetual flight or a foreign land.34

While Juan is not under a sentence of death, his experiences become a species of perpetual flight and extended survival in a variety of foreign lands. A kind of homo beatus, the antithesis of the homo sacer, Juan appears blessed with uncanny capacity for thriving through adversity. Byron’s plot repeatedly exposes Juan to the threat of death, and our nominal hero frequently appears “reduced to a bare life” by the exigencies of shipwreck, enslavement, sexual oppression, military service, and more. Yet Juan’s defining quality remains not his vulnerability but rather his buoyant resilience – a resilience that is nonetheless described in terms emphasizing his physical being, in a more positively coded version of “bare life.” Juan’s existence is frequently reduced to physical urges: puberty, arousal (often involuntary), hunger and/or digestive trouble, physical exhaustion. When, for instance, the adolescent boy engages in extended philosophical musings, the narrator remarks: “’T was strange that one so young should thus concern / His brain about the action of the sky,” and the closing rhyme of the ottava rima stanza underscores the physicality of the punchline: “If you think ’t was philosophy that this did, / I can’t help thinking puberty assisted.”35 Puberty trumps philosophy here as sexuality will repeatedly override abstract thought throughout Juan’s adventures. Possible trauma is often left off stage, as at the end of the first canto: Here ends this canto. – Need I sing, or say, How Juan naked, favour’d by the night, Who favours what she should not, found his way, And reach’d his home in an unseemly plight?36

This is not the only plight that will appear “unseemly” – indecent, unhandsome, unfit for representation – in Don Juan. The narrative resists realist norms by turning away from this kind of representational challenge. Like the aftermath of this first sexual escapade, for instance, the end of the seraglio episode is left unsung and obscure. At the same time, Juan remains well-favored not only by female characters but also by female abstractions (Night, Fortune, etc.)

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through his many adventures. The narrator insists that Juan mistakes his body’s desires for abstract thought, but at the same time, the poem’s abstractions respond to Juan as if they were responding to his body, favoring him as a woman favors a lover. Comic bathos – a comically erotic transgression of conceptual categories – operates in both directions. Yet while the poem uses the body’s erotic urges to travesty Juan’s philosophizing and idealism, even his romantic tendencies are undercut by still more basic physical drives. On the boat bearing him away from his first beloved, Juan’s performance of love and distress is disrupted by seasickness, and the interruption is granted the status of a general principle of human existence: “Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!” Juan exclaims, but the narrative interrupts his speech as it specifies, “(Here he grew inarticulate with retching).” And while the poem seems to grant the force of Juan’s love, that acknowledgment appears only in the context of a broader assertion of love’s inability to withstand “vulgar” illness. No doubt he would have been much more pathetic, But the sea acted as a strong emetic. ... Love, who heroically breathes a vein, Shrinks from the application of hot towels, And purgatives are dangerous to his reign, Sea-sickness death: his love was perfect, how else Could Juan’s passion, while the billows roar, Resist his stomach, ne’er at sea before?37

The pathetic is undone by the emetic: Juan’s passion may resist his stomach in his own experience, but the reader’s sense of Juan’s love has been thoroughly undercut and diverted by references to retching and bowels. As Love’s “capricious power” is puzzled and defeated by “vulgar illnesses,” so the body’s demands here conquer the literary conventions of pathos and romantic heroism. Juan’s transition to a new beloved also takes a detour through his digestive system in a sequence that again privileges “vulgar” physicality over romance. After Juan’s seasickness comes a detailed account of the shipwreck, including many pathetic details intermingled with a range of discomfortingly blasphemous jokes.38 By the time Juan washes up on the beach, however, the poem seems to take his physical sufferings more seriously:

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And there he lay, full length, where he was flung, Before the entrance of a cliff-worn cave, With just enough of life to feel its pain, And deem that it was saved, perhaps in vain. ... And, like a wither’d lily, on the land His slender frame and pallid aspect lay, As fair a thing as e’er was form’d of clay.39

Nineteenth-century readers might draw on multiple accounts of harrowing shipwrecks to contextualize these lines; for twentyfirst-century readers, the most perilous sea-crossings commonly reported involve refugees and migrants (one might recall the viral image of Alan Kurdi here). The tone of this passage is closer to that of Childe Harold than to the archly comic posturing more common to Don Juan: both here and elsewhere, an insistence on physical vulnerability and the threat of death punctuate Byron’s satiric epic. Yet Juan rebounds quickly, both physically and emotionally, turning from existential devastation to the bathos of basic human needs. His eyes he open’d, shut, again unclosed, For all was doubt and dizziness; he thought He still was in the boat and had but dozed, And felt again with his despair o’erwrought, And wish’d it death in which he had reposed; And then once more his feelings back were brought, And slowly by his swimming eyes was seen A lovely female face of seventeen.40

The passage begins with an involuntary repetition of a traumatic experience but turns by way of imagery and verbal repetition to the possibility of romance. Juan “thought” he was back in the boat, then “felt again” (the poem doesn’t specify what he felt, though it specifies how: “with his despair o’erwrought”), then “wish’d” for death. After all this cognitive and emotional activity, Juan’s “feelings back were brought” as if they, like his body, needed to find landfall, even as his eyes go “swimming” to find a new “lovely female face” to worship. No sooner is this romance set up, however, then the narrative turns to another, more corporeal channel:

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Betsy Bolton And Juan, too, was help’d out from his dream, Or sleep, or whatso’er it was, by feeling A most prodigious appetite: the steam Of Zoe’s cookery no doubt was stealing Upon his senses, and the kindling beam Of the new fire, which Zoe kept up, kneeling To stir her viands, made him quite awake And long for food, but chiefly a beef-steak.41

The poem steps back from its initial suggestion that love and beauty are what help bring Juan back to life and back from the brink of despair: Juan’s “prodigious appetite” and “Zoe’s cookery” rather than Haidée’s beauty is what most emphatically “steal[s] upon his senses” and makes him want to live – in order to consume a typically British “beef-steak.” (At this moment, the young Spaniard Juan is presumably overshadowed by his British creator and narrator.) Here, as in many of Juan’s most trying encounters, the poem reduces any possibility of heroism down to a bare corporeality – but corporeality that is supremely resilient, especially in comparison to the “bare life” left to Agamben’s homo sacer.42 Of course, Byron’s Juan is such a comic naif that his resilience is hardly a theoretical or philosophical principle: indeed, his buoyancy is more of a running joke, especially in the context of the poem’s broader exploration of migration and movement.

Vagabonds and Tourists Share the Universal Condition of Precarity Thus far, we have considered Byron’s narrator and protagonist as if they remain the polar opposites they at first appear – but the plot of the epic unravels that opposition in ways that anticipate and partly resist Bauman’s analysis of tourists and vagabonds as interconnected figures. Bauman’s tourist is the consummate consumer; his vagabond is a “flawed consumer” – but the vagabond’s “flaw” helps underwrite an entire global system.43 According to Bauman, What is acclaimed today as “globalization” is geared to the tourists’ dreams and desires. Its second effect – a side-effect, but an unavoidable one – is the transformation of many others into vagabonds. Vagabonds are travelers refused the right to turn into tourists.44

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Vagabonds (migrant workers, trafficked and homeless people, “the waste of the world which has dedicated itself to tourist services”) are a necessary component of this world-system: “The widely noted, increasingly worrying polarization of the world and its population is not an external, alien, disturbing, ‘spoke in the wheel’ interference with the process of globalization; it is its effect.”45 Yet, Bauman argues, because this unavoidable effect of globalization is not well understood or broadly recognized, tourists fail to recognize their intrinsic connection to vagrants and vagabonds. Bauman argues that tourists and vagabonds are situated on a continuum where their plights and pleasures are intertwined, despite the “tendency to gloss over the networks of mutual dependency which underlies each of them as well as their opposition.”46 Bauman suggests that tourists out of ignorance abhor the vagabond as a nightmare alter ego, a figure that threatens to expose their own consumeristic imperfections: While sweeping the vagabond under the carpet – banning the beggar and the homeless from the street, confining him to a far-away, “no-go” ghetto, demanding his exile or incarceration – the tourist desperately, though in the last account vainly, seeks the deportation of his own fears.47

The polarizing effects of globalization appear through the distance tourists seek from vagabonds. Paradoxically, however, Bauman argues that [w]hat makes the tourist life endurable, turns its hardship into minor irritants and allows the temptation to change [to a non-tourist way to happiness] is the self-same sight of the vagabond that makes the tourists shudder. . . . The worse is the plight of the vagabonds, the better it feels to be a tourist.48

For Bauman, the vagabond is the abject, the other that defines by opposition the tourist’s (temporary) freedom from constraint and suffering. While Bauman acknowledges the vulnerability shared by both vagabond and tourist, the binary opposition between those figures remains a central part of his analysis. Byron’s Don Juan, by contrast, more emphatically erases the distinction between tourist and vagabond, between apparently powerful voluntary travelers and disempowered involuntary migrants. Byron’s narrator, identified by most readers with Byron the aristocratic exile, matches Bauman’s description of the tourist: he travels

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because he wants to, and he defines his own self-possession against the vulnerability of those he encounters. Yet where Bauman stresses the vagabond’s lack of volition and agency, in terms that invite comparison with Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the cursed man or homo sacer, Byron’s bizarrely resilient vagabond hero seems instead to present a migrant’s fantasy of being able to rise to every challenge. At the same time, even the linguistic virtuosity of Byron’s narrator eventually betrays his vulnerability before the state. Byron’s double inversion of expectations here highlights the extent to which both the aristocratic tourist and the destitute vagabond remain subject to the system that creates their apparently divergent experiences. On Shooter’s Hill outside London, Byron uses plot and diction together to underscore the vicissitudes and reversals of fortune to which both vagabonds and tourists are vulnerable. Young Juan finds himself approaching London at the apparent high point of a kind of Grand Tour that has brought him from St. Petersburg through Poland, Germany, and the Netherlands to the British Isles. On the ominously named “Shooter’s Hill,” Juan is moved to proclaim the wonders of England: I say, Don Juan, wrapt in contemplation, Walk’d on behind his carriage, o’er the summit, And lost in wonder of so great a nation, Gave way to ’t, since he could not overcome it. “And here,” he cried, “is Freedom’s chosen station; Here peals the people’s voice, nor can entomb it Racks, prisons, inquisitions; resurrection Awaits it, each new meeting or election. “Here are chaste wives, pure lives; here people pay But what they please; and if that things be dear, ’T is only that they love to throw away Their cash, to show how much they have a-year. Here laws are all inviolate; none lay Traps for the traveller; every highway ’s clear: Here – ” he was interrupted by a knife, With, – “Damn your eyes! your money or your life!” These freeborn sounds proceeded from four pads In ambush laid.49

The narrator’s rather awkward “I say” draws attention to questions of voice in this passage. Juan cannot overcome his wonder: rather, it

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seems to overcome him as he “gives way to it” and speaks as if with the irrepressible “people’s voice.” Yet Juan’s jingoistic enthusiasm for Byron’s home is first undercut by its own expression (the people’s voice swallowed up despite Juan’s claims in “racks, prisons, inquisitions,” all relatively ancient modes of torture) and then dramatically rebutted by his experience of the vicissitudes faced by all travelers. “The people” Juan actually encounters seem to speak in a very different voice, in the language of “flash” or underworld slang, even as Juan’s own voice is “given the lie” by his encounter with highwaymen, whose demand that Juan stand and deliver is framed by the narrator as “freeborn sounds.” As this alternative “people’s voice” demonstrates, English laws are not inviolate; traps are laid for travelers (and readers); highways are not clear. Within this world (and in this passage), the vagabond and tourist change places in terms of their relative power and vulnerability: Juan the former vagabond has become a tourist, as the narrator aligns himself linguistically with the footpad. Juan fires on his assailant without pausing for thought, and the highwayman dies at Juan’s hand rather than the other way around. And that death is the moment in which flash most emphatically enters the poem: “The dying man cried, ‘Hold! I ‘ve got my gruel! / O for a glass of max! We ‘ve miss’d our booty; / Let me die where I am!’”50 Gary Dyer persuasively argues that Byron himself is exposed in this second version of a “people’s voice,” as the narrator in crafting his elegy picks up the dying man’s slang mode of expression: Poor Tom was once a kiddy upon town, A thorough varmint, and a real swell, Full flash, all fancy, until fairly diddled, His pockets first and then his body riddled.51

According to the narrator, Tom is all knowing until he finds himself cheated (diddled) by a flat (a naive mark), shot by the man he meant to rob. This is not Juan’s language: he doesn’t even understand English, far less the slang connecting sporting gentlemen and thieves. But Byron himself is “full flash” (knowing) and “all fancy,” in the sense that “the Fancy” referred to fans and patrons of boxing. As Dyer notes, Byron’s footnote offers enlightenment on “flash” by directing his readers to his friend, the boxing champion and instructor John Jackson (and perhaps a model for the Jack Johnson who accompanied Juan from shipboard slavery to the taking of Ismail). While Don Juan is famous for the many languages deployed and referenced

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– and that linguistic virtuosity is often seen as a sign of the narratorpoet’s mastery – Dyer notes the vulnerability implied by this polyglossia, particularly in relation to this passage. Indeed, Dyer stresses Lord Byron’s fluency in the techniques of covert communication that marked the cultures of sodomy, boxing, and crime . . . . Each of these “cant” dialects or codes was necessitated, at least initially, by the risk of legal prosecution . . . . Sodomy could be punished with death; if the accused was privileged or fortunate, he would suffer exile or disgrace. Although boxing was only tangentially illegal, its distinctive slang (“flash”) betrayed the sport’s ties to the culture of people like Tom: thieves, beggars, and prostitutes – an underclass for whom the gallows was an ever-present threat and secrecy a necessity. For Byron these communities overlapped: he and his Cambridge friends . . . were not only active or aspiring “sodomites” but also members of “the Fancy,” the fans and patrons of boxing. Because of their sexual practices, Byron and his friends were no less criminal in English law than Tom was.52

For Dyer, sodomy is the secret underlying every other secret in Don Juan. Certainly, in an episode like this one, Byron’s legal vulnerability brings him (in the figure of the narrator) closer to the dying highwayman than to Juan. Juan is now a diplomat, traveling on commercial business while the tour-guide-narrator is suddenly linked to a dying highwayman whose covert language offends against many laws, yet offers more of a “people’s voice” than the jingoistic patriotism more commonly associated with good British citizens. Perhaps because of this struggle to claim “the people’s voice,” the poem reverts to its opening emphasis on heroes, only to ignore our long-time hero Juan in favor of the dead highwayman: But Tom’s no more – and so no more of Tom. Heroes must die; and by God’s blessing ’t is Not long before the most of them go home.53

Even Juan is heading, according to Byron’s proposed ending for Don Juan, to his own death in the midst of the French Revolution, while Byron himself stops writing in order to join the Greek struggle for independence – though, according to Eric Strand, “Byron’s attempt at political heroism ended up with him dying as a tourist.”54 Dying as a tourist, as a vagabond, as a war hero – the character in which one dies seems less important than the dying itself. Precarity becomes the common feature of modern globalization, death its defining moment.

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Narrative and Poetic Resources Offer a Creative Response to Precarity In Don Juan, Byron is self-consciously crafting a new form of epic for a new modern age, and his wandering plot suggests that modernity and migration are inextricably connected. The epic proper begins with an emphasis on the short commodity cycles of a modern celebrity culture: I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one.55

Byron explicitly sets his epic in an age of modern commodity culture, with its short marketing cycles and a kind of planned obsolescence both for heroes and for the cultural values a hero is supposed to embody – and Byron’s selection of a hero embraces the moral tawdriness implied by this kind of a marketing cycle. Since no hero these days is worth the name, an impossibly tarnished hero will do as well as any: Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I ’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan – We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.56

While “Brave men were living before Agamemnon / And since,” these hero-candidates lack a certain poetic-photogenic quality, the ability to shine “on the poet’s page.” In “the present age,” only the engagingly tarnished Don Juan is “fit for my poem (that is, for my new one),” Byron asserts.57 Byron took the name and concept of Don Juan from the pantomime (and Shadwell’s Libertine): the traveling adventures were his own contribution to the figure. Byron’s famous account of his plans for “Donny Johnny” (in a letter to Murray) involved an expansive tour: The Fifth is so far from being the last of Don Juan, that it is hardly the beginning. I meant to take him the tour of Europe, with a proper mixture of siege, battle, and adventure, and to make him finish as Anacharsis

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Juan’s tour of Europe turns the “finishing” of a young gentleman on its head, as Byron satirically polishes off all the “ridicules of society” displayed around Europe. Anacharsis Cloots was a Prussian baron who spoke to the French National Constituent Assembly on behalf of an embassy of thirty-six foreigners in support of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. He became known as the “orator of mankind” and he took on the name of Anacharsis from a philosophical romance by the Abbé Barthelmy (the original Anacharsis was a Scythian chief who journeyed to Athens and became admired as an outspoken barbarian). In Italy, a cavalier servente was a socially acknowledged “gallant” who would accompany a married woman to public events; the cavalier servente might have a sexual relationship with his acknowledged mistress, with her husband’s knowledge. Werther was the suicidal hero of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther: he killed himself out of unrequited love, and the novel set off a “Werther craze” that swept Europe. By engaging odd romantic and sexual mores across Europe and then planning to kill off his hero in the French Revolution, Byron specifies the time as well as the geographical range of the epic, placing it in the near past (some two decades before the time of writing), suggesting that even modernity is always at least a little belated. Despite this insistent belatedness, Byron’s satiric epic works to update the form of the epic to suit modern manners and needs: even his handling of minor characters shows a sophisticated sense of the way moral possibilities can be defined and circumscribed by larger social systems. Byron’s implicit theorizing of modernity may be usefully compared to the “transcendental homelessness” György Lukács associated with the novel and Edward Said linked to the experience of exile. For Lukács, Don Quixote is “the first great novel of world literature” and it “stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere.”59 This homeless soul is one of Byron’s recurring interests in Don Juan, a question he can neither answer nor stop asking.

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In the first canto, for instance, he prepares for a major assertion, only to turn aside at the last moment: Few mortals know what end they would be at, But whether glory, power, or love, or treasure, The path is through perplexing ways, and when The goal is gain’d, we die, you know – and then – What then? – I do not know, no more do you – And so good night. – Return we to our story.60

Similarly, when the Italian commandant is shot in the street outside the narrator’s lodgings, he is shaken by the episode and dwells at some length on this encounter with death: I gazed (as oft I have gazed the same) To try if I could wrench aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make a faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: – but where? five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far! And is this blood, then, form’d but to be shed? Can every element our elements mar? And air – earth – water – fire live – and we dead? We whose minds comprehend all things? No more; But let us to the story as before.61

In place of a faith, which might provide some stable grounding, this satiric epic of “transcendental homelessness” can only turn to narrative: instead of turning to God, “return we to our story.” The irony, of course, is that the story itself is shaped through the comic, irreverent form of ottava rima, a form in which sound is at least an equal partner to sense. The first six lines extend a familiar abab rhyme scheme one step too far, creating comic potential out of excess extension (ababab); the couplet with its sudden sense of closure and excess similarly serves as a punchline, often (though not always) delivering a surprising or comic turn. In a discussion of the politics of ottava rima, William Keach quotes Southey’s complaint that Byron, like his predecessors in the form, created a “capricious” “transition from what is serious to what is burlesque,” and capriciousness is one of the epic’s core intellectual

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procedures.62 To consider capriciousness an intellectual procedure may seem oxymoronic, but Byron repeatedly gestures at metaphysical truths he refuses to engage more seriously, as if pointing the reader’s attention to his capricious shifts in focus and in seriousness. Peter Conrad argues that Byron’s narrator is “as unscrupulous in his treatment of a ductile stanza form, as his hero is meant to be with women,” 63 but Jane Stabler demurs, noting that “Byron actually treats his stanza form with respect: the rhymes of ottava rima are audacious, but the challenge is levelled at the reader, not the language.”64 These accounts of Byronic form understandably emphasize its political and poetical seriousness, but I think they somewhat risk undervaluing the resources provided by its insistence on free play. As Byron’s ottava rima challenges readers’ expectations by playing on the contrast between a visual and an aural rhyme, or between an expected pronunciation and the kind of pronunciation the rhyme demands, so his apparently capricious digressions challenge readers’ desires for a clear narrative arc. Byron’s contemporary John Wilson Croker speculated that Byron was improvising the plot as he went: “I dare swear, if the truth were known, that his digressions and repetitions generate one another, and that the happy jingle of some of his comical rhymes has led him on to episodes of which he never originally thought.”65 Byron’s own verse gestures gleefully at its random turns and associations: after invoking epic norms (such as beginning in medias res), he insists My way is to begin with the beginning; The regularity of my design Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning, And therefore I shall open with a line (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning), Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father, And also of his mother, if you’d rather.66

This insistently “regular” poet is, of course, best known for his poetic wanderings, including the digressive commentary modeled here. “Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure,” the narrator will remark later in the canto:67 here, wandering as sin evokes wandering as pleasure – for the narrator if not yet for the reader. Having asserted the importance of regularity and design, the narrator tosses off the flippant gerund “spinning” as a verb for poetic creation (rhymed with “sinning”), and then plays with the norms of

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his design by offering a couplet whose second line is both conceptually off-kilter (he can’t “open” with a line addressing both father and mother or choosing between them “if you’d rather”) and poetically excessive (in that it rhymes “father” with both “mother” and “rather”). The epic’s delight in its own silly versifications may point beyond itself to the broader benefits of caprice. In the case of both verse and narrative, Byron’s challenges to his readers takes the form of a kind of game shared by reader and writer, narrator and hapless hero: ottava rima at once offers and demands conceptual mobility and produces the sometimes illicit pleasures of a linguistic, moral, philosophical shiftiness. Yet Byron’s investment in transcendence is persistent as well as capricious and shifty – persistent in ways that seem associated with his existence in a kind of political and intellectual exile. Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile” extended the concept of transcendental homelessness to include the multiplicity associated with modernity: According to Said, In the epic there is no other world, only the finality of this one. Odysseus returns to Ithaca after years of wandering; Achilles will die because he cannot escape his fate. The novel, however, exists because other worlds may exist, alternatives for bourgeois speculators, wanderers, exiles.68

Don Juan seems to oscillate between a fixed end (Juan dies as Anacharsis Cloots in the French Revolution; he ends in hell or an unhappy marriage, whichever is worse) and an utterly fluid set of futures. Finality versus alternatives: Byron’s epic straddles the line. Intriguingly, the bourgeois speculator leads Said’s list of modern heroes, ahead of wanderers and exiles – and Byron repeatedly performs acts of intellectual and commercial speculation, including his famous joke about bribing the Edinburgh Review for a good press. Both Byron and twentieth-century theorists link the forms of modernity – the novel and the updated epic – to modern forms of commercial extraction and capitalization. Eric Strand’s excellent reading of Don Juan as an allegory of the development of global economic systems suggests that there is no exit from these systems. Strand argues that “Byron is in a bind, wanting to tell the truth about political tyranny, but compromised because his poem is a part of the very economic system that underlies the tyranny.”69 Byron’s own aggressive marketing of the poem shows his implication in British economic systems – implications he is happy to acknowledge but cannot ever quite evade. The final section of

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Strand’s analysis tracks Byron’s turn from writing poetry to attempting to wage war on behalf of Greek independence: Byron, in sum, was a sort of super-tourist . . . . Byron was alternately enthused with the prospect of heroism and confronted by the awareness that this was simply the extension of gaming at Newmarket. Political heroism turned out to be “Or Molu” (DJ 11.67), a consumerist fantasy that was dependent on his savings and whatever credit could be obtained, and his main task as a wealthy traveler was to guard his pockets.70

Strand gives Byron the poet and would-be hero full credit for “lacerating irony and self-awareness,” for his cynicism “about his poetical efforts and political ambitions.”71 Yet Strand’s critique, nonetheless, seems to gesture toward an alternative possibility in which Byron might find a solid moral ground on which to stand. Don Juan does very briefly imagine such a ground, but only as a stop-gap in the midst of greater horrors. At the siege of Ismail, young Juan has instinctively rescued a young Turkish girl who was about to be killed by Russian Cossaques.72 Called on to greater heroism and reward by his friend Jack Johnson, Juan refuses to move until the child is protected: Look Upon this child – I saved her – must not leave Her life to chance; but point me out some nook Of safety, where she less may shrink and grieve, And I am with you.73

Juan’s requests are both modest and impossible: some nook of safety in the middle of a battlefield is not easy to find. Yet Juan was immovable; until Johnson, who really loved him in his way, Pick’d out amongst his followers with some skill Such as he thought the least given up to prey; And swearing if the infant came to ill That they should all be shot on the next day; But if she were deliver’d safe and sound, They should at least have fifty rubles round, And all allowances besides of plunder In fair proportion with their comrades.74

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Juan’s immovability registers a moral stability within this world of war: he will not surrender the child. And yet that immovability gives way not to a period, but rather to a semi-colon: it is easily translated by Johnson into something far more fluid and provisional, based on a mercenary’s commercial exchange. Byron is thus perhaps more cynical than many recent critics about the moral standing of individual actors within corrupt systems. Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” for instance, invokes Theodor Adorno’s claim that “it is a part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”75 In Don Juan, the character who is displaced in this way is the slavetrading pirate Ladro, who is assumed dead by his daughter, and whose power has been usurped by Juan and Haidée’s union. Ladro, returning from sea to what appears a celebration of his death, enter’d in the house no more his home, A thing to human feelings the most trying, And harder for the heart to overcome, Perhaps, than even the mental pangs of dying; To find our hearthstone turn’d into a tomb, And round its once warm precincts palely lying The ashes of our hopes, is a deep grief, Beyond a single gentleman’s belief. He enter’d in the house – his home no more.76

The repetition of his displacement (“the house no more his home”; “the house – his home no more”) underscores Ladro’s claim to an Adorno-style modern morality – and yet Ladro’s first actions are to threaten Juan with death and then (after Haidée’s intervention) to sell him into slavery. Yet Byron turns the screw of ethics one more time, noting of Ladro that his piracy developed out of a failed desire for Greek independence: “His country’s wrongs and his despair to save her / Had stung him from a slave to an enslaver.”77 If Byron at Missalonghi seems at once an independence fighter, a tourist, and (in relation to his own English tenants) something of a pirate himself, these contradictions have already been compassed by the poem. Byron’s Don Juan thus remains quite ostentatiously cynical about the possibility of finding any moral certainty or standing within a corrupt economic system – but his repeated, capricious invocations of transcendence re-place or re-perform moral standing as mobility. Byron’s poetics offer a combination of persistence and comic moral shiftiness as a mode of peripatetic resilience in the face of precarity.

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Conclusion Byron’s musings on migration anticipate and problematize a variety of later writings on the subject, as Byron’s acute epic satire suggests that migration offers narrative possibilities but no moral certainties. From a Byronic perspective, Said’s invocation of Lukács – the association of the novel and modernity with a kind of transcendental homelessness – is more productive than Adorno’s claim that “it is a part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (a claim Byron undercut by featuring Ladro’s displaced morality as no more than brutal retaliation). The homelessness of the soul is a recurrent problem for Don Juan, but the problem is overcome through a turning or returning not to God but to narrative. That narrative frames its own argument about precarity – namely, that all are vulnerable to vicissitudes of bodily suffering – but where Bauman sees tourists requiring the oppression of the vagabond, Byron seems to imply with Judith Butler that “no one escapes the precarious dimension of social life.” Butler’s insistence on the lack of a foundation for social unity works well with Byron’s apparently endless skepticism: “Nothing ‘founds’ us outside of a struggle to establish bonds that sustain us.”78 Byron’s epic satire struggles episodically, comically, distractedly, to distinguish the bonds that imprison us from those that sustain us. In the process, he offers us not Giorgio Agamben’s grim homo sacer but rather Juan as an irrepressible homo beatus. Similarly, in formal terms, the poem’s comic ottava rima offers mobility as a diverting, self-mocking evacuation of sometimes pompous certainties. Narrative and poetic mobility, the ability to occupy multiple positions simultaneously, becomes Don Juan’s (and Byron’s) best hope of resilience, and perhaps our own best opportunity to establish bonds that will sustain us through increasingly precarious circumstances.

Epigraph: McDonald’s, Fès, Morocco; July 2016 What would Byron say? I find myself wondering on a hot summer day in Fès. The midday sun is brutal and McDonald’s offers its patrons not only food but also precious air-conditioning. In a nearby booth, Lesley Wyrtzen, a geographer starting work on a dissertation about migration, is interviewing a group of sub-Saharan migrants living in Morocco as they continue attempting to cross the border

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into Europe. They have all been turned back, and most have been badly beaten in previous attempts to cross. I asked Lesley if I could tag along on her fieldwork, and so I am keeping company with those waiting to be interviewed. As I chat with five dark-skinned men in variably broken French, Moroccans sitting nearby look askance at us. On our way home, up the mountain to small-town Ifrane, Lesley will share with me a striking exchange repeated in each of her interviews: Lesley: Migrant: Lesley: Migrant:

Knowing what you know now, would you have left home? No. If it were possible for you to return home now, would you go? No.

This spare summary of their predicament takes my breath away. These men live in a space – call it “regime of motion” or precarity – defined both by their oppressive circumstances and by their will to self-determination, their refusal to accept the shame of public defeat. In my more (perhaps Byronically) desultory conversations with these men, I am simultaneously impressed and worried by their resilience and optimism. Coming originally from Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon, they have lived for years under difficult conditions in a country inhospitable to them; yet they remain undaunted. Their final goal is not Spain but rather Germany, Sweden, or the United States. Even before Trump’s election, I try to warn them that the United States can also be inhospitable to new immigrants, especially those without papers, but they are unconcerned: “I am capable of working very very hard and living on very little. Others may struggle, but I know I can succeed.” Migrants do not necessarily see themselves as Bauman’s “dark vagrant moons reflecting the shine of bright tourist suns and following placidly the planets’ orbit.”79 Instead, many migrants see themselves as possessing something very like Juan’s magical resilience and fortune – at least as long as they can look forward to an arrival . . . elsewhere. Each of the men I speak with sees himself not as a homo sacer, but as homo beatus. They find resilience in relationship, refuge in one another. The camps where these men find a temporary haven – an “empty” city block beside the train station in Fès, now crowded with hundreds of migrants, for instance – are often organized by nationality, but relationships develop across nationalities as well. F—, from Côte d’Ivoire, describes two of the Cameroonians at the table as “my brothers of the road,” explaining that they met only in the camp in

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Fès, but because they share the same conditions of suffering, they can also share an unexpected depth of intimacy. They also describe feeling a certain kinship with a fellow foreigner like myself, or with Moroccans who have lived abroad, as opposed to the “illiterates” (F—’s word) or native Moroccans who lack any cosmopolitan acceptance of the stranger. Curious travelers, we flock together. As I talk with these men, I have an uncanny sense that the group of us together are stepping in and out of the semi-fluid roles sketched by Byron’s Don Juan: at any given time, one of us in that booth is speaking in the voice of the narrator and social critic, while others articulate the endless optimism of young Juan, vagabond and hapless hero, irrepressible homo beatus. The challenge may be to bring these voices together in more formally sophisticated and explicit ways. Surely the task of people like me is to listen to and learn from these “brothers of the road,” those who are most expert on the lived experience of precarity, most practiced in building bonds that can sustain us through these times of trouble. In the process, we might also learn from Byron’s systemic social critique, his sardonic self-mockery, and his delight in caprice, his restorative pleasure in the free play of wandering story and sound.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 3. Katz, “Vagabond Capitalism,” p. 709. Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 13. Byron, Don Juan, 10.72.569–76. Byron, Don Juan, 12.88.703–4. Quoted in Strand, “Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ as a Global Allegory,” p. 505. I am indebted here and throughout the chapter to Strand’s fine reading of Don Juan in terms of the epic’s political economy and its analysis of the modern world-system. Katz, “Vagabond Capitalism,” pp. 709–10. Byron, Don Juan, 12.6.43–4. Byron, Don Juan, 12.6.45–8. Byron, Don Juan, 12.5.33–40. Ferguson, The World’s Banker, p. 91. Finel-Honigman, A Cultural History of Finance, p. 116. Byron, Don Juan, 10.65.518–20. Byron, Don Juan, 10.69.547, 10.69.552. Cowper, The Task, 2.40–2. Byron, Don Juan, 10.70.559–60.

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Byron’s Ambivalent Modernity 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

47

Byron, Don Juan, 11.15.113–17. Byron, Don Juan, 10.66.521–8. Byron, Don Juan, 10.67.535–6. Byron, Don Juan, 10.68.38–45. Byron, Don Juan, 10.67.535–6. Byron, Childe Harold, 1:113. Byron, Childe Harold, 2:98. Buzard, “The Uses of Romanticism,” pp. 32 and 47. Edward Said’s distinction between refugee and exile may also be relevant here: “The word ‘refugee’ has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas ‘exile’ carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality.” See Said, Reflections, p. 144. Byron, Don Juan, 1.22.174. Blackwood’s, for instance, in an essay titled “Remarks on Don Juan,” objected that “those who are acquainted, (as who is not?) with the main incidents in the private life of Lord Byron – and who have not seen this production, will scarcely believe that malignity should have carried him so far, as to make him commence a filthy and impious poem, with an elaborate satire on the character and manners of his wife.” Scott, “Living Authors, No. IV,” p. 52. Byron, Don Juan, 5.52.409. Byron, Don Juan, 5.48.381–4. Byron, Don Juan, 5.52.409–16. See Bauman, Postmodernity. Byron, Don Juan, 5.64.505–12. Byron, Don Juan, 5.65.516–20. Byron, Don Juan, 5.66.521–5. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 183. Byron, Don Juan, 1.93.743–4. Byron, Don Juan, 1.188.1497–1500. Byron, Don Juan, 2.21.167–8; 2.23.179–84. For instance, the narrator’s note that Catholics who drown have to wait several weeks for a mass because (the poem claims) relatives don’t want to pay for a funeral mass until death is proven – or the fact that sailors who cannibalize a priest go raving mad. Byron, Don Juan, 2.108.861–4; 2.110.878–80. Byron, Don Juan, 2.112.889–96. Byron, Don Juan, 2.153.1217–24. As Philip Martin argues, “Don Juan is a poem which is continuously elevating the body over the mind . . . against the expectations incited by its title, the dominant bodily organs are not those of generation but those of digestion . . . the images of the body denud[e] metaphysics of its paradigmatic privilege over the physical.” See Martin, “Reading Don Juan,” p. 112.

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48 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Betsy Bolton Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 96. Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 92. Bauman, Postmodernity, pp. 92–3. Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 99. Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 97. Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 98. Byron, Don Juan, 11.9.65–11.11.82. Byron, Don Juan, 11.16.122–4. Byron, Don Juan, 11.17.133–6. Dyer, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets,” p. 563. Byron, Don Juan, 11.20.153–5. Strand, “Global Allegory,” p. 534. Byron, Don Juan, 1.1.1–4. Byron, Don Juan, 1.1.5–8. Byron, Don Juan, 1.5.33–4, 1.5.38–9. Byron, Letters, February 16, 1821. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 103. Byron, Don Juan, 1.133.1061–1.34.1066. Byron, Don Juan, 5.38.302–5.39.312. Quoted in Keach, “Political Inflection,” p. 561. Quoted in Stabler, Byron, Poetics, and History, p. 150. Stabler, Byron, Poetics and History, p. 150. Quoted in Manning, “Don Juan and the Revisionary Self,” p. 219. Byron, Don Juan, 1.7.50–6. Byron, Don Juan, 1.133.1060. Said, Reflections, pp. 181–2. Strand, “Global Allegory,” p. 526. Strand, “Global Allegory,” p. 534. Strand, “Global Allegory,” p. 534. For a slightly different reading of the ethics of this scene, see Borushko, “History, Historicism, and Agency at Byron’s Ismail,” pp. 269–97. Byron, Don Juan, 8.99.785–9. Byron, Don Juan, 8.102.809–8.103.818. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 38. Byron, Don Juan, 3.51.401–3.52.409. Byron, Don Juan, 3.53.433–4. Puar, “Precarity Talk,” p. 170. Bauman, Postmodernity, p. 92.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005).

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Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998). Bauman, Zygmunt, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity, 1997). Borushko, Matthew, “History, Historicism, and Agency at Byron’s Ismail,” ELH, 81(1), Spring 2014, pp. 269–97. Buzard, James, “The Uses of Romanticism: Byron and the Victorian Continental Tour’” Victorian Studies, 35(1), 1991, pp. 29–49. Byron, George Gordon, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Jerome McGann (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 2 of 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Byron, George Gordon, Don Juan, in Jerome McGann (ed.), Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5 of 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Byron, George Gordon Byron Baron, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Vol. 5, ed. Rowland E. Protheroe. London: John Murray, 1901. Conrad, Peter, Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). Cowper, William, The Task (London: J. Sharpe, 1817). Dyer, Gary, “Thieves, Boxers, Sodomites, Poets: Being Flash to Byron’s Don Juan,” PMLA, 116(3), 2001, pp. 562–78. Ferguson, Niall, The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998). Finel-Honigman, Irene, A Cultural History of Finance (New York: Routledge, 2009). Katz, Cindi, “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction,” Antipode, 33(4), 2001, pp. 709–28. Keach, William, “Political Inflection in Byron’s ‘Ottava Rima’,” Studies in Romanticism, 27(4), 1988, pp. 551–62. Lukács, Gyorgy, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971). Manning, Peter J., “Don Juan and the Revisionary Self,” in Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 210–26. Martin, Philip W., “Reading Don Juan with Bakhtin,” in Nigel Wood (ed.), Don Juan (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1993), pp. 112–15. Nail, Thomas, The Figure of the Migrant (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015). Puar, Jasbir, “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović,” TDR/The Drama Review, 56(4), 2012, pp. 163–77. “Remarks on Don Juan,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 5, 1819, pp. 512–18.

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Said, Edward, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Scott, John, “Living Authors, No. IV: Lord Byron,” London Magazine, 3, 1821, pp. 50–61. Stabler, Jane, Byron, Poetics and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Strand, Eric, “Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ as a Global Allegory,” Studies in Romanticism, 43(4), 2004, pp. 503–36.

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Chapter 2

Diasporas: Thomas Pringle and Mary Prince Kenneth McNeil

Cultural “Diaspora-ization” and The History of Mary Prince First published in pamphlet form in 1831, Mary Prince’s History is the first narrative of the life of a black woman to be published in Britain and one of the last examples of British slave narratives published before abolition in 1833. The History provides on the one hand a valuable historical record of a former slave called upon to bear irrefutable witness to “the horrors of slavery,” giving voice to the memories of the break-up of her family, endless toil, disease, physical and emotional brutality, and sexual exploitation. On the other hand, as an autobiographical retrospective account, slave narratives like Prince’s have become recognized as key contributors to the emergence of collective identities forged in the crucible of transatlantic slavery: African-American, Afro-Caribbean, Black Atlantic, and African diaspora.1 Stuart Hall neatly summarized the transnational and cross-cultural processes at work in the formulation of these identities, writing: The final point which I think is entailed in this new politics of representation has to do with an awareness of the black experience as a diaspora experience, and the consequences which this carries for the process of unsettling, recombination, hybridization and “cut-and-mix” – in short, the process of cultural diaspora-ization (to coin an ugly term), which it implies.2

Slave narratives reveal this process of what Hall terms “diasporaization” in the fragmentation and hybridity of the black (writing)

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subject. Prince’s History, like many slave narratives, is not a straightforward memoir of her experiences of enslavement. Because Mary Prince is unable to authorize the story of her own experience, her History must rely heavily on the textual interventions of her editor, Thomas Pringle, who is called upon to provide an irreproachable authority, who can verify and lend credence to her eyewitness claims, and who can himself testify to her character as an upright Christian woman. As a Christian, male abolitionist, Pringle authorizes Prince’s voice, and even her body, to speak the truth of slavery. As William L. Andrews summarizes, “Slave narratives usually required a variety of authenticating devices, such as character references and reports of investigations into the narrator’s slave past (almost always written by whites), so that the slave’s story might become operative as a linguistic act.”3 Prince’s History, writes Sara Salih, “is not the simple narrative of a black woman’s experiences.” Instead “it is a composite text assembled by an editor who had a clear agenda in mind,” and Pringle’s “preface, supplement and appendices” are, therefore, “an inseparable part of the text.”4 The mediated dialogic quality of the History characterizes transatlantic black women’s writing in general, which Carole Boyce Davies argues “should be read as a series of border crossings” within a framework of “cross-cultural, transnational, translocal, diasporic perspectives.”5 Thomas Pringle’s paratextual contributions are therefore a crucial component of Prince’s creolized Caribbean subjectivity, as expressed in her writing, yet few recent studies of Prince’s work have paid much attention to the transnational elements of Pringle’s own background and writing career beyond the History.6 After abandoning a failed literary career in Edinburgh and faced with the loss of his family’s small tenant farm in the Scottish Borders, Pringle found himself in 1820 leading the vanguard of Scottish settlement in the newly pacified “Neutral Territory” in the Cape Colony of South Africa, as part of an emigration scheme assisted by the British government.7 In Cape Town, he continued to write and founded a newspaper and literary journal, but after only six years in the colony, during which time he witnessed the brutality of slavery firsthand, Pringle returned to Britain, forced out by financial hardship and by the colonial governor whom he had offended. In London, Pringle began a new career as editor of the AntiSlavery Reporter and as paid secretary for the Anti-Slavery Society, one of the most prominent and powerful abolitionist organizations in the city, where his life and work intersected with Mary Prince’s.8 When Pringle’s position as secretary came to end in 1834, after abolition, he had already made plans to leave London and return, not to

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Scotland, but to the Cape Colony, where he hoped to live out his days. Pringle’s Cape experiences and writings led South African critics of the last century to claim him as “the father of South African poetry,” while other critics more recently have sought to reclaim him as a Scottish writer.9 Yet studies which place Pringle’s writing within a single national literary historiography belie the ways in which his voice, like Mary Prince’s own, is a product of the “process of cultural diasporaization.” Exile, displacement, and dispossession – experiences that brought him to Mary Prince and her History in the first place – inform Pringle’s own contribution to her slave narrative. As the product of a Scottish diaspora, Pringle’s contribution manifests a partial identification with Prince’s condition of exile, while providing its own powerful yet distinct expression of diaspora.

A Scottish Double Consciousness In his preface to the History, Pringle lays out his editorial agenda, stating that, while he “retain[ed] as far as was practicable, Mary’s exact expressions and peculiar phraseology,” so that “no fact of importance has been omitted and not a single circumstance or sentiment has been added,” he had “pruned [her narrative] to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors, so as to render it clearly intelligible.”10 Pringle’s rendering of Prince’s oral testimony represents, for many recent critics, an act of colonial appropriation. Jessica L. Allen, for example, describes Pringle’s editorial decisions, particularly his exclusion of redundancies, as an instance of his “white imperialist domination,” as it demonstrates his profound ignorance concerning the uses of repetition in creole patois.11 While Pringle indeed spent no time in the Caribbean and was probably completely unfamiliar with the linguistic structures of West Indian patois, his desire to render Prince’s language reflects perhaps his own linguistic anxieties, as a native Scottish speaker seeking a metropolitan audience. The impetus to linguistic compromise and collaboration that informs Pringle’s editorial interventions in the History might manifest Scottish “double consciousness,” a conflicted, hybrid subjectivity derived from long habits of subsuming traces of “native” vernacular while adopting the language of the British metropole in public speech. Angus Calder argues that Pringle’s Scottish university training predestined him to resist the vernacular and accept genteel (English) standards of diction in his own poetry. At the same time, Scots words and phrases in Pringle’s writing often serve as linguistic markers of his national identity, and he

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retained the use of Scotticisms in his personal and informal writing.12 Pringle’s career as a poet, Calder writes, parallels that of the Scottish poet Pringle idolized, Thomas Campbell, who “epitomised the tension in Scottish literary circles between the claims of native culture and the wish not to seem uncouth in Southern eyes.”13 While Pringle also exhibited a keen, if patronizing, awareness and interest in indigenous African tongues as well as the Dutch and English creoles he encountered in the Cape Colony, aspects of which he sometimes deployed in his own writing, he also stressed the importance of using what he defined as plain style to move a reader. In a letter written to his friend John Fairbairn in 1825, Pringle defends this stylistic approach, in his poem “The Bechuana Boy,” which describes the plight of a representative of a group of displaced refugees who roamed near his settlement and who were often sold to slavery.14 This poem, Pringle writes: is adapted to please a class of readers whom you too much neglect [‘women, children, counting house clerks, country functionaries, and aides de camp’] . . . . [I] have tried this very simple style with something of a further view – to excite some sympathy in very common readers, for this class of unfortunate strangers.15

The language politics of Pringle’s Scottish background, coupled with his ideas on plain style’s ability to most dramatically move a “common” reader to sympathy, suggest something more complex than colonial ignorance is at work in his later editorial interventions in the History. Instead his editorial agenda suggests the anxieties of a writer who himself has felt perpetually on the outside, one who has had to constantly modulate his voice in order to speak with authority in the metropolis. As the product of a Scottish-British poet/colonial settler/abolitionist secretary, the “white written text” of The History of Mary Prince, through which its subject must speak – creating the hybrid “double-voiced” quality that has been identified as the hallmark of African diaspora literature – is itself already double-voiced.16

“The Stranger and the Exile Who Is in Our Land within Our Gates” As a retrospective, the History, like many other slave narratives, emplots a transformation of its author’s subjectivity – from brutalized human chattel to autonomous writing-subject, who is able to

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speak for those still enslaved. Yet Prince’s narrative differs from many other slave narratives in expressing the precariousness not only of her past but also of her here-and-now. The History recounts how she was forced to leave behind a husband in Antigua and was brought to London by her masters, the Woods, who were attending to their children’s education. Prince’s London visit initially represents a hopeful future, a possible cure for the rheumatism that she had acquired from a lifetime of hard labor and, more crucially, an escape from thralldom, as she hears that, once in London, “my master would free me.”17 Yet the hopefulness that London holds out is contingent in her mind on an eventual return to Antigua, where she could live out the rest of her life with her husband as a free woman. In London, however, Prince, too ill and weak from her rheumatism to accomplish the work demanded of her from her masters, is threatened with dismissal from their household. Prince describes the decisive moment when the Woods make a final ultimatum that she accede to their demands or face eviction: [Mrs. Wood] supposed I thought myself a free woman, but I was not: and if I did not do it directly I should be instantly turned out of doors. I stood a long time before I could answer, for I did not know well what to do. I knew that I was free in England, but I did not know where to go, or how to get my living; and therefore, I did not like to leave the house. But Mr. Wood said he would send for a constable to thrust me out; and at last I took courage and resolved that I would not be longer thus treated, but would go and trust to Providence. This was the fourth time they had threatened to turn me out, and, go where I might, I was determined now to take them at their word; though I thought it very hard, after I had lived with them for thirteen years, and worked for them like a horse, to be driven out in this way, like a beggar.18

This scene represents a pivotal moment in the transition of Prince’s subjectivity, the moment when she asserts her autonomy as a “free woman” in England against the dictates of the Woods who would have her remain a slave. Yet the scene also recounts Prince’s ambivalence when confronted with the sacrifice freedom requires of her, which she characterizes as a casting out, becoming penniless and alone. Finding temporary shelter with the Moravians, Prince eventually found her way to the offices of the Anti-Slavery Society, where she met Pringle. Pringle not only championed her cause but took her into his home. Yet she continues to characterize life in London as one of permanent exile from the home and family life she had established in Antigua. As she exclaimed to Pringle at their first meeting:

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Kenneth McNeil I would rather go to my grave than go back a slave to Antigua, though I wish to go back to my husband very much – very much – 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 too bad. I would rather go into my grave!19

Unable to return to “home” to Antigua without also returning to a condition of enslavement, Prince was trapped in a legal limbo in London, “shipwrecked,” in Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s words, “by laws that made slavery illegal in England, while it was still legal in the colonies.”20 Far from signaling the achievement of autonomous selfhood, Prince’s London domicile is only the final in a series of displacements recalled in her History: born into slavery in Bermuda but separated from her family at the age of twelve and sold off to a succession of masters, Prince was for a time on Grand Turk Island before returning to Bermuda and then moving to Antigua, before sailing to London with the Woods. Prince’s predicament, as one whose freedom is contingent upon permanent exile from her Antiguan “homeland,” represents an unresolved disjuncture in her transformation in the History from slave to former slave, a disjuncture that eventually forms part of its polemicist agenda. By publishing Prince’s story, and by sponsoring a petition to Parliament, the Anti-Slavery Society hoped not only to provide further evidence of the cruelty of slavery but also to draw attention to a particular anomaly in British slavery laws, originating in the 1722 case of Grace Jones. Like Mary Prince, Grace Jones had accompanied her mistress from Antigua to England. Jones’s later return to the Caribbean with her mistress was deemed a violation of her rights; her defenders argued that Jones’s stay in England had made her a free British subject, but the judge in the case, Lord Stowell, had ruled that Jones was only a free woman while residing in England, and that when she returned to the West Indies, she had forfeited her freedom.21 Pringle makes explicit reference to the Jones case at the end of his Supplement, suggesting the particular significance of Prince’s story is the way it bears upon the status of slavery in Britain itself: I may observe that the history of Mary Prince furnishes a corollary to Lord Stowell’s decision in the case of the slave Grace, and that it is most valuable on this account. Whatever opinions may be held by some readers on the grave question of immediately abolishing Colonial Slavery,

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nothing assuredly can be more repugnant to the feelings of Englishmen than that the system should be permitted to extend its baneful influence to this country. Yet such is the case, when the slave landed in England still only possesses that qualified degree of freedom, that a change of domicile will determine it. Though born a British subject, and resident within the shores of England, he is cut off from his dearest natural rights by the sad alternative of regaining them at the expence of liberty, and the certainty of severe treatment.22

Expanding on the legal questions, Pringle makes an appeal to readers’ sympathy, asking them to imagine the emotional ramifications of a life of perpetual freedom-in-exile: It is true that [the slave] has the option of returning; but it is a cruel mockery to call it a voluntary choice, when upon his return depend his means of subsistence and his re-union with all that makes life valuable. Here he has tasted “the sweets of freedom,” to quote the words of the unfortunate Mary Prince; but if he desires to restore himself to his family, or to escape from suffering and destitution, and the other evils of a climate uncongenial to his constitution and habits, he must abandon the enjoyment of his late-acquired liberty, and again subject himself to the arbitrary power of a vindictive master.23

Pringle’s elaboration on vexed legal issues moves to an empathetic imagining of the anguish that Prince must suffer, as one whose freedom is contingent on permanent estrangement from home and family. References to Prince’s exiled status appear frequently in Pringle’s contributions to the History. He writes that, after waiting for nearly a year and “seeing the poor woman’s spirits sinking under the sickening influence of hope deferred” while Prince’s legal case remained unresolved, Pringle promises to intervene on her behalf, referring to her as the “exiled negro woman.”24 In a postscript to the (likely non-existent) second edition of the History, which is quoted in the preface of the third edition, Pringle reports that Prince’s legal status remains unchanged – she remains “cruelly and hopelessly severed” from her husband and her home – but her health has deteriorated, and she has become afflicted with “a disease in the eyes,” which may lead to “total blindness.”25 Pringle makes a final appeal, on the grounds of sympathy, for those “friends of humanity” to promote the sale of her narrative so that she may receive much-needed funding: “The seasonable sympathy thus manifested in her behalf,” Pringle writes,

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Kenneth McNeil will neither be fruitlessly expended nor unthankfully received; while in accordance with the benign Scripture mandate, it will serve to mitigate and relieve, as far as human kindness can, the afflictions of “the stranger and the exile who is in our land within our gates”.26

Pringle’s postscript is perhaps a fitting summary of the overall impetus of his contributions to Prince’s work, to paint her as a figure worthy of great sympathy, as a woman broken in body and mind after a lifetime of physical and mental cruelty. Pringle’s reference to the Christian mandate to lend aid and shelter to the outcast and the homeless also places both him and Prince within a narrative of Christian charity, in which Pringle can play the role of the compassionate Christian householder, who will take the exiled Prince into his home and tutor her on the path to salvation. In casting their relationship this way, however, Pringle is also repeating a similar narrative he had already established in his poem “The Bechuana Boy” and in other of his South African writings. In “The Bechuana Boy,” Pringle recounts his relationship with the eponymous subject of the poem, “a swarthy Stripling,” who is an orphan and a refugee from war and slavery. As he relates their first meeting, Pringle encounters the Bechuana Boy one day, when he comes out of the desert and suddenly appears, half-naked and forlorn, before Pringle’s tent exclaiming “in the language of his race,” “I have no home!”27 Standing before Pringle in his tent, the boy then relates a story of violent dispossession and exile: the destruction of his village by mountain banditti, wandering in the wilderness before being sold into slavery by Boers, and escaping to Pringle’s home where, Pringle writes, “We took him for ‘our own’,” eventually coming to regard the boy as his own child and setting him on the path of conversion to Christianity.28 As he had done for the real-life inspiration for “The Bechuana Boy,” Hinza Morassi, Pringle “takes in” Mary Prince, in an act of benign paternalism that plays out the dynamics of sympathy that Jenny Sharpe has described as characteristic of British antislavery polemic, which, while it established a “kinship of Europeans and Africans,” places the suffering black “other” in a position of inferiority in relation to a sympathetic white observer who alone has the power to help them.29 Parallels in the accounts of refugee and former slave provided in “The Bechuana Boy” and the History have led Matthew Shum to read the former as a “prehistory” of the latter, in which Morassi prefigures Prince, as a subject of reader sympathy.30 But the associative power of Pringle’s recollections of his life in South Africa extends beyond parallels between Pringle’s

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accounts of his two black protégés. Pringle’s contributions to the History reverberate with the echo of his own memory of estrangement and multiple displacement, both from his native Scotland and from the Cape Colony where he had hoped to make a lasting home but never did.

Scottish Diaspora in South Africa Wonder at the vast unknown coupled with hopes for future settlement permeate Pringle’s initial impressions of South Africa. In poems he composed while living in the Cape Colony, and in the Narrative of a Residence in South Africa he published in 1834 as part of his two-volume collection, African Sketches, Pringle provides a retrospective account of his arrival in the colony, which encapsulates the psychology of a Scottish settler diaspora, as he describes the journey to the fertile valley in which he and the small band he led planned to establish their initial settlement. Pringle in his Narrative describes the different reactions of English and Scots upon seeing the colony for the first time from the ship: the sublimely stern aspect of the country, so different from the rich tameness of ordinary English scenery, seemed to strike many of the Southron with a degree of awe approaching to consternation. The Scotch, on the contrary, as the stirring recollections of their native land were vividly called up by the rugged peaks and shaggy declivities of this wild coast, were strongly affected, like all true mountaineers on such occasions. Some were excited to extravagant spirits; others silently shed tears.31

Pringle here narrates the birth of a communal diasporic consciousness, which is comprised of fond remembrance of the departed homeland, and which commences the moment the new world landscape comes into view. The “rugged peaks and shaggy declivities” of the South African landscape provide a comforting analogue to a native landscape left behind, while also prompting perhaps an equally comforting assertion of a continued Scottish identity in opposition to an English one. Nevertheless, the topography of this new world initiates a strong conflictedness on the part of Scottish emigrants, who hope for a better future but for whom memories of the homeland they left behind appear unbidden and without warning. At a temporary sojourn on their long trek to their intended settlement, for example, Pringle describes the reaction of a longtime resident, one Mr. Hart

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– “a Scotch gentleman” – who, even though he had resided in the colony for more than twenty years, is overcome by the sound of the voices of a large party of his fellow expatriates: A numerous party of us were assembled at tea in the officers’ dining hall, when Mr. Hart joined us. The Scottish accent, seldom entirely lost even by the most polished of the middle ranks of our countrymen, was heard from every tongue; and the broad “Doric dialect” prevailed, spoken by female voices, fresh and unsophisticated from the banks of the Teviot and the Fields Lothian. Hart, a man of iron look and rigid nerve, was taken by surprise, and deeply affected. The accents of his native tongue, uttered by the kindly voice of woman, carried him back forty years at once and irresistibly, as he afterwards owned, to the scenes of his mother’s fire-side; and recalled freshly before him the softened remembrances of early life – those tender and sacred remembrances which, though apparently buried beneath the cares and ambitious aims of after years, are never, in any good heart, entirely effaced.32

Pringle’s description of the affective power of the sound of Scottish dialect amounts to a psychological case study of how particular sensory impressions can, “at once and irresistibly,” bring memories of a former life to the forefront of consciousness. An ode to the associative power and sanctity of remembrance, the passage suggests how a national consciousness can be retained and even cultivated in new surroundings. Remembrances tied to homeland and family are never “entirely effaced,” no matter how long one has been away.33 At the same time, the passage echoes early nineteenth-century theories of the malady of nostalgia, which paid particular attention to aural sensory impression – native songs and voices, particularly, were thought to irresistibly bring memories of a former life to the forefront of the imagination.34 The lingering anguish of exile, as the persistent memory of a home left behind, reminds Mr. Hart that he remains an alien in the colony. Conflictedness summarizes the sentiment of much of Pringle’s poetry on the theme of emigration, as his tone from poem to poem swings dramatically – from morbid despondency to hopeful optimism. Pringle adopts the ballad form in “An Emigrant’s Song” (date of composition unknown but first published in 1834), in which the poet asks the “maid of Tweed” to sail with him to “the wilds of South-Africa, far o’er the sea,” where he will build her a “cabin beside the clear fount.” The poem concludes with the image of a future life of prosperity, free from the burden of memory:

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There, rich in the wealth which a bountiful soil Pours forth to repay the husbandman’s toil; Content with the Present, at peace with the Past, No cloud on the future our joys to o’ercast.35

In “The Exile’s Lament,” published in 1824, Pringle again adopts the ballad form, while also reintroducing a “Scottish Maiden,” as in “An Emigrant’s Song.” But this maiden is already in South Africa and, “mournfully pour[ing] her melting lay / In Tevoit’s Border Tongue,” she sings a much different song. The sunny and fertile landscape that surrounds her brings no optimism or hope: bright are the skies – and these valleys of bloom May enchant the traveller’s eye; But all seems drest in death-like gloom To the exile – who comes to die!36

The poem concludes with a final lament: Oh, light, light is poverty’s lowliest state, On Scotland’s peaceful strand, Compared with the heart-sick exile’s fate, In this wild and weary land!37

In perhaps Pringle’s most sustained and personal exploration of the diaspora experience in South Africa, “The Emigrant’s Cabin” (first published in 1834 but dated “Glen-Lynden 1822”), Pringle recounts his motives for emigration. In the poem, he imagines a visit to his rustic cabin from his friend John Fairbairn, who chides Pringle, suggesting he embraced self-exile on the Cape due to a “disappointed pride” in the failure of his literary career back in Scotland. Pringle answers, You’ve missed the mark, Fairbairn: my breast is clear. Nor Wild Romance nor Pride allured me here: Duty and Destiny with equal voice constrained my steps: I had no other choice.38

Alluding to the destitution that had threatened his family amid the new economic realities of post-war rural Scotland, Pringle configures his motive to emigrate as the duty to secure financial prosperity for his immediate family and for future generations. Pringle makes this

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motive of familial preservation explicit in the beginning of his Narrative, as one of the “two distinct objects in view” when he decided to emigrate to the Cape: “to collect again into one social circle, and establish in rural independence, my father’s family, which untoward circumstances had broken up and begun to scatter over the world.”39 As was the case for many Scottish emigrants to the British colonies, and in stark contrast to Mary Prince – for whom the price of freedom was exile and permanent estrangement from “all that makes life valuable” – Pringle envisions his displacement as a means to secure and perpetuate past ties and affiliations rather than as a hopeless break from them. Migration to rural Africa in “The Emigrant’s Cabin” signals a hoped-for continuation of a communal way of life, built upon ties of kinship and compatriotism, which had become untenable back “home” in Scotland. Though Pringle’s deft and knowing incorporation of indigenous and Dutch-Afrikaans terms and phrases have led the editors of his collected African poems to identify “The Emigrant’s Cabin” as one of the first depictions of “an embryonic indigenous culture definably ‘South African’ in character,” the poem also gives expression to the particular aspects of the Scottish diasporic experience of the period – the global “scattering” of extended families and whole communities that sought to hold onto a distinctly “Scottish” way of life.40 In the fall of 1824, however, Pringle was in poor health and hounded by the colonial governor whom he had publicly criticized in the newspaper he had helped establish. Increasingly despondent and disillusioned and describing his “‘prospects in the Colony” as “entirely blasted,” Pringle began to consider a return to Britain. In October, Pringle sent Fairbairn a poem entitled “To Scotland.”41 “When I think of all I’ve lost,” he writes, “In leaving thee to seek a foreign home, / I find more cause the farther that I roam / To mourn the home I left thy favoured Coast.”42 Given Pringle’s disappointed hopes for a prosperous life in South Africa, there is bitter irony in the poem’s expression of loss and exile, as Pringle confronts the possibility of a double displacement – imminent dispersal from a colonial domicile that had already established the diasporic conditions of his earlier writings. This history of multiple displacement weighs heavily on Pringle’s contributions to The History of Mary Prince. Much as, for Mary Prince, residence in London represents a kind of doubled “exile” – from a Caribbean “homeland” of no certain nation or territory in a transatlantic circuit that exemplified a “diaspora-ized” Black Atlantic – so too for Pringle, his stay in London also represents a kind of doubled exile, from the colonial settlement on which he had staked

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a claim for a new life and new beginning as he departed his native Scotland. As Pringle perhaps drew out and amplified Prince’s own lamentations of exile, his contributions to her story suggest more than white British abolitionist sympathy-at-a-distance; rather they manifest a recognition and partial identification with a diasporic voice he found in some ways corresponded to his own: the voice of a stranger in the metropolis, an outcast from a national and colonial “home,” that had ultimately proved untenable.

Scottish Imperialist Humanitarianism To be sure, to foreground the affinities and parallels in the circumstances that brought Mary Prince and Thomas Pringle together in London, and which helped to shape the dialogic structure of her narrative, is not to suggest that the circumstances informing their perspectives are in any way the same. Although Pringle’s writing, like Mary Prince’s, often reflects conflicted wavering between a hopeful optimism and the despondency of the exile who finds himself or herself alienated from his or her surroundings, Pringle, of course, was always a free citizen of Great Britain, and his background and work encapsulate the contradictions of Scotland’s relation to empire in the period. On the one hand, Scots played a central role in empirebuilding, “thoroughly and systematically colonizing all areas of the British empire,” writes T. M. Devine, “from commerce to administration, soldiering to medicine, colonial education to the expansion of emigrant settlements.”43 Though the Scottish contribution to the abolitionist movement has long been remembered in Scotland, historians only recently have begun to unearth the nation’s important contribution to the Atlantic slave trade, exposing a darker past of Scottish-born plantation owners and their clerks, overseers, and slave drivers; of Scottish captains and ship’s surgeons on the slaver ships; of Glasgow and Edinburgh merchants who traded in tobacco, indigo, cotton, and sugar; and of Scottish apologists for slavery, like James MacQueen, who lambasted both Prince and Pringle in the pages of Blackwood’s and the pro-slavery Glasgow Courier.44 On the other hand, Scotland’s status as a “semi-periphery” in an emergent “world-system” of global capitalism prompted a dramatic surge in outmigration. Between 1830 and 1914, the heyday of the British empire, over two million people emigrated overseas from Scotland, “a rate of outward movement that was around one and a half times that of England and Wales.”45 Among nations of the British Isles,

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only Ireland suffered a greater loss of population in the time period, and “Scotland was almost alone among European nations in having experienced large-scale industrialization and a great outward movement of population.”46 It was this great wave of Scottish migration that carried Pringle to South Africa, where he acquired a special knowledge and sympathetic insight into the local black African cultures he encountered, while also providing a consistently pointed critique of the British slave system and its denial of the basic humanity of black Africans. At the same time, however, his South African writings also rehearse familiar assumptions of British Christian abolitionism, expressing the absolute conviction of Britain’s moral, intellectual, and social superiority. This conviction is evident in his description in the Narrative of his earliest encounters with native African peoples. Setting out on horseback to survey the surrounding environs of his party’s initial camp, Pringle recounts his impressions of a native village he suddenly comes upon, which emphasize the stark juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange: The bleating of flocks returning to the fold, the lowing of the kine to meet their young, and other pleasant rural sounds, recalling to my recollection all the pastoral associations of a Scottish glen, gave a very agreeable effect to my first view of this missionary village. When I entered the place, however, all associations connected with the rural scenery of Europe were at once dispelled. The groups of woolly-haired, swarthy-complexioned natives, many of them still dressed in the old sheep-skin mantle or caross; the swarms of naked or half-naked children; the wigwam hovels of mud or reeds; the long-legged, large-horned cattle; the broad tailed African sheep, with hair instead of wool; the strange words of the evening salutation (goeden avond – “good evening”), courteously given, as I passed, by old and young; the uncouth clucking sounds of the Hottentot language, spoken by some of them to each other; these, and a hundred other traits of wild and foreign character, made me feel that I was indeed far from the glens of Cheviot, or the pastoral groups of a Scottish hamlet – that I was at length in the Land of the Hottentot.47

Here again is the emigrant’s search for familiar analogues of the homeland he has left to make sense of the new world in which he now resides. These, however, must yield to the disorientingly unfamiliar aspects of this new world, for which no analogues can be found. However, in his lengthy description of his first encounter with the “Land of the Hottentot,” Pringle also seeks to contain the African

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Other through what would become a familiar colonialist alignment of race and primitiveness that reasserts a confidence in his own superiority. Relying on the universalist theories of the Scottish science of man that his description adumbrates, Pringle reasserts a social, cultural, and epistemological authority over the natives through a careful ethnographic cataloguing of their salient characteristics. Though this passage describes his first encounter with African village life, the knowing references to African social and linguistic practice betray the passage’s later composition, after Pringle already had resided some time in the colony and after his cultivation of knowledge of its various cultures. This passage displays the sympathetic and tolerant but patronizing view of black Africans with which all of Pringle’s writing on South Africa is shot through. In his Narrative and in poems such as “The Bechuana Boy” and “Song of the Bushman,” which provide representatives of what Pringle describes as an outcast wandering people, and “the South African ‘Children of the Mist’”48 – or “The Captive of Camalú,” a poem that adopts the voices of “those Caffers and Ghonaquas . . . who . . . were forced to become bondmen among the Boors, or imprisoned in Robben Island” – Pringle demonstrates his sympathy not only with the plight of the enslaved, but also with that of displaced Indigenous peoples who are victims of the colony’s long history of internecine warfare and European encroachment.49 His sympathy for the latter often inspires his condemnation of British colonial policy. After recounting in the Narrative a conspicuous act of criminal duplicity on the part of a Scottish commander overseeing the violent removal of Xhosa people from lands they occupied, during an earlier attempt at native “pacification,” Pringle sums up the general tenor of British colonial attitudes: “It is a lamentable truth that in our treatment generally of savage nations, all respect for common honesty, justice, or humanity, appears to be often utterly forgotten, even by men otherwise generous, kind, and sensitively honourable.”50 However, Pringle’s tolerance for cultural difference and his sympathy for the native victims of “unchristian” colonial violence and dispossession at times give way to expressions of strong hostility against resistance to the colonial social order, especially when that resistance threatened his own settlement. For example, he characterizes as “banditti” the nomadic groups of displaced peoples, runaway slaves, and what he described as mixed-race thieves and deserters from the colonial militia, who occasionally harassed Glen Lynden. In a June 1825 letter to Fairbairn, Pringle described a group of “Bushmen” who:

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Kenneth McNeil continue to plague us – ungrateful schelms! Even after I have celebrated them in song [i.e., in “The Bushman”]. They stole all my brother’s riding possessions last week and severely wounded a Bastard [mixed-race] Hottentot with poisoned arrows. So I have declared war against them and have written to the Landdrost for a commando to attack them in their rocky dens. You see we back Settlers grow all savage and bloody by coming in continual collision with savages.51

In the formal letter he sent to the landdrost, the colonial authority in the region, Pringle tempers his rhetoric, saying “both on the count of humanity and for the ends of justice” it would be preferable to force the capture of “these Banditti” by surrounding and blockading them in their strongholds, rather than adopting the “usual mode” of “firing upon them indiscriminately.” Nevertheless, he continues: there cannot surely be a doubt either of the justice or necessity of extirpating (under proper guidance of course) a band of thieves and murderers from the territory ceded by the Caffers – a country in the first place, which . . . they can have no claim to occupy; and secondly . . . are composed of runaway Schelms from the Colony, deserters from the Cape Corps, and other criminals, whom it is otherwise expedient to put down.52

The ambiguity and ambivalence illustrated in Pringle’s alternating depictions of sympathetic outcasts and lawless wandering banditti suggest the contradictions of Pringle’s own trans-peripheral experiences and background. Intentionally established as a kind of buffer zone between the British colony and warring Xhosa groups, the “Ceded Territory,” in which Pringle’s settlement was situated at the very frontier, was one frequented by the refugees from recent frontier wars and Xhosa people who had recently been forcibly pushed off their lands. As he migrates from one “borderland” to another, Pringle is on the one hand particularly attuned to the complexity of cross-cultural contact and to the disruptive consequences of the uncertain and constantly shifting allegiances and loyalties at work along national and imperial frontiers, and deeply sympathetic to the plight of what he terms “enthralled aborigines,” refugees from war who have been sold into slavery. On the other hand, as the leader of his settlement he fancies himself a “petty ‘border chief’; being able to muster upwards of thirty armed horsemen (including our own party and the six Hottentot soldiers) at an hour’s notice” to defend his small, isolated community from marauding outsiders.53 Pringle

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ultimately sees himself as belonging to the vanguard of Christian progress in the Cape Colony, and his South African writings display a special interest in the theory and practice of colonial settlement. His recounting of his six-year Cape residence prefigures accounts of the great Scottish imperial icon David Livingstone, whose missionary work and sympathetic concern for the welfare of the native would come to exemplify Scotland’s contribution to the civilizing mission in Africa later in the century. In his concluding remarks in the Narrative, Pringle provides a vision of an African future in which emancipation and justice are achieved through a program of unbridled imperial expansion: The Native Tribes, in short, are ready to throw themselves into our arms. Let us open our arms cordially to embrace them as MEN and as BROTHERS. Let us enter upon a new and noble career of conquest. Let us subdue savage Africa by JUSTICE, by KINDNESS, by the talisman of CHRISTIAN TRUTH. Let us thus go forth, in the name and under the blessing of God, gradually to extend the moral influence, and, if it be thought desirable, the territorial boundary also of our Colony, until it shall become an Empire, embracing Southern Africa from the Keisi and the Gareep to Mozambique and Cape Negro – and to which, peradventure, in after days, even the equator shall prove no ultimate limit.54

Pringle’s narrative of progress and material and spiritual improvement in Africa informs much of his South African writings. Traces of this narrative also surface throughout his contributions to the History of Mary Prince, as they, at the same time, reveal a correspondence to the diasporic conditions that shape her story. In this way, the story of the exiled but free and Christianized African Mary Prince was also for Pringle, perhaps, a particularly Scottish allegory of empire.

A Land of No Return But what became of Mary Prince and Thomas Pringle? In London, Prince lived in Pringle’s home for a time, yet her ultimate fate became entangled in the competing public narratives of her sexuality. In the Christian abolitionist polemic that Pringle helped shape, Prince’s story was made to conform to an “evangelical model of womanhood” in which, Moira Ferguson writes, “acceptance of conversion necessitates admission as well as absolution of formal sinfulness.”55 Yet Prince was also subject to the racialized sexual stereotyping of her

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former owner and his sympathizers. Her most prominent critic was James MacQueen: as editor of the Glasgow Courier and frequent contributor to Blackwood’s, he publicly portrayed her as a licentious and deceitful woman. MacQueen, whose writing represents no less a significant Scottish contribution to the slavery debate than Pringle’s, was one of the most prominent pro-slavery advocates of the time, and, as a former plantation overseer in Grenada, was part of what David Lambert identifies as “an Atlantic system of patronage and kinship that was of profound importance in the manning and maintenance of Scottish-owned plantations across the Caribbean.”56 MacQueen took up Prince’s History to launch a scathing attack on the truthfulness of her claims while seeking to cast doubt on her character, in part through the imputation that she had been addicted to “immoral habits,” which “led her to commit the most disgraceful lascivious acts.”57 Pringle, in MacQueen’s account, plays the role of Prince’s hypocritical dupe, one who “sees nothing but purity in a prostitute.”58 MacQueen’s vicious imputations against him prompted Pringle to sue MacQueen’s London publisher, Thomas Cadell. Pringle himself would be sued by Prince’s former master John Wood, in early 1833, and Prince’s sexual past again would become the subject of public scrutiny in the context of these libel suits.59 Also, though she remained in contact with the Pringles after publication of her History and attended the wedding of her transcriber, Susanna Strickland, Prince ultimately became the victim of the sexual politics of the white missionary world that had once given her sanctuary. The Moravian church had given her immediate shelter in London after she had left the Woods, and Moravian missionaries in Antigua had taught her to read. The church, however, refused her appeal for readmittance in London in 1834. The “sexual nature of MacQueen’s public character attacks on Prince and Pringle and her pecuniary situation and prospects,” writes Sue Thomas, “clearly affected their decision.”60 Exiled once again because her sexual identity had become incompatible with a Christian anti-slavery idea of proper victimhood, Prince disappears from the public record, and nothing is known of her life afterward. For Pringle, a self-awareness of his own unsettled predicament perhaps underlay his desire to help Prince, as London represents for both of them not a center, but a meeting point at the crossroads of exile. As Prince, as far as is known, never made the return trip “home,” to the West Indies, so did Pringle remain in London, estranged from the Cape Colony where the rest of his family had

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permanently settled. Alienated from his immediate surroundings and nostalgic for the African “home” he had sought to make as an idealized re-creation of his native Scotland, and with faith in Christian progress and the potential of native Africans to become “civilized,” Pringle began to plan for his return to South Africa. With his health failing, and with no improvement in his finances, he wrote in July 1834: “If I had now a few hundred pounds I would go out to the Caffer frontier, buy and stock a farm, and settle myself for life in the wilderness.”61 He failed to obtain compensation for losses suffered at the hands of the colonial governor several years before, however, and Pringle’s plan to purchase land came to nothing. Still resolved “to go to the Cape, where I have . . . relations, among whom I may either regain my health or find a not unmourned grave and leave my wife among kind friends,” Pringle sold off all his furniture and household goods while making a final appeal to his Anti-Slavery Society friends, who supplied him with sufficient funds to finance the voyage.62 While awaiting embarkation, however, he became too ill to sail and died in London.63 Pringle thus ended his days where his life had intersected with Mary Prince’s; he, like her, remained in exile, unable to make the return journey home.

Notes 1. For recent studies on slave narratives as the earliest examples of AfroCaribbean autobiography, see Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography; Thomas, Telling West Indian Lives; Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery; and Ferguson, Subject to Others. 2. Hall, “New Ethnicities,” p. 448. 3. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 26. The Birmingham Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves was hesitant to provide relief funds for Prince until they received corroboration from credible sources that she indeed bore the marks of repeated beatings that she claimed in the History. In response Pringle’s wife, Martha, provided her and three other women’s firsthand examination of Prince in a letter to the Society, confirming “that the whole of the back part of her body is distinctly scarred, and, as it were, chequered with the many vestiges of severe floggings” (Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 64). See also Baumgartner, “The Body as Evidence.” Robert Wedderburn’s slave narrative The Horrors of Slavery, published in London in 1824, unusually does not rely on a white editor to undergird its credibility. Wedderburn’s account, however, runs to only a few pages, and provides only a brief sketch of his birth and early life in Jamaica. Instead, accusations and counter-accusations as to

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

Kenneth McNeil Wedderburn’s true paternity occupy much of The Horrors of Slavery, which amounts to a scathing critique of his Scottish planter father, who abused and raped his enslaved mother. Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. xiii. Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity, p. 4. See Glissant’s seminal account of creolization in Caribbean Discourse. Morris notes that Prince’s work might be considered more broadly within the framework of a Scoto-British transnational network in the Caribbean, which includes not only Pringle but also his Scottish-born pro-slavery nemesis in the libel cases that followed publication of the History, James MacQueen. See Morris, Scotland and the Caribbean, p. 187. Even though Pringle, along with James Cleghorn, was fired from his job as co-editor of Blackwood’s after only six issues, Pringle continued to be the target of ridicule for John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, two of the magazine’s most influential contributors, who made mocking reference to the disability which forced Pringle to walk on crutches his whole life. Pringle is referred to as the “beast which was like unto a lamb,” in the satirical Chaldee Manuscript, who takes up the fight against “the man whose name is ebony [Blackwood]” in the service of “the man who is crafty [rival publisher Archibald Constable].” Pringle wrote an account of slavery on the Cape of Good Hope just before setting sail for Britain in January 1826. His letter appeared in the October 17, 1826 issue of Thomas Campbell’s London New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, where Pringle’s work caught the attention of members of the Anti-Slavery Society. Pringle alludes to this account in his Supplement to the History, explaining that he could describe “many cases which fell under my own personal observation, or became known to me through authentic sources, at the Cape of Good Hope” (Prince, The History of Mary Prince, p. 60). Pringle thus not only plays the role of corroborating witness in the History, but also provides his own firsthand eyewitness observances to supplement Prince’s own. The first edition of the Companion to South African English Literature echoes the claim of Wahl, who, in the Introduction to his 1970 edition of Pringle’s Poems Illustrative of South Africa, writes, “For well over a century Thomas Pringle has been regarded as the ‘father’ of South African poetry” (p. xi). Low, writing in the midst of the Second Boer War, some sixty years earlier, states emphatically that “the poet of South Africa is Thomas Pringle” (“The Poet of South Africa,” p. 208). Thompson, writing just thirty-four years after Pringle’s death, declares “Pringle is more to us than simply one of the minor poets of Great Britain. He was the South African poet, colonist, and philanthropist” (Poems, Essays, and Sketches, p. 136). The editors of the most recent collection of Pringle’s poetry ask rhetorically, “Can we still – after

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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Mtshali, Serote, Sepamla, after The New Classic, Staffrider and the performance poetry of Qabula and Mzwakhe – continue to describe Pringle as the ‘father of South Africa poetry’?” (Pringle, African Poems of Thomas Pringle, p. xi). See, in contrast, Calder’s insistence that we position Pringle as “a poet typifying a Scottish school which flourished in his lifetime” (“Thomas Pringle [1789–1834],” p. 1). Calder points out that Pringle spent only six of his forty-six years in South Africa. For recent reassessments of Pringle as neither a South African nor a Scottish but a “British” colonial writer, see Klopper, “Politics of the Pastoral,” and Voss, “The Personalities of Thomas Pringle.” See also Coetzee, White Writing, and Bunn, “‘Our Wattled Cot.’” Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 3. Allen, “Pringle’s Pruning of Prince,” p. 511. For example, in a letter to his fellow Scottish emigrant and friend in South Africa, John Fairbairn, Pringle refers to the Cape colonial governor who eventually ruined him as “the muckle sumph” (grand idiot) (Pringle, South African Letters, p. 231). In his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (p. 26), Pringle describes the laughter of the native Africans in his camp as “Wild and eldritch,” a word, appearing frequently in Scottish literature from the Middle Ages onward, that connotes “weird, ghostly, uncanny, unearthly, hideous, esp. of sound” (Scott, “Scots Word of the Season: Eldritch”). Calder, “Thomas Pringle [1789–1834],” p. 7. Pringle first refers to “The Bechuana Boy” in a letter to John Fairbairn dated October 12, 1825, but the poem did not appear in print until 1830, when it was published in Friendships’ Offering. Pringle refers to the poem again in 1829, but it is a completely rewritten version of the earlier poem (Pringle, African Poems of Thomas Pringle, p. 77). Pringle, South African Letters, p. 260. For a discussion of double-voiced discourse in Black literature, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey. See also Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 31. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 33. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 34. Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography, p. 31. For a discussion of the case, see Fryer, Staying Power, pp. 130–2, and Prince, History of Mary Prince, pp. xix–xx. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 62. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 62. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 42. Prince, History of Mary Prince, p. 4. Prince, History of Mary Prince, pp. 4–5. Pringle, African Poems, p. 4.

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28. Pringle, African Poems, p. 7. Pringle provided a brief account of the real-life particulars of the circumstances recounted in “The Bechuana Boy” in his notes to the poem. Marossi was “apparently about nine or ten years of age” when he “had been carried off from his native country by the Bergenaars . . . and sold to a Boor, (for an old jacket!).” Pringle adopted him in September 1825, and Morassi accompanied the Pringles to England where in 1827, Pringle writes, he “took on himself . . . his baptismal vows, in the most devout and sensible manner.” “Shortly afterwards,” Pringle reports, “he died of a pulmonary complaint under which he had for many months suffered with exemplary meekness” (African Poems, p. 78). 29. Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery, p. 79. Indeed, Voss labels “The Bechuana Boy,” “a slave narrative” (“The Personalities of Thomas Pringle,” p. 94). 30. Shum reveals discrepancies between Pringle’s published accounts of his relationship with Marossi and other sources. For example, though Pringle described their meeting as an accident in his notes to the poem and in his Narrative, his correspondence reveals he was aware that the colonial government was “‘distributing stranded refugees,’ and that he had requested ‘a few of them’ for the Scottish party and ‘a single young man or boy of 14 years of age’ for himself.” See Shum, “The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince,” p. 296. 31. Pringle, Narrative, p. 7. 32. Pringle, Narrative, p. 28. 33. Even Pringle’s name for their new settlement, “Glen Lynden,” was meant to remind them of their Scottish origins, even though it had no correspondence to an actual location in Scotland. See Vigne, Thomas Pringle, p. 79. 34. For a discussion of the “acoustical theory of nostalgia,” see Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” and Illbrick, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease. Roth quotes from a French medical dissertation of 1830, which lists some of the “occasional causes” of nostalgia: a “love letter, a picture, a conversation, a song,” or “hearing the accent of one’s native country” (“Returning to Nostalgia,” p. 30). 35. Pringle, African Poems, p. 4. 36. Pringle, African Poems, p. 44. 37. Pringle, African Poems, p. 45. 38. Pringle, African Poems, p. 29. 39. Pringle, Narrative, p. 3. 40. Pringle, African Poems, p. 96. 41. The poem was first published in Ephemerides in 1828, reprinted in the anti-slavery journal The Tourist in 1832 as “Colonial Exile,” and, with some revision, in African Sketches (1834); and as “My Country” in the posthumous Poetical Works of Thomas Pringle (1838). See Pringle, South African Letters, p. 132. 42. Pringle, Ephemerides, p. 15.

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43. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, p. xxvi. 44. For recent historical accounts of Scotland’s role in Atlantic slavery, see Devine, Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past; Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World; and Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery. For studies of the Scottish literary response to slavery, see Andrews, ‘“Ev’ry Heart can Feel”’; Morris, Scotland and the Caribbean; and Sassi, “Acts of (Un)willed Amnesia.” 45. Devine, Scottish Nation, p. 263. 46. Devine, Scottish Nation, p. 264. 47. Pringle, Narrative, p. 14. 48. Pringle, African Poems, p. 86. 49. Pringle, African Poems, p. 105. 50. Pringle, Narrative, p. 292. 51. Pringle, South African Letters, p. 192. “Schelms” is a derogatory Dutch term, akin to English “rogues” or “rascals.” “Commando” describes the vigilante border patrols historically organized by local (Boer) farmers in the Cape Colony. 52. Pringle, South African Letters, p. 194. 53. Pringle, Narrative, p. 114. Pringle wrote a poem on the Ceded Territory, “The Forester of the Neutral Ground,” which he subtitled “A South-African Border Ballad.” In it, he adopts the Scottish ballad form to dramatize the ambiguities of social and cultural exchange in the borderlands. 54. Pringle, Narrative, p. 342. 55. Ferguson, Subject to Others, p. 377. 56. Lambert, “The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’,” p. 392. 57. MacQueen, “The Anti-Slavery Society and the West-India Colonists,” p. 1. 58. MacQueen, “The Anti-Slavery Society and the West-India Colonists,” p. 1. 59. For a detailed account of the libel trials, see Thomas, “Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle.” 60. Thomas, “New Information on Mary Prince in London,” p. 85. 61. Pringle, South African Letters, p. 366. 62. Pringle, South African Letters, p. 369. 63. Pringle died December 5, 1834, of tuberculosis. Vigne, Thomas Pringle, pp. 245–7.

Bibliography Adey, David, Ridley Beeton, Michael Chapman, and Ernest Pereira (eds), Companion to South African English Literature (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1986).

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Allen, Jessica L., “Pringle’s Pruning of Prince: The History of Mary Prince and the Question of Repetition,” Callaloo, 35(2), Spring 2012, pp. 509–19. Andrews, Corey E., “‘Ev’ry Heart can Feel’: Scottish Poetic Responses to Slavery in the West Indies, from Blair to Burns,” International Journal of Scottish Literature, 4, Spring/Summer 2008, pp. 1–22. Andrews, William L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of AfroAmerican Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Baker, Jr., Houston A., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Baumgartner, Barbara, “The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in ‘The History of Mary Prince’,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter, 2001, pp. 253–75. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2(12), October 1817. Bunn, David, “‘Our Wattled Cot’: Mercantile and Domestic Space in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 127–73. Calder, Angus, “Thomas Pringle [1789–1834]: A Scottish Poet in South Africa,” English in Africa, 9(1), May 1982, pp. 1–13. Coetzee, J. M., White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). Davies, Carole Boyce, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994). Devine, T. M. (ed.), Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past: The Caribbean Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). Devine, T. M., Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003). Devine, T. M., The Scottish Nation (London: Penguin, 1999). Ferguson, Moira, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992). Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984). Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism, 1988 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Glissant, Eduoard, Caribbean Discourse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). Hall, Stuart, “New Ethnicities,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen Stuart (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 442–51. Hamilton, Douglas, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World, 1750– 1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

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Illbrick, Helmut, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2012). Klopper, Dirk, “Politics of the Pastoral: The Poetry of Thomas Pringle,” English in Africa, 17(1), May 1990, pp. 21–59. Lambert, David, “The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’: James MacQueen and an Atlantic Proslavery Network,” Slavery and Abolition, 29(3), September 2008, pp. 389–413. Low, Sidney, “The Poet of South Africa,” The Anglo-Saxon Review 9, June 1901, pp. 207–21. MacQueen, James, “The Anti-Slavery Society and the West-India Colonists,” Glasgow Courier, July 26, 1831. Morris, Michael, Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–1833: Atlantic Archipelagos (London: Routledge, 2015). Paquet, Sandra Pouchet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, 1831, ed. Sara Salih (London: Penguin, 2004). Pringle, Thomas, African Poems of Thomas Pringle, ed. Ernest Pereira and Michael Chapman (Durban: University of Natal Press, 1989). Pringle, Thomas, Ephemerides (London: Smith, Elder, 1828). Pringle, Thomas, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (London: Edward Moxon, 1834). Pringle, Thomas, The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle, ed. Randolph Vigne (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2011). Roth, Michael S., “Returning to Nostalgia,” in Suzanne Nash (ed.), Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 25–44. Sassi, Carla, “Acts of (Un)willed Amnesia: Dis/appearing Figurations of the Caribbean in Post-Union Scottish Literature,” in Giovanna Covi, Joan Anim-Addo, Velma Ollard, and Carla Sassi (eds), Caribbean–Scottish Relations (London: Mango, 2007), pp. 131–98. Scott, Maggie, “Scots Word of the Season: Eldritch,” The Bottle Imp 6, http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/SWE/TBI/TBIIssue6/Eldritch. html. Sharpe, Jenny, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archeology of Black Women’s Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Shum, Matthew, “The Prehistory of The History of Mary Prince: Thomas Pringle’s ‘The Bechuana Boy’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 64(3), December 2009, pp. 292–322. Starobinski, Jean, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes, 54, 1966, pp. 81–103. Thomas, Sue, “New Information on Mary Prince in London,” Notes and Queries, 58(1), 2011, pp. 82–5. Thomas, Sue, “Pringle v. Cadell and Wood v. Pringle: The Libel Cases over The History of Mary Prince,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(1), March 2005, pp. 113–35.

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Thomas, Sue, Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804–1834 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Thompson, William Rodger, Poems, Essays, and Sketches: With a Memoir, ed. John Noble (Capetown: J. C. Juta, 1868). Vigne, Randolph, Thomas Pringle: South African Pioneer, Poet, and Abolitionist (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012). Voss, A. E., “The Personalities of Thomas Pringle,” English in Africa, 18(1), May 1991, pp. 81–96. Wahl, John Robert, “Introduction,” in Thomas Pringle, Poems Illustrative of South Africa, ed. John Robert Wahl (Capetown: C. Struik, 1970). Wedderburn, Robert, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings by Robert Wedderburn, 1824, ed. Iain McCalman (Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1991). Whyte, Iain, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

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Chapter 3

Transatlantic Masculinities: Military Leadership and Migration in the South American Wars of Independence M. Soledad Caballero

With the French Wars over after 1815, many British sailors and soldiers returned home with few employment opportunities. Across the Atlantic, from the 1810s onward, another theater of war emerged with rebellion in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, where Spain’s control over its empire was slipping.1 And here, rebellion and revolution would prove exceptionally profitable for Britain, as returning naval and military officers and soldiers found the New World particularly attractive. Several thousand British mercenary officers, sailors, and soldiers, a population that Matt Brown calls “adventurers,” traveled to South America to participate in independence campaigns.2 Of course, Britain and Spain had a long history of animosity dating back at least to their mutual interest in the Americas during the age of discovery. Perhaps unsurprisingly, relations between British adventurers and Spanish American Criollos (Creoles) were not always easy, as the two groups sometimes held quite different perspectives on the pursuit of independence. Karen Racine has shown that Criollo leaders, who were often educated in Spain, looked to Britain as a potential model for their future government structures.3 During the Wars of Independence they traveled to Europe for the express purpose of receiving aid and recognition, particularly from Britain. Although British officers hired by the Criollo governments often led campaigns, they were also led by local leaders, in the northern campaigns under Simón Bolívar and in the southern campaigns under Francisco José de San Martín. Britons and Criollos did not

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always agree as to how these military and naval campaigns should be waged, or what laudable military leadership entailed. When British adventurers traveled to South America, especially after 1817 to participate in the Wars of Independence, Britain adopted an official policy of neutrality; but the Foreign Office did little to curtail Criollo agents in London looking for mercenary recruits.4 In early 1817, when agents of Simón Bolívar and Francisco José de San Martín began recruiting in London for the independence armies, Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, did little to suppress local enthusiasm, especially as advertisements for the Spanish American independence armies regularly appeared in the British press.5 Until the panic of 1825, when the “bubble” of over-speculation created economic crises, British subjects left for adventures in Spanish America and tried their luck there as soldiers, entrepreneurs, and settlers.6 In fact, Rafe Blaufard argues that the “vacuum created by international competition over Spanish America” during this period “favoured adventurism to a degree unknown since the time of the buccaneers.”7 In this chapter, I will discuss several British adventurers’ narratives whose writers either participated in or witnessed the southern campaigns of the Wars of Independence. All of these narratives focus at some point on San Martín, specifically his role in the liberation of Lima, Peru, imperial Spain’s stronghold in the region, and the question of whether his military leadership showed appropriate bravery and forthrightness. Their homing in on San Martín, often detailing his flaws, indicates that in some ways he functioned as a kind of cypher for their own anxieties regarding masculine military behaviors. I suggest we learn relatively little about San Martín in these accounts. Instead we see how a military engagement that was not officially sanctioned by the British government led to a cultural conflict over the concept of military masculinity, in which the adventurer-mercenary, whether soldier or entrepreneur, was central. British adventurers’ narratives of this period employ the conventions of the memoir or travel narrative, declaring themselves to be true stories.8 However, as Brown and Brian Vale note, some of these narratives were written decades after the events they ostensibly portray, leaving open what truths they might reveal. For example, three volumes chronicling Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s time in South America appeared between 1855 and 1869 and were written by G. P. Earp “to vindicate Cochrane, to prove that he had been right in all his innumerable quarrels, and to justify his financial claims.”9 Captain Basil Hall, who published his narrative soon after his time

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in South America, enlisted family to help him rewrite his account.10 John Miers and William Bennett Stevenson wrote their narratives after years in South America, and even Maria Graham, who published her narratives soon after her return to Britain, revised them extensively.11 It is not only British adventurers who delayed writing or revised their narratives before publication. Brown indicates that even Criollo politicians like Venezuelan President José Antonio Paéz published his memoirs using the accounts of the British adventurers I discuss below as guides for the events of the wars. Indeed, many of these narratives were written decades after the Wars of Independence, in different circumstances and for a variety of purposes. If these texts do not offer seamless narratives of British and South American interactions during the Wars of Independence, they do point to the complexity of this period and the difficulty of studying it. For, as Brown has observed, “To make things even more difficult for the historian, fragmentary materials for the topic are distributed across the globe in national, regional, local, and private archives.”12 Collectively, these stories provide imperfect but important representations of the practices of military masculinity in a culturally hybrid theater of war. In their discussion and revision of the term “hegemonic masculinity,” R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt suggest that “masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals. Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular social setting.”13 Accordingly, historical contexts matter when thinking about how masculinities are lived, practiced, and understood. In Connell and Messerschmidt’s analysis, hegemonic masculinity allows for local, regional, and global variability: “Adopting an analytical framework that distinguishes local, regional, and global masculinities (and the same point applies to femininities) allows us to recognize the importance of place without falling into a monadic world of totally independent cultures or discourses.”14 When considering British portrayals of Thomas Cochrane and San Martín, the local contexts of those representations matter greatly. Cochrane and San Martín appear to practice and, more importantly, to embody relatively similar forms of what can be called a version of European hegemonic masculinity. As military men, concepts like honor, courage, strength, and bravery in battle defined their understanding of masculinity. Yet something happens locally in South America when British adventurers portray San Martín; he embodies a deficient masculinity and Cochrane does not.

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As I will argue, this local contestation of European hegemonic masculinity is not rooted in a clear dichotomy between what is appropriate or inappropriate masculine behavior and action in the Wars of Independence. Rather, this distinction emerges because Britons, at least those who actively discuss San Martín’s “cowardice,” shared Cochrane’s profit-seeking aims and valorized the mobile mercenary masculinity that he embodied. Cochrane’s mercantilism, while tied to British views of his “liberation” of South America, allowed for a purposeful merging of economic goals with support for independence. Because Britain did not recognize any South American nations until 1825 – that is, after most conflicts had ended – British subjects in the region were free to pursue their economic goals without fear of recrimination from the British government. Thus, many of the texts I analyze align profit with liberation. Cochrane was a bombastic figure, well known not only for his passionate outbursts but also for his financial self-interest. San Martín’s quiet patience and alternative views of war and “winning” were marginalized and diminished by some British accounts in favor of Cochrane’s wild, explicitly self-interested pursuit of wealth and individual fame and glory. While in Britain, perhaps, calm wisdom and restraint were understood to be central tenets of a masculinity suited to the marketplace, the South American Wars of Independence were a site of alternative possibilities, one where passionate mercantilist goals and fortune making were valorized as brave, courageous, and very much British.15

Multiple Masculinities: Adventurers, Soldiers, Mercenaries, Entrepreneurs, or Migrants? Who were the British adventurers who crossed the Atlantic to South America? Many of them were attached to the armed forces, yet only about a third of those who traveled to South America, at least to its northern Independence campaigns, “had any verifiable experience in the British navy.”16 So we cannot think of this migration of British subjects to South America only militarily. Indeed, Racine argues that for many adventurers, economic reasons explained their presence in the region. The belief that Spanish versions of valor and bravery were corrupt created in British adventurers abroad a sense that they were not just there for financial profit but also for a higher moral purpose:

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British merchants and soldiers believed they had another, and perhaps higher purpose, as they aided the Spanish American patriot forces: their presence might help raise the level of civility among a people debased by years of Spanish colonial rule. Their material possessions and moral rectitude would diffuse a modern, refined spirit among the local people, and raise their efficacy by providing a stimulus to industry.17

We see that even as British adventurers in South America were there to a great extent for profit and personal gain, they imagined that their supposed ideals of civility, morality, and industry would reform a local population “debased” by Spanish colonial rule.18 Adventurers were in South America for many reasons: profit, patriotism, and sometimes permanent settlement. Graham Dawson notes that though these adventurers are in the tradition of the soldier adventurer or merchant adventurer who emerges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yoking together travel, adventure, and money, they are also indicative of the “different forms of adventure hero [that] co-exist in the early nineteenth century, alongside other forms of imagined masculinity ranging from the Methodist working-man to the Byronic hero, from the Jacobin radical to Cowper’s domestic contemplative.”19 One way to label these British adventurers is as mercenaries, as they were recruited by a foreign power to fight for individual profit rather than for their country. And, if not in the armed forces explicitly, these adventurers were there for financial reward, even if the idea of “freedom” also connected to their personal aims. If we think of these adventurers, broadly, as mercenaries, they are implicated in a system that associates masculinity with money rather than honor. Erik Simpson argues that the mercenary is a troubling figure, as he has no allegiance to the nation, monarch, kingdom, or ruler he is fighting for. While the “volunteer” upholds the ideals of the nation or the war being fought, “the underlying logic of the mercenary involves a paradoxical choice to sacrifice choice: the person performing a mercenary action freely engages to bend his or her will to that of an alien commander.”20 For British subjects who enlisted as “volunteers” in the Wars of Independence, financial gains, titles, land, and monies were huge motivating factors, even as ideologies of British liberty and British civility anchored their time there and they were also pledging allegiance, whether financial or military, to local leaders in South America. Alan Knight argues that in South America “the British came bearing not only guns and gifts but also intangible ideas: economic liberalism, parliamentarianism, monarchism, anti-slavery,

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Protestantism, sport, racism, perhaps even a ‘gentlemanly’ ethos, which some argue, was integral to British capitalism.”21 As their narratives reveal, adventurer-mercenaries were vehicles for the transmission of beliefs and practices that exceeded their individual contributions to the South American Wars of Independence.

Adventure Narratives and José de San Martín The Wars of Independence happened on two fronts: in northern South American with Bolívar, and in southern South America with San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins. The northern war was mostly conducted on land, but in the south, to liberate the Viceroy of Lima, Peru, naval power was instrumental. Admiral Thomas Cochrane and other British adventurers were key to this naval campaign, though it was San Martín’s army that led the way for the fall of Lima. While Bolívar is ultimately credited with the final liberation of all of South America, San Martín’s role in the southern campaign was instrumental, as was his leadership. When the British arrived as adventurers, San Martín was already a tried military strategist. He had proved his leadership when he led 5,000 men, 10,600 mules, 1,600 horses, and 700 cattle across the Andes to secure Chile’s freedom in 1817. He had managed an incredible feat and was introduced to at least one British adventurer in Chile as “this Hannibal of the Andes.”22 It was also San Martín who recognized that only with the independence of Lima could South America be free of Spanish power. Indeed, the liberation of Peru was “his greatest ambition,” and he knew he needed naval power to do it.23 When the plans to free Lima emerged after the liberation of Chile, and with O’Higgins’s support, San Martín was in charge of all forces and military strategy, including the Chilean navy, which was under Cochrane’s command. It is impossible to focus on all the narratives that touch upon British involvement in the Wars of Independence. I am focusing here on the best known while also including a range written by those who interacted with San Martín and Cochrane: William Bennet Stevenson’s A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of 20 Years Residence in South America (1825), Captain Basil Hall’s Extracts from a Journal, Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in 1820, 1821, 1822 (1824), John Miers’s Travels in Chile and La Plata (1826), Maria Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile (1824), and, briefly, Admiral Thomas Cochrane’s Narrative of Services in the Liberation

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of Chili, Peru, and Brazil, from Spanish and Portuguese Liberation (1859).24 All of these offer analyses of San Martín’s character and conduct while also presenting their author’s understandings of military bravery and prowess in a foreign land. I will focus on three things: first, San Martín and Cochrane’s land and sea campaign to free Lima, Peru, in the early 1820s, and the role San Martín played in Lima once Spanish royal forces had been forced beyond the city; second, how San Martín was perceived once he became “Protector of Peru” and in particular his treatment of Spanish royalists; third, how San Martín’s character is assessed in the narratives.25 When Cochrane arrived in South America, he was ready for a change from Britain, especially since in 1814 he had been implicated in a Stock Exchange controversy. This controversy cost him his knighthood and his position in the British navy.26 He was disgraced and unemployed, and when South American agents recruited him in 1817, he took the opportunity quickly. Cochrane arrived in South America in November 1818 with his family to head the Chilean navy; in December 1818, he became a Chilean citizen, and was appointed Vice Admiral and Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Navy.27 He received $6,000 a year, somewhat less than a Vice Admiral in the Royal British Navy. Vale notes that while salary might have been problematic given his title and what he was recruited to accomplish, Cochrane was also “an unknown quantity”; and if he had a reputation for bravery, in the British Navy he had not been ranked higher than a captain and only ever commanded a frigate.28 Initially, Cochrane had little time to be picky about money (though this changed very quickly), as he had to settle his family in Chile, appoint a staff, and begin the work he was hired to do.29 Cochrane’s presence in South America allowed leaders like O’Higgins and San Martín to conceive of Lima’s liberation from the Spanish. There is no debating that Cochrane’s naval prowess in Chile was incredibly successful. In Chile, Cochrane “harassed Spanish ships and ports up and down the coast, blockading Callao, and dramatically capturing Valdivia at the end of 1819, providing Chilean patriots a secure base from which to carry out subsequent operations.”30 After the successful liberation of Chile, attention turned to the military strategy that would liberate Peru, and, initially, San Martín and Cochrane attempted to work together. However, their approaches to fighting and battle strategies did not mix well. In the British narratives, these differences in military strategy read as San Martín’s lack of leadership and bravery in Lima’s liberation, his selfish, tyrannical ambition, and his disingenuous character.

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Historians take up questions of San Martín’s military strategy even now. Some have viewed his desire not to engage with Spain’s armies in Lima as idealistic, if potentially wrongheaded. Rodriguez suggests, Since landing, San Martín had refused to engage in combat, insisting that he would not win by shedding American blood. Inasmuch as the vast majority of royalist officers and men were natives of the New World, who gave little indication of changing sides, his hope for a bloodless victory was unrealistic.31

Others argue that San Martín’s ideas of indirect contact and liberation versus conquest were correct, indeed necessary, for the political climate he encountered: “San Martín believed that a foreign liberating expedition could not in fact liberate Peru, that liberation needed the cooperation of the Peruvians and should be secured as much as possible by Peruvians, with the minimum violence.”32 Specifically, Lynch argues that San Martín’s plans were “more complex than those of Cochrane; they were subtle and possibly unique to the American revolution,” as he wanted “the minimum of violence to their country and its institutions.”33 British narratives of the period criticize San Martín’s hesitation to enter Lima and his ceasefire with Viceroy Joaquin de la Pezuela after landing near Lima, in Pisco, in September 1820. Many argued that he should have immediately entered the city and forced the surrender of the royalists, thus strong-arming Peruvians to uphold the cause of independence. Contemporaries debated his treatment of Spanish royalists once he entered the city, and critiqued his motives for naming himself Protector of Peru despite his promise to allow Peru’s citizens to dictate their own form of government.34 These questions seem to be part of a long tradition of contestation concerning what happened in Lima in the weeks after San Martín’s forces landed in Peru, and more significantly, for this chapter, what his hesitation may indicate about his courage, military prowess, and sense of manliness. Those who were present or had access to what occurred in Peru were of varying opinions, and these have led to a fundamental divide between those who interpreted San Martín as a military hero and those who saw him as a cowardly opportunist.35 Captain Hall’s is perhaps the most “neutral” British narrative of this period. Though not officially an adventurer, Hall was stationed on a British ship, the Conway, in 1820 in South America to safeguard British economic interests in the region. As a member of the

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British navy, he represents the most “official” view of this region at the time, and in his narrative he is conscious that he is entering a vexed discussion. In one of several sections devoted specifically to San Martín, Hall notes, As the character and conduct of San Martin have been made the subject of a controversy into which for many reasons I am unwilling to enter, I shall merely state what are the leading points of this discussion; the real merits of which cannot, for the present, as I conceive, be fully understood at this distance from the spot.36

Hall enumerates what are considered to be the strikes against San Martín: The first charge made against him is his want of activity and energy in the conduct of the Peruvian war; the next, his despotic expulsion of the old Spaniards in Lima; and lastly, his desertion of the Independent cause at a season of great danger and perplexity.37

Hall spends several pages responding to the various critiques of San Martín. On San Martín’s treatment of Spanish royalists Hall argues that San Martín’s “friends” considered this treatment “justified” given Spanish royalists’ “resistance” to the Patriot cause. He informs readers of other Patriot governments that also expelled their royalist populations: “in Columbia and Mexico a similar degree of severity towards the Spaniards has been found indispensable to the safety of the new governments; in Chili, also, and in Buenos Ayres, the same policy has been considered necessary.”38 He claims that he does not “praise” or “blame” San Martín and that his “sole object, in this sketch, has been to draw up as faithful and impartial a picture as [he] possibly could of what has actually taken place.”39 Hall understands he is an expert eyewitness whose observations carry the weight of authority and, perhaps, could offer an alternative representation of San Martín’s actions and character. After defending San Martín’s treatment of royalists, Hall offers a character analysis that tends to further vindicate San Martín, whom he describes as “thoroughly well-bred, and unaffectedly simple in his manners, exceedingly cordial and engaging, and possessed evidently of great kindness of disposition.” In short, Hall has “never seen any person, the enchantment of whose address was more irresistible.”40 He reports that in their conversations San Martín “listened earnestly, and replied with distinctness and fairness, showing wonderful

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resources in argument, and a most happy fertility of illustration,” but that “there was nothing showy or ingenious in his discourse, and he certainly seemed, at all times, perfectly in earnest, and deeply possessed with his subject.”41 Hall’s word choices – “kindness,” “unaffectedly,” “earnest” – highlight San Martín’s authenticity, suggesting that deceit or treachery would be foreign to his nature. His sincerity is embodied in his manners and conversation. His tendency to address “the strong points of a topic” suggests a depth of feeling that his manners and behavior make clear.42 Overall, Hall indicates that San Martín lacks selfish ambition or cunning self-interest. In doing so, Hall obliquely addresses the accusations raised against San Martín in other British narratives, suggesting his awareness of the stories circulating about San Martín in the small British community in South America, where “adventurers” who had fought alongside Cochrane and witnessed tensions between him and San Martín were not hard to find. W. B. Stevenson was Cochrane’s personal advisor in the region, and the third volume of his narrative is devoted to the liberation of Chile and Peru. 43 In it he contrasts Cochrane’s exploits and bravery with San Martín’s “prudence,” a word he uses sarcastically to suggest cowardice: “the incomparable prudence of San Martin, revolted at effusion of blood, which must necessarily be the precursor of so much glory.”44 Stevenson also uses “prudence” to connote cunning: The consummate prudence of San Martín, however, did not allow him to risk the firing of a shot, lest the ball might slay a “brother;” at the same time that his Guerilla parties were actively engaged in committing all the cruelties incident to predatory warfare.45

Unlike Hall, Stevenson claims that San Martín is two-faced, behaving “prudently” for show but cruelly in secret, suggesting a tyrannical streak. Stevenson relates that “his excellency expected to be obeyed as a Dey of Algiers, and as universally flattered as a Sultan of the East; and to those two over-ruling passions may be attributed part of the disgrace of his administration in Peru.”46 In declaring that San Martín is ruled by his “passions” rather than by reason, courage, or military vision, Stevenson indicts San Martín’s manliness. Ironically, the prudence that is so valued in British business adventures and masculine mercantile models is derided when discussing San Martín’s military strategies.

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Stevenson’s descriptions are of a piece with the narratives of Graham, Miers, and Cochrane. Miers, a British merchant in the region, suggests that San Martín is someone whose policy . . . evidently induced him to place more reliance upon intrigue and diplomatic finesse than upon the hazard of warfare: in the eyes of military men he has been condemned; in the opinion of others his policy has been defended as the more prudent line of operation.47

Miers also uses the word “prudent” to suggest cowardice in San Martín’s military strategy even though we might expect a merchant to value prudence more highly than a military or naval officer would. He adds that San Martín was not sufficiently imbued with the kind of knowledge which enables a man from his own resources to command his fellow men . . . He had read little; and had no sound notions of government: he had, however, an unusual share of cunning, was quick of comprehension in ordinary circumstances.48

While Hall implied that San Martín was intelligent and well read, Miers highlights his lack of education and knowledge. San Martín’s “cunning” enables his “prudence,” as his quick understanding allows him to further his own interests. For Stevenson and Miers, if San Martín is slow to action, he is also disingenuous when he takes any. Like her fellow adventurers, Maria Graham critiques San Martín’s military actions and his character. Graham was widowed in Chile after the death of her husband, Captain Graham, an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy on the Doris, a ship that was stationed to look out for British interests in the area. When discussing San Martín’s strategy on Lima, specifically his title of Protector of Peru, she writes: Although he had passed the time since his arrival on the coast of Peru in total inactivity . . . yet he takes on himself the style and title of a conqueror, and, to read his official papers, one might think he had won the city by hard fighting.49

For Graham, San Martín’s “inactivity” cannot be part of a nuanced military strategy; instead it must be a symptom of laziness. Graham also considers San Martín disingenuous. Like Stevenson and Miers, Graham claims that San Martín’s

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M. Soledad Caballero views are narrow, and I think selfish. His philosophy, as he calls it, and his religion, are upon a par; both are too openly used as mere masks to impose on the world . . . He certainly has no genius; but he has some talents, with no learning, and little general knowledge. Of that little, however, he has the dexterity to make a great deal of use; nobody possesses more that most useful talent, “l’art de se faire valoir.” His fine person, his air of superiority, and that suavity of manner which has so long enabled him to lead others, give him very decided advantages.50

We see the same patterns here that appeared in Stevenson’s and Miers’s narrative. In Graham’s assessment, San Martín is not only cowardly, he is also uneducated and manipulative. As one of the only women who traveled to and wrote about South America during this period, Graham is unusual, yet we see that she is as invested in affirming the models of military masculinity endorsed by her fellow adventurers as they are. Ultimately, words like “cunning,” “dexterous,” “suave,” and “prudent” are ubiquitous in these narratives, and all point to San Martín as a decidedly too tyrannical leader whose masculine character, moral code, and behavior indicate effeminacy, moral weakness, cowardice, tyranny, and ignorance. In Hall’s narrative there is room for varying models of military leadership, including local, non-British ones. For Hall, British military successes in the region do not indicate South American deficiency. Hall’s descriptions of San Martín are not without criticism, but he is better able to account for the complexities that surrounded San Martín’s military strategies. One explanation for Hall’s more positive assessment of San Martín’s character may be that by the time Hall met him, San Martín’s disagreements with Cochrane and his role in Lima’s liberation were things of the past, whereas Stevenson, Miers, and Graham were present during the conflicts between the two leaders and were very much aware of those having to do with prize money, payments for the Chilean navy, and Cochrane’s own financial rewards.51 Stevenson and Graham (and, of course, Cochrane) devote considerable space to these financial concerns. Jennifer Hayward has convincingly argued that Hall’s analysis of San Martín derives from his position relative to Graham, Miers, and Stevenson. She writes, “the similarity of three of the travelers’ perspectives, and the contrast of Hall’s, forces awareness of a major factor in early British imperialism: the power of collaboratively developed discourses of nationalism and colonialism in crafting identities of English communities abroad” such that “their shared culture was emphasized and indeed heightened as they faced the Other in the colonial context.”52 Meanwhile, according to Hayward, Hall

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“spent his years in Chile within a very different, and doubtless more ideologically influential, community: the British navy.”53 Certainly, authorial positionality is crucial in understanding these adventurer narratives. But most British subjects in South America were influenced by the British naval presence not only in their analysis of South American independence and San Martín’s role in it, but also in their understandings of their identity as Britons. After all, Britain’s naval power was unparalleled at this point in the world. And even noncombatant adventurers and merchants in the region relied on British naval influence during the Wars of Independence. Yet I would argue that, ironically, it is precisely Cochrane’s nonBritish naval status in South America that creates tensions about military masculinity in these narratives, specifically Cochrane’s mobile mercenary status. Indeed, Cochrane did not officially represent Britain in his dealings with, his fighting for, or his engagements in the emerging nations in South America. Though he had been an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, he had, at the time of his employment in South America, been stripped of his title and his position in the navy. He was in South America entirely of his own volition, and for his personal financial and career gains. His mercenary goals clash directly with a Burkean model of aristocratic chivalry and equally with the mercantilist model of rational restraint in issues of trade and money-making. His is precisely a masculinity that the narratives I have discussed strive either to ignore or, more importantly, to revise such that his mobile mercenary status becomes, if not as honorable as an official position in the British Navy, at least different than that of the many British subjects in South America who were also there to further their own financial interests. Cochrane’s bravery and valor in battle may have served to legitimate their own speculations and investments, which did not, as Joselyn Almeida, Heinowitz, and others have pointed out, yield much financial success in this early period of South American independence.54 If Cochrane’s “whole soul was engaged in the total emancipation of the Spanish colonies,” his fortitude and bravery are, ironically, visible precisely because of his insistence that he be paid for them.55 Indeed, Miers highlights Cochrane’s sacrifices by reminding readers that the prize money he expected remained unpaid: “not a single dollar had he any hope of receiving.”56 Stevenson, Miers, and even Graham (who could not have been present) all devote considerable space to detailing the disagreements between Cochrane and San Martín about prize money and payments that ensued after Lima’s liberation and once San Martín named himself Protector of Peru. In their narratives, they include

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proclamations and letters, and even cite personal direct conversations that read like a novel. Indeed, most of Stevenson’s third volume is about these interactions. There were Britons stationed in South America who, like Commodore William Bowles, considered San Martín to be an honorable figure: “He disregards money and is I believe very little richer than when I came to this country, although if his view had been interested or personal he might have easily amassed a large fortune since his entry into Chile.”57 For the most part, however, Cochrane’s narratives and those who favored him have had historical weight in the English-speaking world at least. The most visible way to disentangle Cochrane’s mobile mercenary status from his military honor is to create an ambitious, cowardly foil in San Martín.58 Adventurer narratives represent San Martín as a selfish, tyrannical, and weak military leader largely because he did not agree with Cochrane’s military strategies for the region, especially his approach to Lima.59 By establishing San Martín as a foil, these narratives play down Cochrane’s mobile mercenary status, neglecting to mention that during his time in South America, he was known as a hothead, a rule breaker, and a prize seeker. Without the veneer of naval experience and military prowess, Cochrane was just another adventurer trying his luck in the region rather than a representative of British honor. In his own narrative, written later in the nineteenth century, Cochrane exclaims, “duplicity and cunning were San Martín’s great instruments when he was not too indolent to wield them.”60 And though he allows that San Martín “was not innately cruel . . . he did not hesitate to sacrifice men of far greater patriotism and ability than himself, regarding them as rivals.”61 Thirty years after the Wars of Independence, Cochrane continued to assert that San Martín was driven by the desire for wealth, glory, and fame, suggesting that San Martín elicited thousands of dollars from the Peruvian and Chilean governments, while “nothing but thanks were rewarded to me, both for liberating their country and liberating them from military despotism.”62 Almost a decade after San Martín’s death in 1850, Cochrane was still tilting at the windmills of these Wars of Independence, claiming that Peru had “rewarded the tyrant and not myself in any form beyond the acknowledgement of my services.”63 Prize money became the focus of tension for most of Cochrane’s time in South America and it would dominate his narratives as well. By the time his narrative was published, his supposed heroism had been immortalized in boys’ adventure stories and maritime fictions, as well as in his ghostwritten memoirs.

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Conclusion: The Final Story? As Leslie Bethell reminds us, “The 19th century was the ‘British century’ in Latin America.”64 Similarly, Blaufard has argued that the “international rivalry” over the “fate” of Spanish America “can be termed the Western Question,” and this question was “given urgency by the fear that Britain would achieve global hegemony by turning South America into a ‘second Hindoustan.’”65 South America functioned as a space of ripe possibilities for British writers and investors across the nineteenth century. Writers like Helen Maria Williams, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and, later, Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf would all invoke South America as a space both promising and ruinous for British travelers and investors.66 In her discussion of British literary representations of South America, Luz Elena Ramirez highlights how South America and “eastern lands” were often conflated in the British imagination so that “in deciding whether or not to interfere in Latin American affairs, imperial officers could draw on what they learned in places like Egypt or India.”67 Through this conflation of the disparate regions of the globe, “the Orient and the Americas taken together were places to colonize, and in time, try out new kinds of businesses.”68 British subjects who were in South America during the Wars of Independence, like other British adventurers after them and across the nineteenth century, “frequently resort[ed] to invention, admission, or self-deception when trying to adapt to their Latin American circumstances.” 69 The narratives I have discussed here manifest this self-deception in particular by celebrating Cochrane’s mobile mercenary status as a model of military masculinity. The irony is that San Martín leaves South America after his failure in Lima, returns to Europe in exile, and dies in relative obscurity and poverty, leaving the final liberation of southern South America to Bolívar. By contrast, Cochrane was immortalized as a British hero.

Acknowledgment This article was written with support of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to Allegheny College for Collaborative Undergraduate Research in the Humanities and with the help of the following inspiring undergraduate student research assistants: Peta Henry, Manual Marquez, Loryn (Belle) Mazurik, and Sarah Wolfe.

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Notes 1. Eliga Gould argues for thinking about Britain and Spain’s histories as “entangled” rather than in comparativist terms. See “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds,” p. 766. For the most current and comprehensive history of Spain and Britain’s American empires, see Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World. 2. On the term “adventurer,” see Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies. Estimates of the number of Britons in South America in the early nineteenth century vary between 5,000 and 10,000. Karen Racine (“‘This England and This Now’”) and Brown each suggest around 5,000; Desmond Gregory (Brute New World) suggests 6,000; Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Independence of Spanish America) estimates the number to be around 10,000. There were plenty of ready and able volunteers when Simon Bolívar and San Martín’s agents began seeking out men to join the South American independence movements. If we consider this in terms of population in Spanish America, which James Belich indicates to be around 15 million in the 1790s, this is not a large number. But if we consider Criollos, whom Belich calls “neo-Spanish” and others have called Creoles – that is, those of European descent – then these numbers shift. As Belich notes, in Spanish America, “the proportions of Europeans varied – from 76% in thinly-populated Chile, through 26% in New Granada and 18–20% in New Spain, to 13% in Peru. Assuming a total population of 14 million in 1780, of whom say 15% were accepted as white, about 2.1 million neo-Spanish seems likely for Spanish America in 1780.” See Belich, Replenishing the Earth, p. 32. 3. Racine, “‘This England and this Now’”; Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies, pp. 7–8. 4. For more on British neutrality during this period, see Waddell, “British Neutrality and Spanish-American Independence.” 5. Heinowitz notes that British newspapers actively followed the Wars of Independence, “including in their pages details of each military victory, character descriptions of the revolutionary leaders, projections about the commercial benefits to come, and – what was new for British readers – regular stocks and bond quotes.” See Heinowitz, Spanish America and British Romanticism, p. 183. See also Racine, “‘This England and this Now’,” p. 9. 6. For a discussion of the shifting ways British periodicals viewed Bolívar as tied to British economic speculation in South America, see Jones, “Images of Simon Bolívar.” 7. Blaufard, “The Western Question,” p. 757. 8. As a genre, travel narratives have been the focus of critical attention for some time. For an overview of nineteenth-century travel writing, see Buzard, The Beaten Track, and Pratt, Imperial Eyes; on gender and the nineteenth-century travel narrative, see Blake, “A Woman’s

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

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Trek”; Caballero, “For the Honour of Our Country”; and Frawley, A Wider Range. On British travel narratives about South America, see Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies; Gardiner, “Foreign Travelers’ Accounts of Mexico”; Keighren and Withers, “Questions of Inscription and Epistemology”; Myers, “A Survey of British Literature on Buenos Aires”; and Perez-Mejia, A Geography of Hard Times. For a focus on women travelers to the region see Rodenas, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth Century Latin America. On the figure of the adventurer, see Know-Shaw, The Explorer in English Fiction, and Zweig, The Adventurer. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 201. McCarthy, That Curious Fellow, p. 60. Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, and Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative. Graham had planned a second edition of her Journal of a Voyage to Brazil. See Caballero and Hayward’s edition of this journal, which includes Graham’s notes and parts of her unpublished “Life of Don Pedro.” Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies, p. 5. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” p. 836. On masculinity as a set of practices, see Brod, “The Construction of the Construction of Masculinities.” Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” p. 850. On mercantile and military masculinities, see Cain and Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism”; Dawson, Soldier Heroes; and Solinger, Becoming the Gentleman. Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies, p. 25. Racine observes that the officer volunteers in the Wars of Independence were “veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, and brought with them their battlefield experience.” See “‘This England and this Now’,” p. 11. Racine, “‘This England and this Now’,” p. 15. Viewing Criollo revolutionaries as victims of Spain’s tyranny had its limits. Once British investments in the region saturated the market and created a “bubble” of speculation that burst after 1825, ideas about the debased nature of the Criollo and local populations and their ties to Spanish tyranny re-emerged, only this time as a critique not of Spain but of the local South American population. Heinowitz argues in Spanish America and British Romanticism that after the crisis of 1825, “whereas in previous years, British writers had depicted natives and creole inhabitants in South America as victims of Spanish prejudice and unjust persecution,” once the market had crashed “the same revolutionaries were denounced as commercially retrograde and authoritarian” (pp. 206, 205). Dawson, Soldier Heroes, p. 58. Simpson, Mercenaries in British and American Literature, p. 6. On mercenaries in South America, see Moises, Freedom’s Mercenaries.

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94 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

M. Soledad Caballero Knight, “Britain and Latin America,” p. 125. Quoted in Lynch, San Martín, p. 97. Lynch, San Martín, p. 96. I include Maria Graham in the category of “adventurer” because she had financial investments in South America and traveled there with her husband in 1821 to secure British financial interests in the region. On Graham’s presence as a woman in Chile, Peru, and Brazil see Caballero, “Clashing Tastes,” and Caballero, “‘For the Honour of Our Country.’” San Martín has been a constant figure of discussion among scholars writing in Spanish; yet there is less written about him in English. Until Lynch’s biography, San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (2009), there had been no English biography since Metford’s San Martín: The Liberator (1950), though Rojas’s San Martín: Knight of the Andes was translated in 1967. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 31. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 37. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 46. Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, pp. 38–9. Cochrane appointed William Bennet Stevenson, another British adventurer, to be his advisor on local manners. Racine, “A Community of Purpose,” p. 14. Rodríguez O., Independence of Spanish America, p. 218. Lynch, Spanish American Revolutions, pp. 173–4. Lynch, San Martín, pp. 121–2. The narratives I discuss all criticize San Martín for naming himself Protector of Peru. It was well known that San Martín did not think South America was ready even for parliamentary democracy. At one point, he considered monarchy to be a good option for the region. For more on San Martín and gender, see Brewster, “Women and the Spanish-American Wars of Independence.” Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 56. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 56. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 57. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 58. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 153. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 153. Hall, Extracts from a Journal, p. 153. Stevenson had been resident for decades in Chile and Peru, “where he was known by his middle name in the Spanish fashion as ‘Don Luis Bennet’.” See Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 39. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative, p. 306. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative, p. 336. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative, p. 260. Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, p. 44. Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, p. 30.

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49. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, p. 82. 50. Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile, pp. 282–3. 51. Vale notes that the tensions around prize money were culturally inflected. Britons believed that when a foreign town was attacked, “the captors retained the booty”; however, the revolutionaries in South America did not see those they were fighting as foreign, but simply as populations that needed to be liberated from Spain’s authority. In Cochrane’s narratives about this period, he continued to argue that Chile and Brazil owed him money, though this was untrue. Cochrane earned over £40,000 in pay and prize money. See Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 81. 52. Hayward, “No Unity of Design,” p. 305. 53. Hayward, “No Unity of Design,” p. 305. 54. For more on British investments across the nineteenth century as well as the continued British economic and cultural influence in the region, see Aguirre, Informal Empire; Dumett, Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism; and Platt, Business Imperialism. 55. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative, p. 243. 56. Miers, Travels in Chile and La Plata, p. 105. Cochrane did not leave South America empty-handed, and here Miers perpetuates a myth that would persist for most of the nineteenth century that he was, somehow, short-changed by the South American nations. See Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, pp. 191–208. 57. Quoted in Metford, San Martín: The Liberator pp. 147–8. These views are corroborated by Lynch, who argues that San Martín was “devoid of personal ambition, and moved primarily by the desire to avoid social upheaval” and that “all his tactics were consistent with his avowed policy” of liberation rather than conquest. See Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, pp. 174, 186. 58. While I have not focused explicitly on portrayals of race in this chapter, racial stereotypes undoubtedly played a role in negative representations of San Martín. Spain was historically Britain’s enemy and, during the early-modern period, accounts of Spain’s cruel treatment of its Indigenous population circulated widely. These accounts, as Mignolo notes, involved “the racialization of the Latin and Catholic south in the mouth and pen of the Anglo and Protestant north.” See Mignolo, “Black Legend,” pp. 320–1, and DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow. Of course, often when the British invoked South America or the “New World” in the nineteenth century, they returned to an Indigenous past before Spanish colonialism. For instance, in her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven Anna Leitia Barbauld looks to South America as the future of civilization. Helena Maria Williams’s epic Peru (1784) discusses the fall of the Indigenous world, suggesting the Spanish are to blame for this tragedy. For more on British representations of Spain in the Romantic period, see Saglia, “O My Mother Spain!”

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59. Cochrane’s approach to warfare and battle did not always satisfy those he was fighting for. Vale observes that “Cochrane, of course, simply saw [Peru] as enemy territory, which should be attacked by any means. O’Higgins and his colleagues did not agree. To them, Peru was a friendly country whose inhabitants were oppressed by an occupying army.” See Cochrane in the Pacific, p. 60. 60. Cochrane, The Liberation of Chili, p. 223. 61. Cochrane, The Liberation of Chili, p. 223. 62. Cochrane, The Liberation of Chili, p. 227. 63. Cochrane, The Liberation of Chili, p. 227. For more on Cochrane’s exaggerated claims about what was owed him see Vale, Cochrane in the Pacific, pp. 191–208. 64. Bethell, “Britain and Latin America,” p. 1. 65. Blaufard, “The Western Question,” pp. 742, 747. 66. For more on British literary representations of South America across the nineteenth century see Almeida, Reimagining the Transatlantic, and Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America. 67. Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America, p. 15. 68. Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America, p. 16. 69. Ramirez, British Representations of Latin America, p. 19.

Bibliography Aguirre, Robert D., Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Almeida, Joselyn M., Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780–1890 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Bethell, Leslie, “Britain and Latin America in Historical Perspective,” in Victor Bulmer-Thomas (ed.), Britain and Latin America: A Changing Relationship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–24. Blake, Susan L., “A Woman’s Trek: What Difference Does Gender Make?” Women’s Studies International Forum, 13(4), 1992, pp. 347–55. Blaufard, Rafe, “The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence,” The American Historical Review, 112(3), 2007, pp. 742–63. Brewster, Claire, “Women and the Spanish-American Wars of Independence: An Overview,” Feminist Review, 79, 2005, pp. 20–35. Brod, Harry, “The Construction of the Construction of Masculinities,” in Stefan Horlacher (ed.), Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 19–32.

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Brown, Matt, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Símon Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries, and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Caballero, M. Soledad, “Clashing Tastes: European Femininity and Race in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil,” in Miguel A. Cabanas, Jeanne, Dubino, Veronica Salles-Reese, and Gary Totten (eds), Politics, Identity, and Mobility in Travel Writing (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 55–68. Caballero, M. Soledad, “‘For the Honour of Our Country:’ Maria Dundas Graham and the Romance of Benign Domination,” Studies in Travel Writing, 9(2), 2005, pp. 111–31. Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I: The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850,” The Economic History Review, 39(4), 1986, pp. 501–25. Cochrane, Admiral Lord Thomas, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, 3 vols (London: James Ridgway, 1859). Connell, R. W. and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society, 19(6), December 2005, pp. 828–59. Dawson, Graham, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (New York: Routledge, 1994). DeGuzmán, María, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Dumett, Raymond E. (ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (New York: Longman, 1999). Elliot, John H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Frawley, Maria H., A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1994). Gardiner, C. Harvey, “Foreign Travelers’ Accounts of Mexico, 1810–1910,” The Americas, 8(3), 1952, pp. 321–51. Gould, Eliga H., “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The EnglishSpeaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” The American Historical Review, 112(3), 2007, pp. 764–86. Graham, Maria Dundas, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, ed. M. Soledad Caballero and Jennifer Hayward (Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2011). Graham, Maria Dundas, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil and Residence there during Parts of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). Graham, Maria Dundas, Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822 and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969).

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Gregory, Desmond, Brute New World: The Rediscovery of Latin America in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: British Academy Press, 1992). Hall, Basil, Extracts from a Journal, Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822 (Philadelphia: E. Little, 1824). Hayward, Jennifer, “‘No Unity of Design’: Competing Discourses in Graham’s Journal of a Residence in Chile,” in Jennifer Haywood (ed.), Maria Graham: Journal of a Residence in Chile, During the Year 1822, and a Voyage from Chile to Brazil in 1823 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 291–314. Heinowitz, Rebecca Cole, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Jones, Calvin P., “The Images of Simón Bolívar as Reflected in Ten Leading British Periodicals, 1816–1830,” The Americas, 40(3), 1984, pp. 377–97. Keighren, Innes M. and Charles W. J. Withers, “Questions of Inscription and Epistemology in British Travelers’ Accounts of Early Nineteenth Century South America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(16), 2011, pp. 1331–46. Kitson, Peter J., “Romanticism and Colonialism: Races, Places, Peoples, 1785–1800,” in Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (eds), Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13–34. Knight, Alan, “Britain and Latin America,” in Andrew Porter and Alaine Low (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 122–45. Know-Shaw, Peter, The Explorer in English Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). Lynch, John, San Martín: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Lynch, John, The Spanish American Revolutions 1808–1826 (New York: Norton, 1986). McCarthy, James, That Curious Fellow: Captain Basil Hall, R.N. (Dunbeath: Whittles, 2011). Metford, J. C. J., San Martin: The Liberator (Oxford: Blackwell, 1950). Miers, John, Travels in Chile and La Plata, Including Accounts Respecting Geography, Geology, Statistics, Government, Finances, Agriculture, Manners, Customs & the Mining Operations in Chile, 1826, 2 vols (New York: AMS Press, 1970). Mignolo, Walter D., “What Does the Black Legend Have to Do with Race?” in Maureen Quilligan, Walter Mignolo, and Margaret Rich Greer (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial

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Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 312–24. Moises, Enrique Rodriguez, Freedom’s Mercenaries: British Volunteers in the Wars of Independence, 2 vols. (Lanham, MD: Hamilton, 2006). Myers, Scott, “A Survey of British Literature on Buenos Aires During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” The Americas, 44(1), 1987, pp. 67–79. Perez-Mejia, Angela, A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780–1849 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). Platt, D. M. C., Business Imperialism 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). Racine, Karen, “A Community of Purpose: British Cultural Influence during the Spanish American Wars of Independence,” in Oliver Marshall (ed.), English-Speaking Communities in Latin America (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 3–32. Racine, Karen, “‘This England and this Now’: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 90(3), 2010, pp. 423–54. Ramirez, Luz Elena, British Representations of Latin America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007). Rodenas, Adriana Méndez, Transatlantic Travels in Nineteenth Century Latin America: European Women Pilgrims (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013). Rodríguez O., Jaime E., The Independence of Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Rojas, Ricardo, San Martin: Knight of the Andes (New York: Cooper Square, 1967). Saglia, Diego, “‘O My Mother Spain!’: The Peninsular War, Family Matters, and the Practice of Romantic Nation-Writing,” EHL, 65(2), 1998, pp. 363–93. Simpson, Erik, Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). Solinger, Jason D., Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660–1815 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Spurr, David, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). Stevenson, William Bennet, A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of 20 Years Residence in South America, 3 vols (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1825).

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Vale, Brian, Cochrane in the Pacific: Fortune and Freedom in Spanish America (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). Waddell, D. A. G., “British Neutrality and Spanish-American Independence: The Problem of Foreign Enlistment,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 19(1), May 1987, pp. 1–17. Zweig, Paul, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

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Chapter 4

At Home on the Prairie? Black Hawk, Margaret Fuller, and American Indian Dispossession Melissa Adams-Campbell

Eleven years after Black Hawk’s so-called war, U.S. transcendentalist author Margaret Fuller toured Illinois prairies where now exiled Sauk and Meskwaki (Sac and Fox) peoples had attempted to reoccupy U.S.-claimed territories east of the Mississippi. In the published account of Fuller’s travels, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, the narrator opines, “How could they let themselves be conquered, with such a country to fight for!”1 In their writing Fuller and Black Hawk each value the land and acknowledge Native claims to it; but only Black Hawk details how the U.S. dispossessed the Sauk and Meskwaki. In his narrative Black Hawk pinpoints a highly questionable 1804 treaty negotiated by then Governor of the Indiana Territory William Henry Harrison as the “origin of all our difficulties.”2 According to Black Hawk, four Sauk and Meskwaki individuals had been sent to St. Louis to make reparations after a fellow tribal member killed a U.S. settler in self-defense. These four individuals were not authorized by their nations to engage in a land deal and, when later questioned, claimed not to have known that they signed away all rights to Sauk and Meskwaki lands east of the Mississippi, including their own villages. Moreover, the accused person at the center of these negotiations was shot as his party prepared to return home. Black Hawk observes, “This is all they could recollect of what had been said and done. They had been drunk the greater part of the time they were in St. Louis. This is all myself or nation knew of the treaty of 1804.”3 Although many Sauk and Meskwaki peoples actively objected to the treaty’s terms and the circumstances of

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its negotiation, they continued to live on lands now claimed by the U.S. for roughly another twenty-five years. However, with increasing numbers of white settlers arriving in northwestern Illinois in the 1820s and the passage of the Indian Removal Act under President Andrew Jackson’s leadership in 1830, regional tensions escalated until Sauk and Meskwaki peoples grudgingly moved west. When Black Hawk led a group of one thousand Native men, women, and children back across the Mississippi in April 1832 he was not explicitly seeking war, as the presence of women and children indicates.4 However, he was certainly challenging the U.S. government’s right to dictate orders to sovereign Native nations. Panicky Illinois settlers and politicians responded with armed force, leading to the eventual slaughter of hundreds of elderly people, women, and children as they attempted to re-cross the Mississippi at Bad Axe, Wisconsin, in August 1832. A few weeks later Black Hawk surrendered; he was held as a prisoner of war at Jefferson Barracks, eventually dictating his version of events to U.S. translator Antoine LeClaire. Newspaper editor J. B. Patterson shaped and prepared the English transcription for print. Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak was published in 1833. While previous scholarship has been occupied with Black Hawk’s mediated voice and the composite nature of the text (filtered as it is through LeClaire and Patterson), this chapter compares the different and competing cultural rhetorics about indigeneity, land, and belonging deployed in Black Hawk’s Life, an as-told-to narrative of Sauk and Meskwaki people’s resistance to settler colonialism and subsequent forced migration from their homelands, and Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, a literary account of her tour of what is now the Midwest.5 The disparity in their social positions – one an exile whose very presence in his former homeland was deemed a menacing threat, and the other a feminist intellectual, tourist, and professional writer – is worth remarking. Fuller’s travel provided her with aesthetic experiences that she transformed into self-reflective creative literature (cementing her status as a notable nineteenthcentury author), while Black Hawk’s re-crossing of the Mississippi (then the official border dividing his people from the U.S.) was an inherently political act challenging the U.S.’s right to expel the Sauk and Meskwaki from their homelands. This chapter specifically employs a cultural rhetorics approach to explore the cultural differences in these distinct authorial positions of power, language, and authority vis-à-vis Illinois land and Native peoples. As Malea Powell et al. describe it,

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the project of cultural rhetorics is, generally, to emphasize rhetorics as always-already cultural and cultures as persistently rhetorical. In practice, cultural rhetorics scholars investigate and understand meaningmaking as it is situated in specific cultural communities. And when we say “cultural communities,” we mean any place/space where groups organize under a set of shared beliefs and practices – American Indian communities, workplace communities, digital communities, crafting communities, etc.6

Drawing on the work of Michel De Certeau, Powell and her coauthors explain how cultures are made up of practices that accumulate over time and in relationship to specific places. Practices that accumulate in those specific places transform those physical geographies into spaces in which common belief systems can be made, re-made, negotiated, transmitted, learned and imagined. Under colonialism/capitalism, however, not all cultures are seen as equal – some are believed to be dominant/civilized while others are seen as marginal/savage.7

Using a cultural rhetorics approach, I contrast Black Hawk’s technique of constellating his people’s belonging to the land, through a shared body of Sauk knowledge, story, and embodied experience, with Fuller’s practice of collating personal and print-source knowledge about the Midwest and Native peoples, as she develops a rhetoric of emotional and intellectual connection to the Great Lakes region. Constellating allows for a flexibility of viewpoints and an emphasis on relationality, while collating allows the editor/assembler to evaluate and arrange evidence in a particular hierarchical order. I further argue that the distinctive temporalities embedded in these competing cultural rhetorics of claiming place stack epic national Sauk cosmologies against borrowed classical mythologies and the temporal logic of translatio studii et imperii (the transfer of knowledge and political power from one civilization to another). While epic is a national form typically arising from a specific locale/people, translatio studii et imperii traces lineages of knowledge and power that migrate to new geographic locations, providing a basis for claims of authority that are non-local, but nevertheless steeped in tradition. Notably, both Black Hawk and Fuller offer logics of belonging that originate outside the official state. Recognizing Black Hawk and Fuller’s texts as culturally specific and rhetorically persuasive arguments for claiming and belonging on

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a specific tract of land begs a larger set of questions. What are the different goals of describing the land for dispossessed nineteenthcentury Indigenous peoples and U.S. tourists/authors such as Fuller? What is gained by seeing both Black Hawk and Fuller as documenters of embodied experience in Illinois as well as strategic performers of their people’s belonging on that land? I argue that the culturally specific forms of rhetoric these narratives deploy suggest both the flexibility and limits of each author’s logic of belonging.

Black Hawk’s Sauk Rhetoric of Belonging Speaking in the Sauk language, Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, literally Black Hawk Sparrow, dictated his Life while a prisoner of war. As part of his sentence, Black Hawk was forced to tour several east coast cities as part of a plan to demonstrate the strength and size of the U.S. and the futility of Native resistance to settler colonialism. Black Hawk’s frustration with inadequate translators and his limited ability to communicate throughout the trip offer a partial motivation for the publication of his story upon his return to Jefferson Barracks. In his opening statement of authenticity, LeClaire quotes Black Hawk’s expressed motivation: so that “the people of the United States . . . might know the causes that had impelled him to act as he had done, and the principles by which he was governed.”8 Although there is plenty of reason to be suspicious of the non-Sauk print collaborators who translated and edited Black Hawk’s spoken words, there is also every reason to believe that Black Hawk genuinely wanted his words to survive in print. Indeed, Black Hawk understood the risk of mistranslation and misrepresentation (he had experienced this in his forced travels), and still he chose deliberately and creatively to embrace foreign print technologies in an effort to more broadly communicate his experiences to others. Indeed, he expresses agency in sharing his version of events, a version that condemns U.S. settlers, their government, and Western values alike. I have argued elsewhere that readers of Black Hawk’s text should approach this book not as autobiography, the life story of a singularly brave warrior, but rather as a Native archive (or storehouse, if you will) of early nineteenth-century Sauk testimony about settler colonial violence.9 I extend that argument here by claiming that Black Hawk’s text preserves his culturally and historically specific performance of Sauk rhetorical belonging in action. As Diana Taylor observes, embodied live performance, what she calls “repertoire,”

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preserves and conveys historical and cultural knowledges across generations of people.10 Native oral tradition, an example of repertoire, is a particularly effective mode of transmitting Indigenous and colonized peoples’ knowledge and group identities, which would not normally be preserved in the historical archive. Black Hawk’s Life in the instance of its telling is an act of repertoire, but as it is transformed into an enduring print object (with the assistance of LeClaire and Patterson) it becomes an example of what Taylor terms “the archive,” a recording no longer immediate or embodied. As readers we can never restore the initial instance of repertoire, though print technology allows us a limited, and admittedly mediated, access to that performance. Although we will never be able to recover the “real” Black Hawk or his initial performance (no transcripts exist prior to the text’s printing), Black Hawk’s Sauk rhetoric of belonging, his particular persuasive logic for claiming kinship to his prairie home, continues to be present in the text. Recognizing Sauk rhetoric demands that readers be sensitive to the shifting genres of storytelling Black Hawk deploys as well as his particular method of juxtaposing stories to create a layered understanding of Sauk and Meskwaki relationality to the land.11 Black Hawk artfully engages the rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition, describing Sauk and Meskwaki uses of land both before and after white encroachment. For instance, in describing his community before white settlers arrived, Black Hawk observes, We always had plenty – our children never cried with hunger, nor our people were never in want. Here our village had stood for more than a hundred years, during all which time we were the undisputed possessors of the valley of the Mississippi.12

In this section Black Hawk describes the seasonal variations of activities that sustained Sauk and Meskwaki life: agricultural activities, hunting, mining, fishing, as well as the seasonal housing patterns that accompanied these activities. Annual ceremonies for burying the dead, courting, recognizing warriors, and cultivating crops regularly mark the passage of time and work to renew social ties in the community. Black Hawk notes that it is difficult to describe the richness of spiritual and ceremonial life “so that white people would comprehend me.”13 In just one example of the way that Black Hawk uses Sauk oral tradition to legitimate his nation’s claim to the land – what I am calling a Sauk logic of belonging – he describes the significance of

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gathering corn crops. While non-Sauk readers might appreciate the agricultural importance of corn, Black Hawk goes deeper to describe the spiritual value and religious ceremony attached to its harvest. But even before he can explain the harvest ceremony and the specific rituals attending it, Black Hawk must back up and relate the origin story of corn, a story clearly handed down from generation to generation since time immemorial: According to tradition, handed down to our people, a beautiful woman was seen to descend from the clouds, and alight upon the earth, by two of our ancestors, who had killed a deer, and were sitting by a fire, roasting a part of it to eat. They were astonished at seeing her, and concluded that she must be hungry, and had smelt the meat – and immediately went to her, taking with them a piece of the roasted venison. They presented it to her, and she eat – and told them to return to the spot where she was sitting, at the end of one year, and they would find a reward for their kindness and generosity. She then ascended to the clouds, and disappeared. The two men returned to their village, and explained to the nation what they had seen, done, and heard – but were laughed at by their people. When the period arrived, for them to visit this consecrated ground, where they were to find a reward for their attention to the beautiful woman of the clouds, they went with a large party, and found, where her right hand had rested on the ground, corn growing – and where the left hand had rested, beans – and immediately where she had been seated, tobacco.14

This layered explanation illustrates that farm lands are not just fields for growing crops, they are spaces occupied by myth and story, with rules of decorum and ritual/ceremony, that is, with embodied tradition rooted across generations to that specific place. Black Hawk cannot describe a Sauk and Meskwaki connection to the land without detailing farming practices; but farming is more than sowing seeds in the earth, more than the food that sustains life. It is also ceremony, story passed down through generations, and ritual relationship to place. It is a fundamental aspect of Sauk and Meskwaki identity. In attending to Black Hawk’s telling of the origins of corn, I am not expressly concerned with the anthropological detailing of Sauk beliefs and practices, but rather with Black Hawk’s rhetorical move to constellate these ideas – a phrase I borrow from Powell et al. to describe “meaning-making practices and their relationships”15 – for his non-Sauk readers, a rhetorical practice most evident in what I have called that moment of backing up when he pauses in his relation of seasonal activities before the arrival of whites to detail a single

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example of Sauk belonging in greater depth. Black Hawk understands that his white audience has no context, no shared story tradition from which to start. He must create this context, relate these ideas, to outsiders who do not share Sauk knowledge and practices relating to the use of corn. In constellating his community’s practices of belonging vis-à-vis corn, Black Hawk makes explicit the role of shared story traditions, a form of intergenerational cultural knowledge, in establishing relationships between the lived, embodied practices of Sauk culture (corn planting, harvesting, and eating, as well as the dances and songs that accompany these rituals) and the philosophical/spiritual beliefs and values underpinning those practices. Black Hawk cannot easily separate the strands that braid together his community’s valuing of corn, which is only one aspect of a larger, life-sustaining relationship to Sauk and Meskwaki land. In Black Hawk’s text this intricate narrative episode epitomizes how Sauk culture works; and, at the same time, it is a culturally specific rhetorical performance that attempts to bring Black Hawk’s non-Sauk audience into the relational constellation of Sauk ways of being. If Black Hawk’s readers could recognize the cultural depth conveyed in his act of “backing up” they might also recognize Sauk knowledge, Sauk practices, Sauk beliefs, as a system or world view just as rich, vibrant, and, most importantly, as valid as their own. In this instance, the story of the origins of corn is not simply an entertaining fictional folk tale, but a node in the constellation of relationships that binds together an interconnected community of believers who continue to give thanks for that first gift of corn through annual harvest ceremonies and repetitions of this very story. Black Hawk’s sharing of the corn origin story rhetorically establishes Sauk people’s attachment to the lands that they have ceremonially cleared, worked, and harvested for generations. Corn is not simply a dietary mainstay, necessary for the preservation and continuation of life. With a knowledge of the origins of corn, readers can also appreciate how, within Sauk culture, corn is constellated with the people’s annual spiritual renewal to the spirit of the corn, a rekindling of their original kindness to her. Finally, among Sauk and Meskwaki peoples agricultural labor was primarily performed by women and was cited as a primary reason that many women sided with Black Hawk in returning to their already established fields.16 The corn story illustrates how Sauk rhetorics of belonging are performed in everyday activities such as agriculture as well as in annual repetitions of accompanying ceremony and story tradition. The constellating logic of Black Hawk’s explanation of Sauk relationality to

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the land, so different from the possessive individualism undergirding settler land practices, no doubt puzzles many non-Native readers. Black Hawk’s retelling of the origins of corn situates Sauk relations to the land within the temporal frame of the epic. In calling Black Hawk’s rhetorical temporality epic, I emphasize the national historical element of Sauk cosmology as it relays a significant cultural myth or sacred story expressive of the nation’s history and values across generations. Extending Cheryl Walker’s astute reading of the Life as an expression of a Sauk nationalism that probably did not exist prior to this conflict, I locate Black Hawk’s telling of the origin of corn story within his consciously constructed nationalist frame.17 Certainly the corn story existed prior to Black Hawk’s telling of it, but within the constellated story structure of the Life it takes on a new epic temporality, framed as it is as both cosmology and national cultural land myth. In contrast to familiar founding myths in the Western tradition, Black Hawk’s invocation of the origins of corn establishes the Sauk people’s relationship to their land as one of reciprocity. The people occupy their land before encountering the original spirit of the corn, but she rewards them for their kindness and hospitality with a new and deeper relation to the land in the form of agriculture and all the labor, ceremony, and food production this entails. Black Hawk’s epic rhetorical temporality argues for Sauk belonging by nationalizing a Sauk variation on a widespread Indigenous story of the origins of corn. And, in doing so, he institutes a notably non-Western expression of relationality to the land – not lineage, not state authority, but hospitality and gratitude. Black Hawk is clearly fluent in and adept at summoning the cultural rhetoric of his community to explain and justify Sauk and Meskwaki people’s persistent commitment to their lands. Without his complex picture of Sauk life before white encroachment, readers could not begin to appreciate or empathize with the depth of attachment Sauk and Meskwaki people feel for their lands, or their particular pain after dispossession.

Margaret Fuller’s Shifting Rhetorics of Belonging In the summer of 1843, Margaret Fuller traveled with two friends, Sarah Shaw and James Freeman Clarke, from Niagara Falls through the Great Lakes to Chicago, the Illinois prairies, and Wisconsin Territory. Although she could little afford it, Fuller took time off from her work with Ralph Waldo Emerson at The Dial, financed

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with funds she received from friends.18 Writing about Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 Jeffrey Steele cautions that readers should not take Fuller’s travel writing as straightforwardly representative of her own views.19 Rather Fuller explores shifting and contradictory social roles and literary personae such as a pioneer woman in Illinois, a genteel lady tourist, and a book reviewer, among others, in order to critique and destabilize contemporary U.S. political and aesthetic ways of knowing. Steele notes that in this disharmony of narrative perspectives, Fuller purposefully breaks down the typical picturesque distance required between genteel observers and the exotic people and places they record. In doing so, Steele argues that Fuller recognizes the social conditions and cultural values that limited marginalized peoples’ possibilities for self-actualization.20 In this section, I attend to two key aspects of Fuller’s shifting rhetorical constructions of indigeneity and settler life: first, Fuller’s importing of classical myth into the evacuated space of Sauk land; second, her gathering together of a number of current commentaries on Native life by notable nineteenth-century authors, such as Jane Schoolcraft, George Catlin, and others. In contrast to Black Hawk’s holistic attempts to constellate Sauk national stories and collective testimony with a larger set of Sauk beliefs, values, and practices, this section explores how Fuller processes her experiences on Indigenous land and among Native people, specifically employing the rhetorical technique of collation and the rhetorical temporality of translatio studii et imperii. Although constellating and collating similarly assemble and connect discrete materials into a coherent assemblage, the act of collation implies a fixed or proper order in the arrangement of documents whereas Powell et al. describe the value of constellation in terms of its subjectivity and flexibility. Constellation “allows for different ways of seeing any single configuration within that constellation, based on positionality and culture,”21 whereas collation binds sources together in a fixed relationship of meaning. While such fixity would seem to contradict both the text’s reflective, meandering digressions and Steele’s celebration of the text’s productive disharmony, I maintain this collative fixity best describes the larger cultural rhetoric within which Fuller works. Where Black Hawk’s constellating logic invites multiple perspectives and draws non-Native readers into Sauk relational logics, Fuller’s collating technique places her in a colonizing position of knowledge/authority vis-à-vis Native American peoples. The rhetorical strategy of collating textual evidence on a given subject will be familiar to anyone trained in writing an argumentative

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essay. The kinds of sources one summons and how one assembles them are the essential arts of a well-crafted persuasive argument. Assuming the persona of editor would have been an easy choice for Fuller, who had firsthand experience as an editor at The Dial. However, as a nineteenth-century white woman, this professional literary persona would be a surprisingly confrontational rhetorical ethos to assume. Combine this with the fact that Fuller was also the first woman known to have been granted research access to Harvard library as she wrote Summer, and the persona becomes a challenge to male literary professionalism and, potentially, to the usual hierarchy of colonizing knowledge available about Native peoples and their lands.22 Fuller’s assumption of academic neutrality as a collator of what she (or her readers) deemed credible sources is a direct challenge to the privilege of white men as archons, as Derrida terms them, the gatekeepers of the institutions guarding archival knowledge.23 By commanding access to typically restricted sources and assuming editorial responsibility for shaping and interpreting these sources, Fuller’s assumption of a neutral editorial posture enacts a rhetorical ethos of gender defiance. However, Fuller’s feminist editor persona problematically accrues this defiant authority by claiming expert knowledge (both researched and firsthand) about other marginalized peoples. Retaining the rights to knowledge/power over others for herself, Fuller’s defiant persona reproduces those same colonizing practices of knowledge/power, reenacting the larger cultural rhetorics that she genuinely seeks to disrupt. As Susan Roberson notes, “[Fuller’s] Indian sections are some of the most perplexed parts of the narrative, for at the same time that she articulates a feminist politics of resistance to hegemonic practices and discourses, she participates to some degree in them.”24 Like Roberson, feminist scholars can and should applaud Fuller’s accomplishments even as we recognize her complicity in reproducing colonialities of knowledge.25 In chapter six of Summer on the Lakes, Fuller’s editor persona places numerous extracts from Schoolcraft, Catlin, Carver, and Mackenzie, among others, alongside firsthand observations of Ojibwa and Ottawa peoples collecting their annual treaty payments at Mackinaw Island, Michigan. In doing so, the editor processes an assemblage of relevant research or print culture knowledge about Native peoples alongside her own encounters. This summoning of textual authority is certainly indicative of a Western cultural rhetoric and suggests that embodied experiences and personal history (testimony) are not sufficient grounds for making a persuasive argument about the nature of “Indians”; print sources (and preferably a

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great number and variety of them) take priority in the argumentative process; and Native sources (despite their embodied experience and personal history) are not likely to be considered more credible than white experts. Contrasting this rhetorical logic with Black Hawk’s storytelling testimonial serves to show how undervalued his culture’s rhetorical strategies are in the nineteenth-century U.S. context. While Steele argues that Fuller’s shifting narrative personae create a generative disharmony that breaks up claims for stable subjectivity in other travel writing and patriarchal discourse, the editor persona’s citational strategy of collating credible sources expressly undermines Native knowledge and Native sources of knowledge. For instance, although she cites Anishinabek (Ojibwe) writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft on the relatively high social status of Anishinabek women in their communities, Fuller dismisses Schoolcraft as one-sided, favoring the reports of Scottish travel writer Anne Grant “because, though her opportunities for observation did not bring her so close she looked more at both sides to find the truth.”26 The Native voices and stories – such as Schoolcraft’s or a traditional story of “Mackwa,” a man who marries a she-bear – are presented only to be dismissed as implicitly biased or simply raw materials for non-Native authors to transform. In this regard, the editor persona’s collation strategy summons Native voices alongside those of nonNatives in the evaluative fashion of a book reviewer. She informs her readers which sources are worthwhile and why, maintaining her own claims to knowledge in this evaluative task. For Fuller’s editor persona, Native peoples are the objects of inquiry rather than the makers of thought. Such attitudes prevail even when Native authors such as Schoolcraft are cited.27 The editor persona’s colonizing mentality is exposed as she offers up these assemblages of extracts as a kind of Native history: “the stories I have cited above . . . [including] European sketches . . . distant and imperfect though they be, yet convey the truth if made in a sympathizing spirit. . . . [They] give the ages a glimpse at what was great in Indian life and character.”28 For Fuller’s editor persona this greatness is always in the past. There could never be a Native-authored history because Native authors are “one-sided,” lacking the supposed neutrality she and others working in the archive bring to the topic. Although the editor persona admires Cherokee Chief John Ross, she dismisses his efforts toward Cherokee sovereignty and survivance (a term coined by Anishinabek theorist Gerald Vizenor that combines “survival” and “resistance”) both before and after Cherokee Removal as a “scanty promise of the future.”29 With this gesture,

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Fuller’s editor persona recognizes that her collative strategy is a kind of historical and cultural research that might be better performed by Native peoples themselves, but she cannot imagine Native academics or Native literary professionals as a possibility. The editor’s collation of extracts provides a useful archive of Euro-American thought on indigeneity, but for Native peoples a “neutral” collative rhetorical strategy fails to provide the kinds of canny, productively disruptive opportunities for self-presentation that Fuller, as author, generates via her other fictional female personae. If Black Hawk’s constellation of Sauk culture invokes an epic national temporality, Fuller’s rhetorical technique of collating textual extracts draws on a genealogical, temporal logic rooted in translatio studii et imperii. Used by early Norman kings to establish their inherited legitimacy from the Holy Roman Empire, this rhetoric, as Fuller deploys it, denies Indigenous rights to land, self-governance, and local expressions of belonging, displacing local authorities and paving over culturally significant sites of indigenous ceremony, story, and knowledge with a borrowed lineage of classical authority and cultural knowledge. It transforms Native peoples and their lands from contemporaneous, agential actors into curious relics of the past. The temporal logic of translatio studii et imperii helps to explain Summer’s problematic sympathy for Native people’s dispossession and the disavowal of Native futurity found most notably in references to Black Hawk. For instance, in Fuller’s original poem marking the meeting between Sauk and Meskwaki prisoners touring the east, including Black Hawk, and then Massachusetts Governor Everett, the speaker describes how the “unimproving” Native peoples must “resign their places; / And Human Culture rolls its onward flood / Over the broad plains steeped in Indian blood.”30 These few lines sum up the displacing logic of translatio imperii. Because their culture is deemed “unimproving” or uncivilized by the conquerors, Native peoples must “resign” their lands for those who advance “Human Culture.” As the land is “steeped in Indian blood” there is no pretense about the violent nature of this change in power. By the logic of translatio imperii this blood is necessary for an advance in knowledge (studii) symbolized as a flood, an unstoppable force of nature that clears the path for human good. Perhaps it goes without saying that Indians are excluded from the “Human Culture” that Fuller envisions occupying the bloodstained plains. Fittingly, the hero of this poem is not Black Hawk, but Governor Everett, who “play[s] the host, with all the dignity which red men boast – / With all the courtesy the whites have lost; – / Assume the

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very hue of savage mind, / Yet in rude accents show the thought refined.”31 Following this poem, Fuller inserts a transcript of Everett’s speech to his Sauk and Meskwaki prisoner-guests, a speech she claims is “the happiest attempt ever made to meet the Indian in his own way and catch the tone of his mind.” In it, Governor Everett welcomes the Sauk and Meskwaki with repeated invocations of brotherhood, aligning the name of his territory, Massachusetts, with the Native peoples who originally resided there. And in the act of remembering (one is tempted to say “honoring”) the original inhabitants of the place, he erases contemporary Massachusetts Native peoples as a continued political presence in their homelands. As the Governor, he (and the settlers) are now in charge. Native peoples are “here” only so long as settlers allow them a presence; and, in Everett’s speech, that is only in toponym.32 Positioning the now ensconced white settlers as grateful for the original “red men” who greeted them with corn, venison, and warm blankets, Everett seems to wish to repay this kindness; but, he does so by neglecting the historic displacement of Native peoples that followed this hospitality as well as the real differences in power between himself, official representative of the state, and his prisoner-of-warguests summoned east to experience the might of their enemies. Everett’s speech naturalizes white settlers’ occupation of Massachusetts, making Native speech, cultural modes of hospitality, and ways of knowing available for Everett to not only imitate (“assume the very hue of savage mind”), but also master. One hopes Everett’s stereotyped “Indian” English was lost in translation, that Black Hawk and his companions may have been spared Everett’s faux Indian speechifying. However, the gesture is not lost on Fuller, who responds to Everett’s “gracious” speech with poetry, adding yet another colonizing layer to Everett’s clichéd imitation of “red man’s” language. Everett’s appropriation of metaphorically rich Native speech patterns is rhetorically of a piece with Fuller’s “plains steeped in Indian blood” in that each effects a temporal displacement of contemporary Native peoples, their land rights, cultural practices, and ways of knowing, into the distant past, as if the massacre of Sauk and Meskwaki peoples at Bad Axe occurred on the same page of settler colonial history as Plymouth Rock. A stranger episode of translatio studii et imperii occurs when Fuller’s narrator composes verse on Eagle’s Nest Bluff, a location along Black Hawk’s trail. Overlaying the scenic landscape of the Illinois bluffs with classical allusions to Apollo, the Greeks, and Rome, Fuller translates her impressive knowledge of the classics onto Sauk

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land on the auspicious date of the fourth of July. Repeating the ofttold anecdote of American artist Benjamin West mistaking a statue of Apollo for a Native American warrior, Fuller’s speaker opines on the aptness of this comparison.33 Rambling along the bluffs, she describes the “noble happiness” Native inhabitants must have felt living in such a place. Such scenes suggest to Fuller’s speaker “a Greek splendor, a Greek sweetness.” Furthermore, she argues that “Rome and Florence are suburbs compared to this capital of nature’s art.”34 If America and, more specifically, the U.S. are the new and best repositories of great human culture, art, and civilization, as this comparison suggests, the Sauk and Meskwaki, like the aestheticminded Greeks before them, are shattered and replaced in inevitable cycles of empire razing and building. Their presence is now traceable in fragments of rock, the arrowheads and tomahawk marks left behind after their removal. Rhetorically linking ancient Greek and contemporary Native American cultures reduces distinct and complex processes of colonial violence to formulaic lamentations of lost “splendor” giving way to supposedly greater forms of civilization and progress, namely Rome and the United States. Such comparisons are especially problematic when one considers that in 1843 the Sauk and Meskwaki were pressured yet again to sign a treaty with the U.S. ceding all their lands west of the Mississippi for yet another paltry payment and yet another false promise of permanent reservation land.35 The narrator’s romantic emphasis on ghostly “traces” of the lands’ former Native inhabitants actively vanishes the very real Sauk and Meskwaki peoples just across the Mississippi. She treasures Native peoples who could appreciate natural beauty. Yet, resolving against aesthetic feeling, as if Native dispossession was ever really about aesthetics, our narrator cautions that the rapid transformation of the prairies is “progress” of a “Gothic” sort, “not Roman.” Like the Goths, whose Roman invasion brought on the so-called Dark Ages, which gave way to the rise of European global empires, the transformation of Native prairie land to settler farm land is rhetorically positioned as a natural stage in the U.S.’s rise to ascendancy. If U.S. settlers are more akin to the destructive, vandal-like Goths, destroying natural beauty for utilitarian gain, Fuller’s verses fill the landscape with Greek and Roman myth, a more aesthetically inclined model for colonization. Whether Gothic or Roman, Fuller’s translatio logic accepts the rise and fall of empires as “inevitable, fatal: we must not complain, but look forward to a good result.”36 In this section Fuller’s tourist persona gazes at the land and peoples she sees through what Mary Louise Pratt terms “imperial eyes,”

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a gaze with acquisitive colonizing powers, a gaze that erases Native presence in order to “discover” land and resources.37 At the top of Eagle’s Nest Bluff on Independence Day, Fuller’s genteel lady tourist persona commands the “prospect,” a word that conveys a place with an extensive view as well as the act of looking, a futurity still possible, not yet decided. The prospect Fuller’s persona elaborates produces in her a deeply patriotic sense of aesthetic ownership and belonging: “I had never felt so happy that I was born in America.”38 The beauty of the place leads to a creative outpouring of poetic form, rooting Fuller’s genteel tourist persona backward to classical antiquity through her individual aesthetic appreciation for this place and cyclically to the romanticized “Noble Indians” she imagines as equally invested in the aesthetics of this “capital of nature’s art.” In “Ganymede to his Eagle,” our poet turns her thoughts to the classical myth of Ganymede, the most beautiful mortal, kidnapped by Zeus in the form of an eagle and given immortality in return for his service as cup-bearer to the gods (and lover to Zeus). Fuller’s poetic tourist persona fills the “empty” space of Eagle’s Nest Bluff and surrounding Sauk and Meskwaki lands with Western knowledge and tradition, showcasing her own verse prowess and classical education while doing so. In this way, our tourist “settles” the land with her writing, enacting a form of translatio studii et imperii on the symbolic date of July 4. With her verse rhapsodies on the pathetic beauty and precarity of Ganymede’s impatience for the arrival of Zeus, our poet tourist performs through writing her own intellectual and discursive claims on Illinois space, as well as performing for readers her Romantic sensibility, taste, and literary genius.39 Today, at Lowden State Park near Oregon, Illinois, one can find Ganymede Spring and Margaret Fuller Island, toponyms celebrating Fuller’s creative efforts at translatio that continue to offer visitors a settler rhetoric of belonging on Sauk land.40 Fuller’s narrator is rightly troubled by the uneven relations between Native peoples’ dispossession, Americans’ patriotic celebration of the extensions of U.S. territory, the hardships women settlers faced in these lands, and the emancipatory mobility she finds as a tourist. Fuller’s narrator creates a sense of kinship with the Sauk and Meskwaki, a feeling of belonging, through her shared aesthetic appreciation for this land. However, she does not fully acknowledge how this extraordinary freedom to stroll the scenic prairies comes from a recent and violent dispossession that bars living Sauk and Meskwaki peoples from connecting with their land. As a tourist, her fitness in that place is bound not by treaties or land deeds, but by the

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desire to see, to know, to emotionally and spiritually connect to a still “wild” prairie before it is settled. Her mobility gives her access to new depths of feeling, new springs of thought, a source of experiences and challenges that stimulate personal growth. Ultimately, the mobility that inspires Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes is intimately bound up with Native dispossession. Though she cannot escape that reality, she is aware of it. And to be fair, most contemporary U.S. citizens have yet to wrestle with the legacies of Native dispossession with even such limited awareness. Attending to the cultural rhetorics used by different groups in the U.S. to describe a sense of belonging is a small step forward in that process.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, p. 31. Black Hawk, Life, p. 19. Black Hawk, Life, p. 19. Recent military history on the subject includes: Hall, Uncommon Defense; Trask, Black Hawk; and Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path. Also of interest: Lincoln and Black Hawk, a film, directed by Jeffrey Chown. On Black Hawk’s voice see: Mielke, “Native to the Question”; Bellin, “How Smooth Their Language”; Schmitz, White Robe’s Dilemma; Scheckel, The Insistence of the Indian; Sweet, “Masculinity and SelfPerformance”; Wallace, “Black Hawk’s ‘An Autobiography’”; Ziff, Writing in the New Nation; Murray, Forked Tongues; Krupat, The Voice in the Margin; and Jackson, “Introduction.” On the composite nature of the text’s production, see Krupat, For Those Who Come After, and Brumble, American Indian Autobiography. Especially helpful to my thinking here: Rifkin, “Documenting Tradition,” and Boelhowler, “Saving Saukenauk.” Powell et al., “Our Story Begins,” Act I, scene 1. Powell et al., “Our Story Begins,” Act I, scene 1. Black Hawk, Life, p. 3. Adams-Campbell, “Life of Black Hawk.” Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, p. 19; also see Ortiz, “Towards a National Indian Literature.” A considerable body of scholarship considers Native peoples’ relationships to and with land. I have gained valuable insight from the following literary approaches: Fitzgerald, Native Women and Land; Teuton, Red Land, Red Power; Wilson, Writing Home; and Sarkowsky, AlterNative Spaces. Black Hawk, Life, p. 46.

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At Home on the Prairie? 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

117

Black Hawk, Life, p. 36. Black Hawk, Life, p. 50. Powell et al., “Our Story Begins,” Act I, scene 2. Black Hawk, Life, p. 62. For additional commentary, see: Adams-Campbell, “Life of Black Hawk,” and Kugel and Murphy, “Introduction.” Walker, Indian Nation. Smith, “Introduction,” pp. vii–ix. Steele, Transfiguring America, p. 135. Also see Bilbro, “Learning to Woo Meaning from Apparent Chaos”; Roberson, Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road; Cooper, “Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes”; Gilmore, “Margaret Fuller Receiving the Indians”; Zwarg, “Footnoting the Sublime”; Stowe, “Conventions and Voices in Margaret Fuller’s Travel Writing”; and Rosowski, “Margaret Fuller, an Engendered West, and Summer on the Lakes.” Steele, Transfiguring America, pp. 135–6. Powell et al., “Our Story Begins,” Act I, scene 2. Smith, “Introduction,” p. xi. See also Tonkovich, “Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library.” Derrida, Archive Fever. See also Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance”; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; Featherstone, “Archive”; Steedman, Dust; Arondekar, For the Record; and Blouin and Rosenberg, Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory. Roberson, American Women, p. 57. Quiajano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” See also: Mignolo, “Delinking.” Fuller, Summer, p. 110. On Schoolcraft, see Schoolcraft, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky. On the desire for “authentic” Native voices alongside distrust of Native traditions, see Mielke, “Native to the Question.” Fuller, Summer, p. 142. Fuller, Summer, p. 142. Fuller, Summer, p. 117. Fuller, Summer, p. 118. Basso Wisdom Sits in Places. Fuller, Summer, p. 33. Fuller, Summer, p. 33. For a history of the subsequent relocations of the Sauk and Meskwaki, see Reinschmidt, Ethnohistory of the Sauk, and Hagan, Sac and Fox Indians. Fuller, Summer, p. 29. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Fuller, Summer, p. 33. On Fuller’s Romantic aesthetics see Adams, “That Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman.”

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40. https://cityoforegon.org/ganymede-spring-and-margaret-fuller-1843. In 1898 Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft founded an artists’ colony there and created his famous “Eternal Indian” statue, more commonly identified as Black Hawk: https://stateparks.com/lowden.html. While an amazing feat of concrete construction, Taft’s “Eternal Indian” mythologizes a generic “noble” Indian identity safely ensconced in the past, rather than confronting Illinois’s history of Native land dispossession. On the historical/rhetorical significance of settler colonial celebrations of “first” settlers and “last” Indians, see O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting.

Bibliography Adams, Stephen, “‘That Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman’: Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and Romantic Aesthetics,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1987, pp. 247–64. Adams-Campbell, Melissa, “Life of Black Hawk: A Sauk and Mesquakie Archive,” Settler Colonial Studies, 5(2), 2015, pp. 145–57. Arondekar, Anjali, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Basso, Keith, Wisdom Sits in Places: Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Bellin, Joshua David, “‘How Smooth Their Language’: Authenticity and Interculturalism in the Life of Black Hawk,” Prospects, 2000, pp. 485–511. Bilbro, Jeffrey, “Learning to Woo Meaning from Apparent Chaos: The Wild Form of Summer on the Lakes,” in Steven Peterscheim and Madison Jones IV (eds), Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015), pp. 57–76. Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (New York: Penguin, 2008). Blouin, Jr., Francis Xavier and William G. Rosenberg (eds), Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). Boelhowler, William, “Saving Saukenauk: How Black Hawk Won the War and Opened the Way to Ethnic Semiotics,” Journal of American Studies, 25(3), 1991, pp. 333–61. Brumble, H. David, American Indian Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Chown, Jeffrey (dir.), Lincoln and Black Hawk, film (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 2005). Cooper, Michaela Bruckner, “Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” in Fritz Fleishman (ed.), Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 171–89.

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Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Featherstone, Mike, “Archive,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 23(2–3), 2006, pp. 591–6. Fitzgerald, Stephanie J., Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015). Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Fuller, Margaret, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). Gilmore, Susan, “Margaret Fuller Receiving the Indians,” in Fritz Fleishman (ed.), Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), pp. 191–227. Hagan, William T., Sac and Fox Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958). Hall, John W., Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Jackson, Donald, “Introduction,” in Black Hawk, Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955), pp. 1–31. Jung, Patrick J., The Black Hawk War of 1832 (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2007). Kennedy, J. Gerald, “Introduction,” in Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak (New York. Penguin, 2008), pp. vii–xxviii. Krupat, Arnold, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Krupat, Arnold, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California, 1989). Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, “Introduction: Searching for Cornfields and Sugar Groves,” in Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy (eds), Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. xiii–xxxvi. Mielke, Laura, “Native to the Question: William Apess, Black Hawk, and the Sentimental Context of Early American Autobiography,” American Indian Quarterly, 26(2), 2002, pp. 246–70. Mignolo, Walter, “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of De-coloniality,” Cultural Studies, 21(2), 2007, pp. 449–514. Murray, David, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in Native American Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Nichols, Roger L., Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992).

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O’Brien, Jean, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Ortiz, Simon J., “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” MELUS, 8(2), 1981, pp. 7–12. Powell, Malea, Daisy Levy, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Maria Novotny, Jennifer Fisch-Ferguson, and The Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab, “Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics,” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, http://www. enculturation.net/our-story-begins-here#_ednref, 2014. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). Quiajano, Anibal, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepentla: Views from the South, 1(3), 2000, pp. 533–80. Reinschmidt, Michael, Ethnohistory of the Sauk, 1885–1985: Continuity and Change (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 1993). Rifkin, Mark, “Documenting Tradition: Territoriality and Textuality in Black Hawk’s Narrative,” American Literature, 80(4), 2008, pp. 677–705. Roberson, Susan, Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2012). Rosowski, Susan J., “Margaret Fuller, an Engendered West, and Summer on the Lakes,” Western American Literature, 25(2), 1990, pp. 125–44. Sarkowsky, Katja, AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations’ Literatures (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter, 2007). Scheckel, Susan, The Insistence of the Indian: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Schmitz, Neil, White Robe’s Dilemma: Tribal History in American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). Schoolcraft, Jane Johnston, The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, ed. Robert Dale Parker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Smith, Susan Belasco, “Introduction,” in Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. vii–xxii. Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). Steele, Jeffrey, Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). Stoler, Ann Laura, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science, 2, 2002, pp. 87–109. Stowe, William, “Conventions and Voices in Margaret Fuller’s Travel Writing,” American Literature, 63(2), 1991, pp. 242–62. Sweet, Timothy, “Masculinity and Self-Performance in The Life of Black Hawk,” in Michael Moon and Cathy Davidson (eds), Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 219–43.

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Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2003). Teuton, Sean Kicummah, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Tonkovich, Nicole, “Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” Legacy, 10(2), 1993, pp. 79–102. Trask, Kerry A., Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006). Walker, Cheryl, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and NineteenthCentury Nationalisms (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1997). Wallace, Mark, “Black Hawk’s ‘An Autobiography’: The Production and Use of an Indian Voice,” American Indian Quarterly, 18(4), 1994, pp. 481–94. Wilson, Michael D., Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008). Ziff, Larzer, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Zwarg, Christina, “Footnoting the Sublime: Margaret Fuller on Black Hawk’s Trail,” American Literary History, 5(4), 1993, pp. 616–42.

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Part II

Migrants as Cultural Mediators: Epistemes and Aesthetics of Mobility

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Chapter 5

“An Alien to my Country”: Migration and Statelessness in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer Patricia Cove

Frances Burney’s final novel, The Wanderer (1814), opens with the eponymous wanderer, the disguised English aristocrat Juliet Granville, who becomes known by the assumed name Ellis, attempting to cross the English Channel to escape the French Revolution. This geographical position points to her marginalization throughout the novel: During the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre, and in the dead of night, braving the cold, the darkness and the damps of December, some English passengers, in a small vessel, were preparing to glide silently from the coast of France, when a voice of keen distress resounded from the shore, imploring, in the French language, pity and admission.1

Ellis first appears as a genderless, classless, and bodiless voice, recognizable only – though incorrectly – in national terms, as French. Ellis is, indeed, an emigrant fleeing revolutionary France; however, she also becomes an internal refugee in her native Britain over the course of Burney’s novel. Unaccepted by the lands of her birth and upbringing, Britain and France, Ellis is stateless, trapped between unreformed and revolutionary regimes. The liminal place Ellis occupies in the novel’s opening, however, also suggests her ability to cross borders and test out “imagined . . . communit[ies],”2 to explore their affective draws and their failings; her geographical movement and downward socio-economic mobility expose her to different ways of life, expanding her social sympathies and allowing her to critique Britain from an outsider’s perspective.

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Ellis’s movement in the novel resembles what James Buzard describes as autoethnographic fiction’s dislocation of British culture and identity from Britain to some position outside from which that culture might be repatriated, restored or “returned” to people who have never yet known it, being as they are mere insiders, the occupants and prisoners of locations.3

Both an English aristocrat restored to her homeland, family, and rank over the course of the narrative and an émigré without an identifiable name, class, or even ethnicity for much of the text, Ellis occupies a unique inside-outside position with respect to Britain’s political and socio-economic systems that permits her to cultivate simultaneous sympathy for and critical distance from her homeland. However, unlike other Romantic-era wanderers, for whom deliberate pedestrianism is a conscious choice that articulates a coherent political program, Ellis’s wandering results from her victimization and contributes to further disempowerment and marginalization. Responding to revolutionary and old-regime violence, Ellis attempts to remake her identity by inhabiting a range of socio-economic positions and geographical spaces representing her relationship to the broader British community. By figuring Ellis’s position as a social and national outcast geographically, Burney revives a trend in 1790s literature that politically remaps Britain in the revolutionary context. This appears in works on French emigrants that redefine Britain’s coastal regions by Edmund Burke, Charlotte Smith, and Burney herself, as well as in political writings on Salisbury Plain by Hannah More, William Wordsworth, and John Thelwall. Unlike Thelwall and More, for whom Salisbury Plain and the surrounding area provide an opportunity for expressing a political agenda, Burney uses the overdetermined spaces of Salisbury, the New Forest, and Wilton to bring Ellis into confrontation with the stresses that burden her subjectivity; stripped of her public, social identity, Ellis must rebuild her sense of self at Stonehenge before she can begin to resituate herself politically. A complement to her downward socio-economic mobility, Ellis’s geographical movement also challenges British nationalism and demonstrates her efforts to negotiate her commitment to numerous, disparate communities. Ellis is affectively bound, but does not fully belong, to the elite France of her upbringing, the aristocratic England from which she is prohibited, the community of French émigrés, and the English homeless, whom she joins when she is

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internally displaced in her birth country. Her geographical movement through a Britain that has been politically remapped by the literary debates of the 1790s highlights the conflict between her allegiances to multiple social groups and her interior self, as her constant motion severs the connections by which she is bound to these communities and leaves her stripped of any sense of national belonging. Burney thus uses the familiar plight of the French émigré to critique British insular nationalism and Britain’s treatment of the internally displaced homeless within its own borders during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Burney, like her heroine, had mixed allegiances to her homeland, England, and to the country where she resided for many years, France. As a child, Burney was drawn to the French side of her ancestry through her close relationship with her French Catholic maternal grandmother, Mme DuBois.4 Meeting a community of émigré French constitutionalists, which included Germaine de Staël and Burney’s future husband, Alexandre d’Arblay, helped extend Burney’s sympathy toward those French liberals who had supported the Revolution early on, but were later banished from France.5 In part because of her years of living in France during the Napoleonic Wars, Burney also occupied a unique inside-outside position relative to British Romantic culture. Though an established eighteenth-century writer, whose new work, The Wanderer, was hotly anticipated before it appeared, Burney fell victim to the realigned, Romantic-era review culture that reflected and shored up what Angela Keane describes as the “masculinist myth of the Romantic nation-state,”6 from which Burney, a woman writer just returned to England after a decade in France, was excluded. Nevertheless, Burney’s political exile from England during the Napoleonic period heightened her emotional commitment to her country. In her Journals and Letters she recounts her 1812 return to British soil: I no sooner touched, than . . . I took up, on one knee, with irrepressible transport, the nearest bright pebble, to press to my lips, in grateful joy at touching again the land of my Nativity, after an absence nearly hopeless of more than 10 Years.7

Ellis responds similarly when she lands at Dover following the lifetime of exile imposed by her family: she “darted forward with such eagerness, that she was the first to touch the land, where, with a fervour that seemed resistless, she rapturously ejaculated, ‘Heaven, Heaven be praised!’”8 Ellis’s double allegiance to Britain

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and France, however, exposes her to the assumption that she is a national enemy in Britain, as the xenophobic Britons she encounters at Brighthelmstone respond to French affairs with ignorance and insular patriotism. In fact, what Burney’s British characters see as their own political stability, as opposed to the chaos of revolutionary France, is nothing more than political stasis, reflecting the paranoid 1814 community that composed The Wanderer’s reading public. By 1814–15, historian Linda Colley claims, mass arming in Great Britain during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France had provided irrefutable proof that patriotism – in the sense of an identification with British independence against those foreign forces that threatened it – transcended the divisions between the social classes.9

Though 100,000 émigrés entered Britain from France in the 1790s,10 British immigration policy during the war years was unwelcoming to refugees: the 1793 Aliens Act allowed Prime Minister William Pitt’s government to track and limit the freedoms of the French refugees who migrated across the Channel. By contrast, during the more liberal Victorian period that followed, Britain had a complete open border policy on immigration.11 This pervasive patriotic militarism and insularism appear in the reactionary community Ellis meets in the 1790s, characterized by privilege and the misuse of power and wealth. Such a stifling atmosphere, Margaret Anne Doody suggests, is just as destructive to human life as the mechanisms of the Terror in France: England’s panicky desire for self-reassurance and its faking of stability has brought about a desiccated half-sullen dullness, barely masking the abusive power that must sustain the fantasy of English security and righteousness. The Wanderer is mapped around the figure of the guillotine, emblem of the political world’s capacity literally to kill.12

The guillotine, in this formulation, stands in for the abuse of political power in Britain as well as the Terror’s state-sanctioned killing. While British stakeholders do not use the guillotine, they are entirely capable of committing violence against Ellis, threatening her with rape, abduction, imprisonment, and deportation to France, where the guillotine and a violent husband in a forced marriage await her.13 British prejudice and power thus translate into real, physical violence for Ellis.

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It is significant, therefore, that nobody but Ellis, herself an exile, expresses any sympathy for the lonely and penniless French émigré Gabriella. Burney’s 1793 pamphlet Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy shows the importance she attributes to Britain’s charitable acceptance of political exiles. The connection between the “desperate wanderers”14 of her pamphlet and the émigrés in her later novel is clear from The Wanderer’s title. Burney’s pamphlet catalogues the emigrant clergy’s sufferings, exclaiming that they are “Driven from house and home, despoiled of dignities and honours, abandoned to the seas for mercy, to chance for support, many old, some infirm, all impoverished? [sic] with mental strength alone allowed them for coping with such an aggregate of evil!”15 Burney also urges the emigrants’ claims on English charity as “duties” of the “community,”16 arguing that the emigrant clergy should be considered as part of a community of human virtue to which the British also belong: We are too apt to consider ourselves rather as a different race of beings, than as merely the emulous inhabitants of rival states; but ere our detestation leads to the indiscriminate proscription of a whole people, let us look at the Emigrant French Clergy, and ask where is the Englishman, where, indeed, the human being, in whom a sense of right can more disinterestedly have been demonstrated, or more nobly predominate? O let us be brethren with the good, wheresoever they may arise!17

The community Burney envisions embraces political exiles as “brethren” rather than seeing them as national aliens of a “different race of beings,” and provides émigrés with surrogate homes to replace those from which they were “[d]riven” and the community which “abandoned” them.18 Ellis similarly attempts to arouse compassion for Gabriella by recounting her sufferings and describing her as an outsider to the homeland from which she has been expelled: “She has lost her country; she wastes in exile; she sinks in obscurity; she has no communication with her friends; she knows not even whether they yet breathe the vital air!”19 Ellis understands Gabriella’s experience as a traumatic dislocation, resulting in the loss of her sense of belonging: she “lost her country” and is irreparably separated from her loved ones by her political exile. Contrary to Burney’s earlier hopes for the emigrant clergy, however, The Wanderer’s British community fails to open itself to Gabriella in her distress. Burney emphasizes the two friends’ outsider status in England through images of geographical dislocation. Claudia L. Johnson

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notes that “Burney adopts the narrative vantage point of marginal figures”;20 however, in addition to being economically and socially marginalized, Ellis and Gabriella are physically located on the geographical fringes of England, Gabriella as a refugee and Ellis as an internally displaced person. Ellis’s exclusion from the national community first appears in what Nora Nachumi describes as the “liminality” of the opening scene: The passengers are literally between France and England. Blinded by darkness and without a familiar context, neither they nor the reader can possibly know what kind of person owns the voice on the beach . . . The usual means of establishing identity – vision, context, and auxiliary information – are entirely absent from this initial encounter.21

Nachumi’s comments suggest that Ellis’s lack of recognizable social identity is exacerbated by her geographically marginal position: she exists on the periphery, neither in England nor in France. Despite Ellis’s joyful homage to British soil, she remains an outsider on landing at Dover and continues to find herself marginalized throughout the novel. As Doody notes, The Wanderer “take[s] us to rural England and the littoral margin, rather than centring on London.”22 When Ellis does briefly reside in London, it is with Gabriella in the émigré quarter of Soho, like the French refugees of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. For most of the novel, however, Ellis lives at the fringes of England in coastal towns: Dover, Brighthelmstone, and, finally, Teignmouth, where she reconciles with her family while literally standing on the beach.23 The peripheral location of the novel’s resolution, in which Ellis establishes her new family and circle of friends, is crucial to her newfound sense of social belonging, as she rejects the images of enclosure associated with xenophobic British patriotism in favor of openness, referring repeatedly to her refutation of what she sees as the lonely, socially “insulated” life24 she has been forced to lead as an unrecognized wanderer. Significantly, the Teignmouth beach is also the space in which Ellis’s transnational identity is ratified by her new, cross-Channel domestic community: her xenophobic maternal uncle, Admiral Powel, is discovered intimately speaking with Ellis’s other affective father figure, a French bishop, inside a bathing machine, where her lover Harleigh and half-brother Melbury join them to arrange Ellis’s marriage.25 Ellis’s two father figures learn to converse “as lovingly as if they were both a couple of Christians, coming off the same shore,” as an old sailor states,26 and the beach provides the space in which Ellis’s new family is

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constructed. Burney converts the insularism associated with Britain’s island geography for most of the novel into a symbolic recognition of the island’s open, outward-facing fringes. Ellis’s positioning on the geographical periphery of Britain throughout the novel facilitates her ability to sympathize with outsiders to the national community, and Burney’s engagement with British geography is one means by which she addresses the complexities of the revolutionary context in her historical novel. Carmel Murphy argues that The Wanderer includes a compound of political views and perspectives on the events of the Revolution [which] gestured to the complexity of the contemporary response to the French Revolution, as well as the difficulties inherent in attempts to assign it any determined, or essential, historical meaning.27

By the time of The Wanderer’s publication, the Channel coast was inscribed with political discourse and imaginatively populated with the poetic speakers and revolutionary sympathizers that occur in such Romantic literary works as Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793) and “Beachy Head” (1807) and John Thelwall’s chapter “The Cliffs” in The Peripatetic (1793), including his “Ode to the Cliffs, At Sandgate,” in which his peripatetic speaker Sylvanus Theophrastus, inspired by a glimpse of the French coast, presents his radical thoughts about cross-Channel politics.28 The characters and speakers in these works, unlike Burney’s xenophobic British characters, look out across the Channel toward France while reflecting on contemporary politics and offering different perspectives on British place. Judith Thompson argues, for example, that Thelwall’s main objective in depicting the British landscape is “to climb over the fences, survey the topography, redraw the map, and reorient the reader, in such a way as to direct attention away from rich, landed interests toward the lowly structures of the common people.”29 By setting most of the novel, including Ellis’s emotional reunion with Gabriella, at Brighthelmstone, Burney engages with this political writing of British coastal space that occurred in the preceding decades. She particularly responds to Smith’s Emigrants, which opens on the cliffs east of Brighthelmstone, from where Smith also signed her poem’s dedication. As in Burney’s pamphlet, Smith uses coastal geography and the plight of French refugees to express her dismay at the “national aversion” between the British and the French30 and to encourage public sympathy for the poem’s “Poor wand’ring wretches.”31

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The Wanderer is thus a return to the political mappings of the 1790s, when British geography and the wandering French emigrant were contested sites in the Revolution Debate for Edmund Burke, Smith, Burney, and others. Burney’s Emigrant Clergy, Susan J. Wolfson argues, offers a conservative representation of emigrant priests that looks to efforts by Burke and Hannah More as models for encouraging public sympathy for exiled religious patriarchs: Wolfson notes that the opening words of Burney’s title, Brief Reflections, allude to Burke’s famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and also identifies “patently Burkean theatrics” and “Burkean gothic horror” in Burney’s descriptive pamphlet.32 In contrast to Burney’s Emigrant Clergy, Smith’s Emigrants revises the conservative position associated with portrayals of emigrant clergy according to her own republican politics, intentionally complicating her compassion for the exiled priests with anti-patriarchal, anti-militaristic polemic and offering an alternative reading of revolutionary politics that became an available model for Burney’s later novel.33 In The Wanderer, the political and geographical terrain mapped by Smith’s poem intersects with Burney’s earlier contribution to a conservative public effort to recruit British sympathy for French emigrants. Although Burney does not embrace Smith’s republicanism, she follows Smith’s critique of militant nationalism and the patriarchal institutions and social structures that fuel British insularism and facilitate women’s victimization. Both Smith and Burney use the emigrant’s plight as a means of approaching broader social problems. As Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke rightly note, both women saw in the exile and disenfranchisement of the clergy the political and economic disenfranchisement of larger groups – women and working people – and thus in The Emigrants and The Wanderer, women and clergy wander through the same treacherous British landscape, victims of a patriarchal ethos of economic and political violence.34

Thus, while Smith uses sympathy for emigrant priests to complicate the more straightforwardly conservative politics of Burney’s earlier pamphlet, Burney’s scene on the Brighthelmstone cliffs signals her decision to pick up the threads of Smith’s social and political project: Burney’s émigrés here are not priests invested with old-regime institutional power, but two penniless women, exiled from France and rejected by the patriarchal and patriotic British public. Their gender and nationality thus intersect to permit their economic, political, and social disenfranchisement, and the dislocations of revolutionary

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violence and emigration are exacerbated by the violence they are subjected to in Britain. Unlike the hostile British public, Ellis is prepared to offer her sympathy to the disenfranchised because of her own experience of marginalization. Not recognizing Gabriella, Ellis follows the unknown “foreigner”35 to a coastal churchyard, sympathizing with her as a political exile: [Gabriella] extended her arms, seeming to hail the full view of the wide spreading ocean; or rather, Ellis imagined, the idea of her native land, which she knew, from this spot, to be its boundary. The beauty of the early morning from that height, the expansive view, impressive, though calm, of the sea, and the awful solitude of the place, would have sufficed to occupy the mind of Ellis, had it not been completely caught by the person whom she followed; and who now, in the persuasion of being wholly alone, gently murmured, “Oh ma chère patrie! – malheureuse, coupable, – mais toujours chère patrie! – ne te reverrai-je jamais!”36

Burney locates this reunion against the backdrop of “the full view of the wide spreading ocean” in order to set the two women’s recognition that there is a world beyond Britain’s geopolitical borders against the insular ignorance of the community in which they seek refuge. The subsequent conversation between the two friends, who finally recognize each other, is entirely in French, with English translations in Burney’s footnotes,37 reinforcing the multilingual, multinational upbringing that has bred Ellis to reject Brighthelmstone’s paranoid nationalism. The British characters snub and suspect the alien Gabriella and Ellis; however, they also fail to use Brighthelmstone’s geographical advantage and look outward, away from the town’s self-enclosed, snobbish society. In Doody’s words, Brighthelmstone “is an inturned world . . . [O]nly the poor émigrés, Ellis and Gabriella, look at the sea.”38 Ellis’s ability to look beyond national borders facilitates her disillusionment with the patriotism she expresses when she first touches British soil; though she is drawn to her birthplace as a refuge from revolutionary France, her continued geographical dislocation after landing in England shows her violent exclusion from the British elite and her inability to concede to the inward-looking self-fortification with which Britain consolidates itself against perceived outsiders. Unlike Smith’s emigrant priests, whose location on the periphery of Britain suggests that they “have in no way committed themselves geographically or ideologically to even a temporary life there,”39 Ellis

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and Gabriella are marginalized despite their willingness to adapt to lives as refugees in Britain. They remain peripheral because they cannot break through the fortress of British paranoia and therefore have nowhere to go, socially, economically, or geographically, in Britain. Ellis’s wandering, like her namelessness and her disguises, also strips away her public identity in a way that marks her distinctness from other Romantic wanderers, for whom wandering can be politically empowering. Doody describes wandering as the quintessential Romantic activity, as it represents erratic and personal energy expended outside a structure, and without progressing to a set objective . . . Alien and alienated, yet potentially bearing a new compassion or a new wisdom, the Wanderer draws a different map.40

This points to Ellis’s place within a group of politicized Romantic wanderers; however, it does not adequately note the nuances of her position as a wanderer who is exploited, not empowered, in her forced, peripheral geographical movement, primarily because of her gender. According to Robin Jarvis, “there was an element of deliberate social nonconformism, of oppositionality, in the self-levelling expeditions of most early pedestrians,” which framed walking as “a radical assertion of autonomy . . . Walking affirmed a desired freedom from context.”41 Although Ellis’s mobility, as we have seen, endows her with “a new compassion,”42 she does not have the leisure or the explicit political purpose of other Romantic wanderers – from Thelwall’s Sylvanus Theophrastus to wandering speakers in poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – which allows them to construct political identities through their observations and sympathies. Women in the period, as Pamela Cheek notes, were already essentially stateless since they could not claim the political rights of full citizenship: Unable to possess nationality or citizenship in their own right, women could not lay claim to cosmopolitanism or bear the status of exile. Nonetheless, without a nationality or citizenship, women were, in a sense, necessarily cosmopolitans or, ultimately, exiles avant la lettre.43

Ellis’s wandering, in other words, cannot make the same kind of political statement as Thelwall’s, for example, because as a woman Ellis is inherently excluded from the political realm. Furthermore, Ellis’s wandering must be read in the context of the violence she faces in revolutionary France and patriarchal Britain.

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Her flight from persecution is not “self-levelling” or “deliberate social nonconformism”44 because it is not a personal choice, but is forced upon her. Nor is the “freedom from context” which Ellis experiences “desired,”45 as her loss of social identity markers only subjects her to further violence. In Stephen Hunt’s words, “Geographical space . . . has always been contested: factors such as class, gender, and age all intersect to determine who may wander where,”46 a point supported by Jarvis’s recognition that “[l]abouring-class men, and women of whatever class, inhabited material contexts which impeded their participation in the age of pedestrianism.”47 Perceived ethnic difference, apparent illegitimacy within the class system, and gendered vulnerabilities combine to Ellis’s disadvantage. Her wandering, like that of the Roma whose frequent appearance in Romantic and Victorian works denotes cultural and ethnic difference, classlessness, and the limits imposed by gender expectations, indicates her removal from the British community.48 Though Ellis is British by birth, her initial disguise seems to distinguish her ethnically from her fellow passengers crossing the Channel and raises the possibility of her affinity to minority groups associated with wandering, like the Roma: her disguised physical appearance – including her “black” arms and “dusky” face49 – and her “foreign accent”50 lead the British characters to speculate wildly about her ethnic origins, naming her “dulcinea” and describing her as a “tawny Hottentot . . . [or] fair Circassian.”51 Ellis is, similarly, an unclassed figure; though the child of a British aristocrat, she is denied legitimacy by her deceased father Lord Granville’s failure to publicly acknowledge his marriage and her birth. In addition to being subject to the limits of her small means and inability to achieve economic independence, Ellis experiences social expulsion from the British class system, to match her political expulsion from revolutionary France; apparently illegitimate, she exists outside of a system of rank determined by male parentage. Burney, then, suggests that Ellis’s rank is only recognized arbitrarily and that such recognition is contingent on the will of male relatives – her father, grandfather, brother, and brother’s guardian – some of whom benefit from her social expulsion. Finally, as Ellis’s dependence upon men to assert her claims for legitimacy within the class system suggests, her gender determines her wanderings, as she flies from aggressive male characters who intend her harm and, as a result, encounters further sexual, economic, and social persecution. Doody’s statement that “Juliet is a Wanderer, like a beggar, like a Romantic poet, or – in a woman’s case – like a prostitute,”52 tellingly identifies the ways in which Ellis’s wanderings, while situating her in a literary tradition, also construct her as a figure of socio-economic abjection.

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Burney also uses literary interlocutors to construct Britain as alien and inhospitable to Ellis, drawing on works and genres associated with continental and colonial places. As a female wanderer, Ellis is more closely aligned to the typically continental Gothic heroines who fly their enemies in Romantic literature than the perambulating, British male Romantics who “[draw] a different map” with their excursions.53 She is pursued, for example, by male relatives who benefit from dispossessing her, or, in Ellis’s words, “making me an alien to my country.”54 Her geographical displacement, then, is an expression of her socio-economic dislocation and subjection to the disruptions of political and familial violence, not an articulation of her politics. Though, as Cheek argues, The Wanderer engages on the surface with the familiar eighteenth-century tropes of sentimental fiction that code characters according to perceived national type, Ellis’s “hybridity . . . veers from its cosmopolitan signification toward abjection.”55 Ellis’s experience is Gothic in that it contributes to her loss of identity and autonomy; by setting Ellis’s plot in contemporary Britain, her birthplace and, on the surface, a place of refuge from revolutionary violence, Burney disrupts the supposedly straightforward distinction between the familiar and the foreign that underlies the Gothic’s typical geographical distancing. Within a specifically British landscape, Ellis’s sense of her internal self and the public, external signs like her family name that mark her identity are challenged, and she becomes a figure of uncertainty. Her aimless, fearful geographical movement accelerates the dissolution of identity that occurs across the novel. Jay D. Salisbury argues that “[w]hen the Wanderer appears in the Gothic novel it embodies the dreadful uncertainty upon which subjects and structures of meaning found their epistemologies”;56 Ellis’s movement through liminal and marginal spaces strips away the external world, revealing the uncertainty even of her own identity and autonomy. The extent to which the social world disappears and insular Britain collapses into ostensibly foreign geography as Ellis wanders further and further from her knowable identity emerges in Burney’s image of Ellis as “a being who had been cast upon herself; a female Robinson Crusoe.”57 She is, Burney continues, as unaided and unprotected, though in the midst of the world, as that imaginary hero in his uninhabited island; and reduced either to sink, through inanition, to non-entity, or to be rescued from famine and death by such resources as she could find, independently, in herself.58

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Though elements of Ellis’s experience are Gothic, Burney suggests, the “female Robinson Crusoe” encounters abjection and persecution within the realm of realism: folding the Gothic elements of her plot into the familiar and realist, Burney uses the “female Robinson Crusoe” image to indict “the world,” which “cast[s] [Ellis] upon herself,” abandoning her to her wanderings. Britain, Burney implies, is at best an absence, a space of bleak isolation or an “uninhabited island,” no more hospitable than Robinson Crusoe’s island. Ellis does not have to find herself literally shipwrecked in order to be utterly alone. Yet this image also indicates that Ellis’s wanderings might grant her the autonomy of a Robinson Crusoe figure, if she can survive being “cast” out by “the world.”59 This stripping away of the social world, then, offers Ellis an opportunity to imaginatively reconstruct her own identity without reference to the social and political relationships that have hitherto defined her, and to work toward building a more sympathetic and socially responsible community as an alternative to the violent French Republic and the oppressive British establishment. As “a being . . . cast upon herself,”60 Ellis is reduced to the essentials; she seeks only physical sustenance and self-preservation from the immediate threat of capture by the agents of the unnamed French commissary she has been forced to marry. When she leaves Gabriella in Soho to fly to Salisbury, for example, she is overwhelmed by the danger of her situation, “too much self-occupied to remark the buildings, the neatness, the antiquities, or the singularities of the city.”61 Unable to observe and process her surroundings, Ellis cannot visit the cathedral or other local attractions that “might have solaced the anxiety of the moment” because “discretion baffled curiosity, and fear took place of all desire of amusement.”62 In the New Forest, pursued by the commissary’s agents and discovering new dangers such as a set of sinister poachers, Ellis feels that “[a]ll was lost to her for pleasure, all was thrown away upon her as enjoyment; she saw nothing but her danger, she could make no observation but how to escape what it menaced.”63 Ellis’s inability to absorb her surroundings when faced with immediate physical danger indicates her further disorientation, even from the liminal geographical spaces she occupies, and illustrates Burney’s maxim that “the basis of social comfort is confidence.”64 Ellis cannot begin to rebuild a social world around herself until she confronts her basic physical needs: security and sustenance. Yet this stripping away of unnecessary social cares allows Ellis to reconstruct her subjectivity, which is threatened by her losses

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in exile. Hidden in the obscurity of the New Forest, she enjoys a brief moment of physical safety: “Here, for the first time, she ceased to sigh for social intercourse: she had no void, no want; her mind was sufficient to itself; Nature, Reflection, and Heaven seemed her own!”65 Such a reduction of Ellis’s social needs so that she has “no void, no want,” allows her, for the first time, to fully recognize her individuality in her own thoughts, rather than understanding her identity in terms of its public manifestations: her name, her nationality, her rank, her gender. Ellis’s reflections, arising from her internal self as distinct from her social self, now become the foundation of her subjectivity; “cast upon herself,”66 she discovers that “her mind was sufficient to itself.”67 The New Forest, Wilton, and Salisbury Plain, where Ellis wanders destitute, are, like the cliffs at Brighthelmstone, sites invested with layers of political meaning deriving from the literary projects of the 1790s. Salisbury and Salisbury Plain were, in eighteenth-century and Romantic culture, historical meeting points, where the ancient, medieval, and modern coexisted and competed. In his historicist reading of William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain, Tom Duggett notes what he describes as two “unavoidable” facts about Salisbury Plain in eighteenth-century culture. First, Stonehenge became significant as “the battlefield for competing accounts of British antiquity,” many of which marked British and English cultures as “founded in blood,” the blood of Druidical human sacrifice or Saxon political massacre, according to rival traditions.68 Second, Salisbury was home to the rotten borough of Old Sarum, and thus “represented all that was perverted and corrupted in modern Britain.”69 Furthermore, the Gothic monument of Salisbury Cathedral symbolized yet another layer of English history, as Gothic architecture was understood in Romanticera discourse to be a particularly English architectural style that was also linked to the ancient Goths.70 In addition to offering conflicting versions of modern Britain’s national foundation stories and contemporary political failings, Salisbury Plain was invested with even more layers of meaning by the Romantic writers who used it as a setting in their writings. Salisbury Plain, for example, was a crucial “focusing image” for Wordsworth’s “turbulent feelings . . . about the war in France and the condition of England” in the revolutionary decade, an image that he returned to throughout his career.71 Wordsworth’s first version of Salisbury Plain (1793–4), an expression of his 1790s “alienated radicalism,”72 stages a sympathetic encounter between a solitary traveler and a female wanderer that indicts the disenfranchisement of the poor, and particularly

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the nationalist warmongering that exploits the female wanderer’s family and leaves her destitute.73 Burney would not have known Salisbury Plain, the first incarnation of which remained unpublished, but Wordsworth’s poem “The Female Vagrant,” derived from a fragment of Salisbury Plain, was included in Lyrical Ballads in 1798; thus, his disenfranchised female wanderer would have been available as a precedent for Burney, although Wordsworth’s political mapping of Salisbury Plain would not have directly influenced her novel. However, Wordsworth was not the only writer drawn to Salisbury Plain and the surrounding area in the 1790s. Hannah More’s 1795 tract, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, was widely distributed, well known, and politically loaded. While for Wordsworth Salisbury Plain is the site of a struggle against social isolation and political marginalization, More uses it to “inoculate the poor against revolutionary discontent.”74 Her Plain is populated by a shepherd and his family, a benevolent clergyman, and the charitable Mr. Johnson, who rewards the shepherd’s hard work by helping his family to set up a Sunday school. The moral of the tract, that “a laborious life is a happy one,”75 illustrates More’s counterrevolutionary vision for a community undisrupted by radical political thought or economic discontent. Thelwall’s “Pedestrian Excursion” (1799–1801), conversely, draws on the “democratic associations” of pedestrianism to highlight the “social labour and political conflicts that . . . are part of the land’s meaning.”76 Thelwall, a well-known radical poet and activist, maps Salisbury with political and social questions focusing on war’s effects on manufacturers,77 the problem of child labor, “wretched” living conditions and the “misery” of the workhouse,78 poverty among agricultural laborers,79 and the political corruption represented by the rotten borough of Old Sarum.80 Ellis’s reduction to the necessities of survival and preliminary efforts to recoup her sense of self while she wanders through the New Forest and Salisbury prevent her from developing and expressing a concerted political world view, as Thelwall and More do, while she is thus preoccupied. Unlike More’s shepherd, Ellis, a homeless vagrant, has no opportunity to work for her own sustenance, nor can she devote herself to expressing political dissent, like Thelwall, while she is focused on survival. This is, in fact, Burney’s political point: Ellis’s deprivation and social and geographical dislocation, like that of Wordsworth’s female vagrant, constitute Burney’s critique of Britain’s status quo. Burney highlights Ellis’s vulnerability by contrasting her destitution with the reader’s knowledge of her rank. Ellis’s connections and education, Burney suggests, do nothing to prevent her fall into vagrancy when the British establishment turns its back on her.

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Ellis’s loss and subsequent rebuilding of her identity against the backdrop of the overdetermined tourist sites of the New Forest, Wilton, and Stonehenge are thus loaded with political meaning. Like Wordsworth, More, and Thelwall, Burney uses these geographical locations to point to her own political position, especially her efforts to build a more open community for Ellis in light of Ellis’s experience of marginalization. The process by which Ellis learns to recognize her subjectivity through her wanderings is most clearly articulated in her visits to Wilton and Stonehenge, after she is rescued from the commissary by her elderly friend Sir Jaspar Herrington. At Wilton, where the pair stops to look at the estate’s collection of art, Ellis assumes yet another disguise, pretending to be Sir Jaspar’s nursery-maid to account for her plain clothing. Posing as yet another person she is not, while absolutely in Sir Jaspar’s power, Ellis loses her autonomy completely. In becoming so entirely dependent on her new protector and the social posture he pushes her to adopt, Ellis feels her sense of self dissolve: Not as Juliet she followed; Juliet whose soul was delightedly “awake to tender strokes of art,” whether in painting, music, or poetry; who never saw excellence without emotion; and whose skill and taste would have heightened her pleasure into rapture, her approbation into enthusiasm, in viewing the delicious assemblage of painting, statuary, antiques, natural curiosities, and artificial rarities, of Wilton; – not as Juliet, she followed; but as one to whom every thing was indifferent; whose discernment was gone, whose eyes were dimmed, whose powers of perception were asleep, and whose spirit of enjoyment was annihilated.81

Ellis’s trauma of internal displacement appears in Burney’s language of absence and negation; Ellis is “not” Juliet Granville, and, in this final blow to her social identity, her mental resources, tastes, education, and subjectivity are “gone,” “asleep,” “annihilated.” Ellis’s lack is made more poignant by the setting, a well-known, museum-like mansion with a famous, quantifiable collection. Silvia Mergenthal argues that “Wilton can be seen as providing an excess of signs . . . which temporarily deprives Juliet of her subjecthood.”82 Against the backdrop of this cluttered collection of “painting, statuary, antiques, natural curiosities, and artificial rarities,”83 the proliferation of Ellis’s identity markers throughout the novel finally renders her an overdetermined cipher that comes to stand for nothing. In her inability to process the excess signs of Wilton, Ellis contrasts sharply with Thelwall, in whom the collection provokes the sophisticated political

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and historical reflections evident in “Pedestrian Excursion.” For example, a likeness of Brutus causes Thelwall to muse, Perhaps we wrong the holy name of liberty, when we rank among its champions the conspirators who assassinated Caesar. It is not by crimes that the virtue of a country is to be restored. It is not by executing even a tyrant unheard and unarraigned, that liberty and justice are to be promoted.84

Ellis’s disempowerment in her internal displacement is heightened by contrast with Thelwall’s thoughtful and articulate narrative of his encounter with Wilton. At Stonehenge, however, Ellis learns to recoup her private self by recognizing that value does not always exist in the public naming or claiming of something. Unlike Wilton, Stonehenge is “apparently devoid of signs,”85 or at least a place in which signs are unreadable and “parallel the fragmentation that Juliet herself has undergone.”86 Stonehenge is, then, a fitting place for Ellis’s attempt to reconnect with her subjectivity before the novel’s conclusion at Teignmouth. Ellis recognizes herself in Stonehenge, establishing sympathy with the structure without naming it: she was struck by the appearance of a wide ditch between a circular double bank; and perceived that she was approaching the scattered remains of some ancient building, vast, irregular, strange, and in ruin. Excited by sympathy in what seemed lonely and undone . . . she arrived at a stupendous assemblage of enormous stones . . . In a state of mind so utterly deplorable as that of Juliet, this grand, uncouth monument of ancient days had a certain sad, indefinable attraction, more congenial to her distress, than all the polish, taste, and delicacy of modern skill . . . Thought, uninterrupted and uncontrouled, was master of the mind.87

Ellis takes Stonehenge for what it is, “the scattered remains of some ancient building,” or “a stupendous assemblage of enormous stones,” rather than imposing meaning on it by speaking its public name and converting it into a symbol of prehistoric British identity. In recognizing its characteristics and its emotional effects on herself, “a certain sad, indefinable attraction” and “sympathy in what seemed lonely and undone,” Ellis learns that the structure has a meaning outside of its public name, an emotional, subjective meaning which she then accesses to restore her own sense of interiority, as she allows “[t]hought” to become “master of the mind.”

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Ellis, furthermore, associates Stonehenge with the borderless openness she and Gabriella find in the sea when they gaze across the Channel at France, as opposed to the fundamental national meaning, the Britishness, with which her fellow traveler invests the ruin. For Sir Jaspar, Stonehenge is a sacred site of ancient British culture and a point of direct contact between the modern British nation and its distant, exotic past; he exclaims, “behold in each stony spectre, now staring you in the face, a petrified old Druid! for learn, fair fugitive, you ramble now within the holy precincts of that rude wonder of other days, and disgrace of modern geometry, Stonehenge.”88 Stonehenge allows Sir Jaspar both to access a history that he construes to be foundational to British culture and to romanticize that heritage. Like Ellis, Stonehenge is simultaneously familiar and “other.”89 Ellis, however, resists claiming Stonehenge for the British nation, instead reading the monument’s sublime vastness as a suggestion that it defies definition and transcends narrow ascriptions of meaning: “She discerned, to a vast extent, a boundless plain, that, like the ocean, seemed to have no term but the horizon; but which, also like the ocean, looked as desert as it was unlimited.”90 Stonehenge, like the Channel, reaches beyond Britain’s borders to unsettle the complacent Britishness Burney’s characters exhibit. At once transcendent and isolated, Stonehenge connotes a borderlessness it shares with the lonely wanderer, Ellis. Although Sir Jaspar intervenes to act as a “nomenclator,” reinstating the authority of public knowledge and British ownership by naming Stonehenge,91 for Ellis the ruin means, as Doody suggests, “the momentary death of law, culture, names.”92 Identifying with a nameless but thought-provoking wonder, Ellis finally rediscovers her own capacity to think and feel, the subjectivity that has been threatened by the expulsion from public identity inseparable from her flight. Furthermore, Ellis’s unique position inside and outside of British culture and society is what grants her knowledge of the “lonely” monument’s secret meanings. In The Wanderer, Burney maps the traumatic dislocations of social, economic, and political violence as geographical displacement, using images of marginalization to suggest that old-regime British institutions and the French revolutionary state share the violent tactics that exclude whole groups of people, especially women. As an internally displaced wanderer, Ellis learns to move outside of the paranoid, insular British community and to develop a complementary transnational compassion and critical distance from her own culture. Ellis’s marginalization, however, exacerbates the stripping of public identity characteristic of her nameless, disguised condition and therefore

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prevents her from developing and expressing a coherent political world view, as Burney’s contemporaries Smith, Thelwall, and More do as they politically chart Britain’s geographical spaces. Nonetheless, by placing Ellis within the settings mapped by the contests of the 1790s from her position at the end of the patriotic war years, Burney situates her novel within this political dialogue centering on British place. In fact, Ellis’s very inability to articulate a politics of wandering is Burney’s message; as in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain, the wanderer’s abjection speaks to the consequences of her social, political, and economic disenfranchisement. Ellis finally begins to reconstruct her fractured subjectivity independent of the socially and politically ratified identities that limit her throughout the novel, rediscovering herself as a thoughtful, autonomous individual at Stonehenge. However, the growth of her “sympathy in what seemed lonely and undone”93 reaffirms her isolation and expulsion from public status as the foundation of the new sense of self that emerges through her experience of destitution as a stateless wanderer.

Acknowledgment This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowships Program.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

Burney, The Wanderer, p. 11. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, p. 50. Kubica Howard, “Introduction,” p. 32. Doody, Frances Burney, pp. 199–200. Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation, p. 16. See reviews of The Wanderer by John Wilson Croker and William Hazlitt in the Quarterly and Edinburgh respectively for examples of how Burney’s national identity and gender were used to disparage the novel and her career. Burney, Journals and Letters, p. 727. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 22. Colley, Britons, p. 319. See Colley’s full discussion of mass mobilization during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the chapter “Manpower,” pp. 283–319. Cheek, “The Space of British Exile,” p. 86.

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11. See Porter, The Refugee Question. Porter writes that “between 1823 and 1906 no refugee who came to Britain was ever denied entry, or expelled; or necessitated any very drastic revision of Britain’s free institutions” (p. 8). 12. Doody, “Burney and Politics,” p. 106. 13. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 457–76, 570–1, 209–10. 14. Burney, Brief Reflections, pp. 3–4. 15. Burney, Brief Reflections, pp. 6–7. 16. Burney, Brief Reflections, p. 14. 17. Burney, Brief Reflections, pp. 12–13. 18. Burney, Brief Reflections, p. 6. 19. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 636–7. 20. Johnson, Jane Austen, p. 25. 21. Nachumi, Acting Like a Lady, p. 138. The history of Burney’s manuscript’s crossing from Dunkirk, recounted in her Journals and Letters, usefully parallels Ellis’s geographical marginalization at the novel’s opening. See Burney, Journals and Letters, pp. 714–27. 22. Doody, “Burney and Politics,” p. 101. 23. See the 1991 Oxford edition’s Appendix III for a description of the geographical locations that appear in the novel. Hester Davenport presents an interesting discussion of the final scene in Teignmouth in her essay, “Fanny Goes Dipping – Evelina Does Not.” 24. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 819, 822. 25. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 864–5. 26. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 864. 27. Murphy, “The Stormy Sea of Politics,” p. 490. 28. Thelwall, The Peripatetic, pp. 263–7. Theophrastus exclaims in The Peripatetic, for example, – O France! O England! rouse ye ere ye fall! Let not thy upstart tyrants, Gallia! balk Thy great designs: Nor Britain thou Be lull’d in fatal lethargy, supine, And wake – (too late!) To curse the galling yoke thy folly bought, And clank thy chains in vain. (p. 266) 29. Thompson, “Introduction,” p. 33. 30. Smith, The Emigrants, p. 231. This quotation from Smith’s dedication is cited by page number; subsequent quotations from The Emigrants are cited by line number. 31. Smith, The Emigrants, line 237. 32. Wolfson, “Charlotte Smith’s Emigrants,” p. 521. For further discussion of Burke’s and More’s support for émigré priests, see Keane, “The Anxiety of (Feminine) Influence.”

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33. For a discussion of the poem’s anti-patriarchal republicanism, see Wolfson, “Charlotte Smith’s Emigrants.” 34. Craciun and Lokke, “British Women Writers and the French Revolution,” p. 12. 35. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 385. 36. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 385. 37. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 385–93. 38. Doody, “Introduction,” p. xx. 39. Wiley, “The Geography of Displacement and Replacement,” p. 58. 40. Doody, “Introduction,” p. vii. 41. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, pp. 27, 28. 42. Doody, “Introduction,” p. vii. 43. Cheek, “The Space of British Exile,” p. 85. 44. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, p. 27. 45. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, p. 28. 46. Hunt, “Wandering Lonely,” p. 51. 47. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, p. 155. 48. Roma appear in works as diverse as Thelwall’s Peripatetic, Jane Austen’s Emma, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. For a discussion of the political resonance of Roma in Wordsworth’s poetry, see Simpson, “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender.” 49. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 19. 50. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 17. 51. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 12. 52. Doody, Frances Burney, p. 329. 53. Doody, “Introduction,” p. vii. 54. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 752. 55. Cheek, “The Space of British Exile,” pp. 88–93, 90. 56. Salisbury, “Gothic and Romantic Wandering,” p. 46. 57. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 873. 58. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 873. 59. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 873. 60. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 873. 61. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 656. 62. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 661. 63. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 686. 64. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 711. 65. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 676. 66. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 873. 67. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 676. 68. Duggett, “Celtic Night and Gothic Grandeur,” p. 165. Duggett refers primarily to William Stukeley’s 1740 claim that Stonehenge was a sacred place for the Druids and to a second tradition that it was built to commemorate the Treason of the Long Knives, a Saxon massacre of British nobility. In “The Architecture of the Devil,” Silvia Mergenthal elaborates on Burney’s engagement with eighteenth-century archeological and

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69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

Patricia Cove aesthetic understandings of Stonehenge: “Frances Burney’s description of Stonehenge . . . owes its register of ‘vastness’, ‘magnitude’, ‘enormity’ to Edmund Burke, who, in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), explicitly refers to Stonehenge when he outlines one of the properties of the Sublime, namely, difficulty. In addition, one of Burney’s characters, Sir Jasper [sic] Herrington . . . reviews several pre-eighteenth and eighteenth-century hypotheses as to Stonehenge’s builders; Sir Jasper [sic] draws on William Stukeley’s extremely influential Stonehenge of 1740 when he discredits the legend that Stonehenge was built by ‘Gog and Magog’, and opts for the Druids instead” (p. 124). Mergenthal’s discussion of The Wanderer also refers to representations of Stonehenge by William Blake and Samuel Johnson. Mergenthal, “The Architecture of the Devil,” p. 165. Mergenthal, “The Architecture of the Devil,” pp. 168–9. Gill, “Introduction,” pp. 5, 3. There are three distinct Salisbury Plain poems by Wordsworth: Salisbury Plain (1793–4), Adventures on Salisbury Plain (1795–9), and Incidents upon Salisbury Plain (1841). See Gill’s edition for all three versions. Williams, “Salisbury Plain,” p. 172. Although the poem critiques Britain’s involvement in war with France, the female vagrant’s story is set during the American War of Independence. Gilmartin, “Study to be Quiet,” p. 498. More, Village Politics 1793, p. 4. Scrivener, “Jacobin Romanticism,” pp. 76, 77. Thelwall, “A Pedestrian Excursion,” vol. 8, p. 966. Thelwall, “A Pedestrian Excursion,” vol. 8, p. 967. Thelwall, “A Pedestrian Excursion,” vol. 9, p. 229. Thelwall, “A Pedestrian Excursion,” vol. 9, p. 228. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 759–60. Mergenthal, “The Architecture of the Devil,” p. 128. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 759. Thelwall, “A Pedestrian Excursion,” vol. 9, p. 18. Mergenthal, “The Architecture of the Devil,” p. 128. Epstein, The Iron Pen, p. 180. Burney, The Wanderer, pp. 765–6. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 766. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 766. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 765. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 766. Mergenthal also uses the term “nomenclator” to describe Sir Jaspar’s role in this scene. Mergenthal, “The Architecture of the Devil,” p. 128. Doody, “Introduction,” p. xxxvi. Burney, The Wanderer, p. 765.

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991). Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Burney, Frances, Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy: Earnestly Submitted to the Humane Consideration of the Ladies of Great Britain (London, 1793). Burney, Frances, The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al., vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972–84). Burney, Frances, The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, 1814, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Buzard, James, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005). Cheek, Pamela, “The Space of British Exile in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer and Germaine de Staël’s Corinne,” in Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz (eds), Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 85–99. Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Craciun, Adriana and Kari E. Lokke, “British Women Writers and the French Revolution, 1789–1815,” in Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (eds), Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 3–30. Croker, John Wilson, “Review of The Wanderer,” Quarterly Review, 21, 1814, pp. 124–30. Davenport, Hester, “Fanny Goes Dipping – Evelina Does Not: Burney’s Attitude to the Pursuit of Sea-Bathing in her Life and Writings,” in Lorna J. Clark (ed.), A Celebration of Frances Burney (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 158–70. Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, ed. Andrew Sanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Doody, Margaret Anne, “Burney and Politics,” in Peter Sabor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Frances Burney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 93–110. Doody, Margaret Anne, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Doody, Margaret Anne, “Introduction,” in Frances Burney, The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. vii–xxxvii.

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Duggett, Tom, “Celtic Night and Gothic Grandeur: Politics and Antiquarianism in Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain,” Romanticism, 13(2), 2007, pp. 164–76. Epstein, Julia, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Gill, Stephen, “Introduction,” in William Wordsworth, The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 3–16. Gilmartin, Kevin, “‘Study to be Quiet’: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain,” ELH, 70(2), 2003, pp. 493–540. Hazlitt, William, “Review of The Wanderer,” Edinburgh Review, 24, 1815, pp. 320–38. Hunt, Stephen, “Wandering Lonely: Women’s Access to the English Romantic Countryside,” in John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington (eds), Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), pp. 51–63. Jarvis, Robin, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (London: Macmillan, 1997). Johnson, Claudia L., Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Keane, Angela, “The Anxiety of (Feminine) Influence: Hannah More and Counterrevolution,” in Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (eds), Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), pp. 109–34. Keane, Angela, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s: Romantic Belongings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Kubica Howard, Susan, “Introduction,” in Frances Burney, Evelina, or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000), pp. 11–78. Mergenthal, Silvia, “‘The Architecture of the Devil’: Stonehenge, Englishness, English Fiction,” in Robert Burden and Stephan Kohl (eds), Landscape and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 123–35. More, Hannah, Village Politics 1793 with The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain c. 1820 (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995). Murphy, Carmel, “‘The Stormy Sea of Politics’: The French Revolution and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer,” Women’s Writing, 22(4), 2015, pp. 485–504. Nachumi, Nora, Acting Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Theater (New York: AMS, 2008). Porter, Bernard, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Salisbury, Jay D., “Gothic and Romantic Wandering: The Epistemology of Oscillation,” Gothic Studies, 3(1), 2001, pp. 45–60. Scrivener, Michael, “Jacobin Romanticism: John Thelwall’s ‘Wye’ Essay and ‘Pedestrian Excursion’ (1797–1801),” in Peter J. Kitson (ed.), Placing and Displacing Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 73–87.

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Simpson, David, “Figuring Class, Sex, and Gender: What Is the Subject of Wordsworth’s ‘Gipsies’?,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 88(3), 1989, pp. 541–65. Smith, Charlotte, “Beachy Head,” 1807, in Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (eds), British Literature 1780–1830 (Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996), pp. 244–56. Smith, Charlotte, The Emigrants, 1793, in Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (eds), British Literature 1780–1830 (Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1996), pp. 231–44. Thelwall, John, “A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales, During the Summer of 1797,” Monthly Magazine and British Register, 8–12, 1799–1801. Thelwall, John, The Peripatetic, 1793, ed. Judith Thompson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Thompson, Judith, “Introduction,” in John Thelwall, The Peripatetic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), pp. 11–50. Wiley, Michael, “The Geography of Displacement and Replacement in Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants,” European Romantic Review, 17(1), 2006, pp. 55–68. Williams, John, “Salisbury Plain: Politics in Wordsworth’s Poetry,” Literature and History, 9(2), 1983, pp. 164–93. Wolfson, Susan J., “Charlotte Smith’s Emigrants: Forging Connections at the Borders of a Female Tradition,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 63(4), 2000, pp. 509–46.

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Chapter 6

The Great Migration and Individual Travels: Precursors of Serbian Modernity? Dragana Grbic´

This chapter explores how the traveling of individuals and the migrations of groups affected changes in Serbian cultural identity from the end of the seventeenth until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first part focuses on the consequences of the Great Migrations of the Serbs of 1690, while the second part centers on the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović (c. 1740–1811), a great traveler, writer, and philosopher, whose reformative thinking not only affected the Serbs, but also influenced South Slavs, Greeks, and Romanians in the Balkans. The migrations from the Balkan Peninsula (from the territories of the medieval Serbian empire) to the north (to the territory of South Hungary in the Habsburg monarchy) affected the integration into Serbian culture of broader Western European cultural tendencies. This process began as a consequence of political, social, and religious changes and had a significant influence on all aspects of life in the Balkans. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, after a long period of isolation under Ottoman occupation, Serbian literature and culture became, for the first time, strongly influenced by Western European literary and cultural developments. Important changes took place in Serbian society after the Great Migrations of Serbs in 1690 from territories once held by Serbs and now under the rule of the Ottoman empire toward the north. As a consequence of that territorial shift, there occurred cultural, political, economic, and religious shifts. Being stateless and divided among the powerful Ottoman and Habsburg empires produced changes of great importance for the whole Serbian population. Geographical, political, and religious issues altered cultural paradigms on two levels: the collective and the individual.

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Obradović’s autobiography was published in two parts. In the first part of The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradović Who as a Monk Was Given the Name Dositej, Written and Published by Himself (Život i priključenija Dimitrija Obradovića, narečenoga u kaluđerstvu Dositeja, njim istim spisat i izdat, I 1783; II 1788, Leipzig), he describes running away from home as a boy to join an Orthodox monastery, becoming a monk and a saint. In the second part, he flees the monastery, bound for enlightened Europe. His journey could be seen as a symbolic representation of the turn that Serbian culture took from the medieval patterns of Byzantium to the enlightening tendencies of Western Europe after the Great Migration of Serbs. His life and a series of historical, political, religious, economic, educational, and cultural circumstances, which can be found by reading between the lines of his autobiography, shed light not only on this key figure of the Enlightenment in the Balkans, but also on the process of integrating Serbian culture into the cultural mainstream of Western Europe. This integration bore immeasurable significance for both the Serbian people and all South Slavic peoples throughout the Balkans. It was not just Obradović’s autobiography but his entire oeuvre1 that was profoundly significant to Serbs. His oeuvre brought the rationalistic ideas of Voltaire, Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Christian Wolf, and Johann August Eberhard to Serbian literature, for the first time, and encouraged reading audiences to follow the work of sentimental and Enlightenment authors such as Fénelon, Lessing, Rousseau, Richardson, and Marmontel. The novel Telemachus and Fénelon’s ideas on the proper way to rule proved especially resonant toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Serbian people were attempting to renew Serbian statehood.2 Obradović’s Life and Adventures could be compared with the most representative literary texts of the eighteenth century, as it incorporates elements of the travelogue, the autobiography, and the novel. Narrating his life in the first person singular and confessing his failures as well as his successes, Obradović attempts to educate his audience by offering them his personal story as an example of how one should live in an enlightened fashion, as an educated, moral, and tolerant being. The sentimental and didactic character of his Life and Adventures resembles Rousseau’s Confessions. However, Obradović’s sporadic fictionalization of the episodes depicting the autobiographical subject growing up, receiving an education, and developing morally, as well as his subsequent adventures and travels, narrated with a strongly introspective and humorous tone, recalls a Bildungsroman published at exactly the

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same time: Karl Philip Moritz’s Anton Reiser. Considering the fact that Obradović was active at the end of the eighteenth century, it is unsurprising that his work represents the late Enlightenment, including his advocacy of the authority of reason, secularization of society, and social and scientific progress. In the complex Balkan region, his direct and strong criticism of the passive monastic life and his glorification of the ideal of religious tolerance and separation of the church and the state had far-reaching effects. Due to the broad and very successful reception of his work, Obradović’s personal transformation on the road to enlightenment gave direction to the Serbian people on their own road there. The connections between the personal account of the grand traveler of Life and Adventures and his contemporaries’ experiences highlight the need for linking historical, political, religious, and cultural circumstances in the Balkans with Obradović’s life story. His autobiography records a symbolic convergence of the personal history of an enlightened individual and his road to personal individuation with the history of collective cultural, linguistic, religious, and political transformations of a whole nation. Jovan Deretić, the renowned historian of Serbian literature, noticed that the turning points in the history of Serbian literature and culture are marked by the travels of so-called literary journeymen, and that it is possible to discern the major stages of both literary and cultural development from their biographies or autobiographies.3 What does such an attitude to Serbian literature and its development convey to us today? What is the significance of the testimony given in the literary works by these great travelers as to the political, religious, and cultural changes that characterized a particular time and culture? How did group migrations or individual travels affect not only the literature, but also the culture and the political circumstances of the times? How was this represented in literary works? How did the travelers upon their return, altered by their encounters with different peoples, religions, customs, and cultures, influence the people of their homeland? The question that plays the central role in this context is what actually happened on the move, because it generates an analysis of those circumstances that motivated crucial changes in travelers and paved the way for their transformation and, potentially, the transformation of their culture. Through their contacts with new cultures, peoples, religions, and customs, travelers, guided by the idea that marked the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment – that is, the notion of individuation and selfrealization – underwent certain changes themselves, which in turn

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occasionally produced an altered view of their original cultural heritage and customs. Transformed by their encounters with new cultures, certain literary journeymen initiated the transformation of their people upon their return to the homeland, introducing novelty into the realms of thought, customs, culture, and literature. Thus, the transformation of the literary journeymen which resulted from learning about Western European thought of the Age of the Enlightenment induced cultural transformations in the East. The works of Obradović are the most illustrative example of this transformation due to the fact that he began his journey as a fugitive monk who traveled first to the Orthodox southeast, learning mostly from Byzantine sources, but became later a free thinker and philosopher in the spirit of the Western European eighteenth century. This is at the same time one of the reasons why his works and his transformation are much more radical than the second part of Francis Bacon’s advice: And let his travel appear rather in his discourse than in his apparel, or gesture; and in his discourse, let him be rather advised in his answers than forward to tell stories; and let it appear, that he doth not change his country manners, for those of foreign parts; but only, prick in some flowers, of that he hath learned abroad, into the customs of his own Country.4

As per Bacon’s advice, Obradović indeed changed his appearance by taking off the monastic habit and dressing like Western European intellectuals of the time. “There [in Halle] I clad me in sinful lay costume, like the rest of humanity, enrolled in the university, and attended the lectures on philosophy, esthetics, and natural theology of the most famous philosopher in Germany, Professor Eberhard.”5 Moreover, he did not just accept the Western European dress-code; rather, he was transformed inwardly. He changed his way of thinking and decided to publish openly his radically changed thoughts: a critique of the church, a corresponding belief in religious tolerance, and a plea for unity among the South Slavs that strongly influenced the public sphere and helped initiate the first Serbian Uprising at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The very idea that travel expresses a desire for new knowledge, opportunities, and power, with the potential to broaden the traveler’s mind, is in accordance with John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The notion that travel widens the traveler’s horizons through interaction with new ideas fully acknowledges Locke’s view

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that human knowledge arises from external perception and that it develops commensurately with the exposure to particular physical stimuli. Not surprisingly, travel and geography soon became the main disciplines of the Enlightenment, while the educational potential of travel was embraced as one of its most important ideas. As disciplines, both travel and geography to an extent rest on Enlightenment premises; for, as Charles Withers and David Livingstone observe, “In broad terms, geography’s perennial fascination with the far away, with mapping the world, with exhibiting and classifying knowledge, and with the imposition of European ways of thinking on global realms are all recognizably Enlightenment preoccupations.”6 Traveling, at the same time, evidently suggests an active attitude because “to move is to do something and moving involves making choice within, or despite, the constraints of society and geography.”7 The principal of active will that the traveler has to evince continually by making decisions about where to go underlines one of the most important marks of the poetics of the Enlightenment: the process of active, progressive, and responsible individuation of an enlightened being. In comparison to eighteenth-century Western Europe, where travel was a part of everyday life for most upper-class citizens, the population of the Balkan Peninsula regarded travel very differently. Extensive trade, conquest, and colonial missions were not a part of everyday life in the Balkans. Admittedly, trade-related travel did occur, but not to the extent it was undertaken by the colonial merchants of England, France, or Holland, for example. Brief accounts of colonial, military, and trading conquests in India and America could occasionally find their way into the first Serbian newspaper, Serbian Daily News (Сербскe новинe повседневнe), which reprinted the articles from the daily or weekly presses of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, or London. Even then, oppressed by constant military conflict, fighting for survival while living between the two great powers, the Habsburg monarchy and the Ottoman empire, the small Serbian readership was not much interested in such distant destinations. If we contrast the travel goals of Western Europeans with those underlying the endeavors of travelers from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, there are significant differences. The Serbs and other Southern Slavic people from the Balkans did not undertake colonial or missionary journeys, but their cultural identity was deeply distinguished, even transformed, by another aspect of moving in time and space – namely, by migrations – which they were forced into under the pressure of military and religious conflicts between the Ottoman

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and Habsburg empires. A certain number of Serbian autobiographies from the Enlightenment with the dominating motif of travel were written by generals and other military personnel, who participated in the wars against the Ottoman empire on the side of the Habsburg or Russian army. They often covered hundreds or thousands of kilometers marching, riding on horseback, patrolling the Danube in the šajka (river-boats), and guarding the frontier as the first line of defense. In addition to military and trading enterprises to nearby destinations, there were journeys, however rare, undertaken by individual travelers for educational purposes or as pilgrimages. We can single out two paradigmatic spatial movements in the Balkans, which resulted in the pronounced transformation of cultural, educational, political, and religious institutions. Forced migration, as the first example, can never be characterized as travel, although the effects of such organized involuntary movements of groups in space on the identity of a whole nation and culture cannot be ignored. Second, there was individual travel, undertaken voluntarily by individuals for personal reasons, as opposed to organized mass migrations. The scope of this work will be limited to the travels of Dimitrije Dositej Obradović, who, in the course of his journeys and encounters with various peoples and cultures, underwent substantial transformation, as described in his autobiography, and who, upon his return, made a permanent impression on not only the Serbian people but also all Southern Slavs in the Balkans. In order to understand the implications and the significance of Obradović’s travels of almost half a century’s duration, it is first necessary to identify the historical factors that led to the integration of Serbian literature and culture into the Western European cultural mainstream. Here, Obradović’s enlightening tendency assumes a special meaning as a part of a transformational stage. His life path could be seen as a paradigmatic example of one individual transformation that illuminates a wide range of religious, educational, and cultural consequences caused by migration. In a way, the individual level mirrors the collective one. Thus, this chapter first explores the collective character of Serbian migration before turning to the character and work of Obradović, a grand traveler, as an individual.

Migrations Migrations from the Balkan Peninsula (from the territories of the medieval Serbian empire) to the north (to the territory of South

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Hungary in the Habsburg monarchy) triggered the modernization of Serbian cultural structures. Eastern Byzantine culture had been dominant among Serbs for centuries: from the ninth century when Southern Slavs converted to the Orthodox Christianity of Byzantium, until the end of the seventeenth century when Serbs started replacing Byzantine cultural models with those of Western Europe. The moment when Serbian culture began adopting Western European institutions did not come suddenly. This process of cultural adaptation happened as a consequence of turbulence in the social, political, and religious spheres of the nation. From the fifteenth century, Serbs were under occupation by the Ottoman empire, but one part of the Serbian population settled in the southern part of the Habsburg monarchy. The issue of faith played the crucial role in establishing national and cultural identity. On the one hand, after the Ottoman conquest and the discontinuation of the medieval ruling Nemanjić dynasty, the Serbs were headed by the patriarch instead of the monarch; on the other hand, faith was at the same time the important mark both of distinction from the enemy and of convergence with Christian brothers – Roman Catholics, Protestants, and other Orthodox Christians. This fact provided the political motivation for organizing the migrations. The statistics show that during the Great Migration, Serbs abandoned nearly 360 cities and villages while approximately 37,000 families with 185,000 people migrated to the north. In terms of political consequences, it is important to emphasize that the huge number of Serbian migrants was a major reason for the issuing of privileges that regulated the status of Serbs within the Habsburg monarchy. The Serbs that settled in the Habsburg monarchy increased the existing Serb population in these regions and made the Serbs an important political force in the area. The migration of 1690 was the continuation of a great movement to the lands along the Danube basin, which had begun late in the fourteenth century. The massive Serb migrations from the territories that were under the occupation of the Ottoman empire to the Pannonian plain started in the fourteenth century right after the defeat of the medieval Serbian empire, and lasted until the second half of the eighteenth century. As a consequence of fighting with the Habsburg monarchy against the Ottoman empire, Serbs were pressured to leave their territories and to move out northward to the territory of the Habsburg monarchy during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. The migration of 1690 was called the Great Migration of Serbs and was led by Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević the Third.8

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Besides the Great Migration, there were several more movements of the Serbs and other Southern Slavs from the territories conquered by the Ottomans northward to the Habsburg monarchy again in 1718–39 and northeast to the Russian empire around 1751–3. Statelessness forced these migrants to seek another “patria” for themselves; at the same time, their plight caused changes in Serbian culture, as they settled in foreign surroundings, constantly interacting with people of different languages, cultures, and habits. In the new environment in which the Serbs found themselves in 1690, they encountered, Enlightenment rationalism, which posed a serious challenge to them in a religious, philosophical, and cultural sense. Additional pressure came from the Habsburg court that pressured Orthodox Serbs to convert to Catholicism. This initiated the intertwining of foreign influences within Serbian culture, with the Serbs in the Habsburg’s territory gradually exchanging Byzantine for Western European customs. It is crucial to emphasize that during the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, this was the most culturally active area among all Serbs who lived divided among three great powers: the Habsburg monarchy, the Venetian/Ragusa republic, and the Ottoman empire. The majority of Serbs, including Obradović, belonged to the Orthodox Church. Almost everything that Serbian writers produced during this century was created in that environment. Regardless of the fact that they might have lived in the Roman Catholic environment of the Habsburg monarchy or the Venetian republic, or in the Islamic Ottoman empire, their fear of forced conversion brought them closer to the then most powerful Orthodox state: the Russian empire. This fear of conversion was the reason why, after the Great Migration, Serbs followed two lines in the process of cultural transition. One was the so-called indirect Slavic line, which sprang from the cultural influences of the Russian empire, already Europeanized by the reforms implemented by Peter the Great. The second was the so-called Western European line, which emerged through the direct contact of Serbian with Western European cultures as Serbs traveled to the West; its most representative example was the case of Dosistej Obradović. Both lines brought modern forces to Serbian culture. The Serbs in their new environment, so different with regard to religious beliefs and culture, entered the process of both Europeanization and Russification. The two phenomena were inseparable in the historical destiny of the Serbian people, who, as it was justly noted, rather rushed into than entered the contemporary Western culture to which the Southern Russians had already been accustomed.9

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Automatic acceptance of Western European cultural models by the Serbian people in the Habsburg territory was impossible due to their defiance of the political intentions of the Habsburg court to convert Orthodox Southern Slavs to Catholicism. This was the reason for Orthodox Serbs to intensify their relations with the Russian empire. The process of direct absorption of Western influences came several decades later; more precisely, in the second half of the eighteenth century. With regard to issues of faith and the dominant role of the church in the creation of cultural and national identity, it is important to emphasize that the Serbs and other Orthodox Southern Slavs relied greatly on the already reformed Russian empire, which had been exposed to the ideas of the Western European Enlightenment. Notably, the reforms of Peter the Great had been largely influenced by the work of Feofan Prokopovich. In 1721, Prokopovich wrote his Dukhovnyi Reglament, which introduced the ideas of the Reformation into Russia. The penetration of Western European ideas into the Russian empire “did not mean simple westernization, but instead secularization.”10 The writings of Prokopovich and other Russian authors of that time could be found in the Metropolitanate of Karlovci, and they represented one of the channels through which rationalism and secularism entered Serbian society in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is supported by the fact that Prokopovich in his Dukhovnyi Reglament offered a new school curriculum modeled after the Kiev Academy, where elite Serbs were educated at that time. Obradović was also headed there, following the examples of the then acclaimed Serbian intellectuals and members of the clergy, such as his precursor and proponent of the religious Enlightenment Jovan Rajić, who asked, “Where else could a young deacon study except in Kiev or Moscow.”11 Nevertheless, Obradović, who had set off for Kiev, toward the “East reformed by Western ideas,” by force of circumstances ended up in Vienna, Bratislava, Halle, Leipzig, Paris, and London, and thus changed future educational trends among the Serbs and vastly influenced the transformation of their culture. The preceding account of the changes in the political, religious, and educational circumstances induced by early eighteenth-century migrations is necessary to understand the innovative quality of Obradović’s ideas, the momentum of change in his interests, and the far-reaching effects of his work. A connection between his travels and the much larger and categorically different Serbian migration

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might not be obvious at first sight, but the consequences of the migrations and development of Obradović’s subjectivity are inextricably connected. Leaving one’s birthplace and heading to the unknown in hopes of finding a better future was a shared necessity for masses of Serbian migrants and for Obradović. Chronologically, Obradović’s journeys followed the migrations, and his individual life path reflects Serbian dissatisfaction with their new environment. As early as in his first published piece, the Letter to Haralmpije (Pismo Haralampiju, 1783, Leipzig), Obradović already emphasizes the need for religious tolerance12 and for developing a common language that would surmount barriers and misunderstandings. The concept of the common language is both metaphorical – the language of common sense shared by all people – and linguistic – the language understood by most Southern Slavs, notwithstanding slight differences.

Dimitrije Dositej Obradović Dimitrije Dositej Obradović (c. 1740–1811) was a former Orthodox Christian monk, a schoolmaster, and a polyglot who studied at Western European universities. He traveled in Europe mostly as an adventurer with a desire for learning, mastering foreign languages, and understanding foreign cultures. He had a decisive influence on the development of the Serbian people with his autobiography, The Life and Adventures, where he wrote about foreign cultures, constantly comparing the different philosophies and customs he encountered during his travels to those of his own culture. His travels resulted in not only his autobiography, but also his Letter to Haralampije, which was published several months before the autobiography and represents the manifesto of the Enlightenment in Serbian literature and culture. His most important work, The Life and Adventures, like many other autobiographies is indeed a “story of a man’s obsession with his life,” as Georg Misch has called it, and “a story about Dositej’s transformation.”13 Its subject intends to realize his potential as an enlightened being, “because the enlightened being is the final product of an idea, the resultant of its possibilities.”14 Obradović achieved this self-realization through his innumerable journeys in pursuit of knowledge. Since Obradović is the Balkans’ most prominent traveler among the hommes de plume, as defined by Roger Chartier, it is interesting

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that his travels have only sporadically been viewed in light of Western European traveling habits as described in Grand Tour or Apodemica literature.15 His autobiographical narrative of The Life and Adventures bears traceable elements typical of this genre, which was then a trend in Western European literature. The following motifs are central to the genre: (1) the motive for setting out; (2) the meaning of the journey; (3) the homecoming; (4) the importance of acquaintances and references; (5) the modes of financing the journey; (6) the learning of foreign languages and the scientific and literary achievements written in them; and (7) the encounter with foreign cultures, presented through the narrative technique of almost continuous comparison and analysis of cultural differences and similarities. In comparison to its Western European counterparts, Obradović’s autobiography portrays an interesting view of the “institution” of the master and tutor. The teaching experience that he gathered while traveling played an important role near the end of his life, when he was appointed a tutor to the son of the new Serbian ruler. Obradović’s mentoring of the young man and his almost utopian wish to rebuild the lost Serbian empire of the Middle Ages are strongly reminiscent of Fénelon’s novel Telemachus. Unlike the well-trodden itinerary of the Grand Tour, Obradović’s travels had no previously planned route; instead, he traveled as his circumstances allowed and dictated. Hence his route was rather meandering, or “go-as-you-see and round-about,” as he describes it in one of his letters. Therefore, his travels certainly cannot be defined as a “tour,” a term which generally assumes following a circular path and returning to the starting point. His itinerary seems somewhat chaotic when compared to the systematic approach of the Western European Grand Tour or Apodemica. Traveling extensively in Europe and one part of Asia Minor, Obradović made several circles, sometimes coming back again and again to the same places. Following his original intention to travel eastward in order to reach Russia via Dalmatia, the Greek Isles, and Albania he found himself in the West, arriving in Halle and Leipzig via Bratislava, Italy, Constantinople, Romania, and Moldavia. From there, he made another circle from Leipzig through Frankfurt, Strasbourg, and Paris so as to arrive in Dover, Canterbury, and, ultimately, London. These circular movements originate in Obradović’s free will to choose and plan his itinerary spontaneously and independently, one of the crucial marks of distinction between the traveler and the Serbian migrants, who were obliged to follow a one-way route dictated by the authorities.

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Obradović lived in London for a while; there, inspired by the rich literature and philosophy of the Enlightenment, he decided to put himself to use in the service of his own people. Thus, he made another circle via Hamburg, Riga, Shkloŭ, Königsberg, and Berlin; then he returned yet again to Leipzig and Vienna. Vienna was the city where he spent the longest period of time, living continuously in one place from 1771 to 1776 and then from 1785 to 1787 and from 1789 to 1802. Before Obradović finally made a homeward journey to Serbia in 1807, he spent four years living in Trieste, Italy, from 1802 to 1806. Bearing in mind the extraordinary cost of his journeys, the dramatic conditions of eighteenth-century travel, the modes of transport he used – boat, carriage, foot, or horseback – and the fact that at times he had to flee the plague or the calamity of war, it is impressive to note that Obradović traveled through or stayed at approximately ninety different places over the almost half a century he spent on the road. Upon his arrival in a new country, Obradović supported himself by teaching languages he already knew. He would use the money earned by tutoring to support his stay and to save for new endeavors, simultaneously gaining further skills to be used in the future by learning the local language. This process of gaining knowledge, which was the purpose of his travels, and of transferring knowledge, which was his means of support, can be viewed as a type of “barter trade.” On several occasions he testifies that he sometimes chose his destinations according to the “marketability” of the languages he knew, so that he could tutor and learn at the same time, earning enough to finance his further travels. Due to his pragmatism, Obradović could be seen as one of Bacon’s “merchants of light,” who sail to foreign countries to explore them and to bring books and knowledge to their own people upon their return.16 Obradović fluently spoke and wrote ten languages, most of which he had learned while traveling across Europe and Asia Minor. His mother tongue was Serbian, and he learnt Romanian as a young boy due to the fact that he was born in a Romanian village. Later, when he entered the monastery, he became familiar with the Old Slavic and the Old Russian that were used among the clergy. Then he started to travel and learn languages, so he studied Latin and Italian in Dalmatia, Old and New Greek in Greece, Albanian in Albania, French, Latin, and German in Vienna, and English in London. Due to financial constraints, he very rarely used the common modes of transport such as boats or carriages, but traveled mostly on foot or horseback; this perhaps explains why he followed his own

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way rather than taking prescribed paths. In the last chapter of his Life and Adventures, Obradović concludes “I may say that I seem to have been born into this world for traveling, because in a year when I did not plan to go even five miles in a straight line, I covered more than five hundred German miles.”17 Describing pedesis as movement that “may be irregular and unpredictable,” Thomas Nail concludes that, “it is not random. Specific movements appear random only from the perspective of those who do not understand or see the enormous number of complex collisions and vectors that determine a given motion.”18 This is exactly the case with Obradović’s fifty years of itinerancy. Taking a close look at his travel map alone could make it seem chaotic and diffuse; it might suggest that Obradović moved exactly in the way that Thomas Nail explained the manifestation of pedetic force: “It moves without center, origin, or ultimate destination . . . A ‘continuous system’ does not have a single repeatable pattern . . . because the degrees of freedom are so large.”19 In opposition to this crisscrossed map of individual travel, the linear and one-way movement of Serbian mass migrations seems very different. However, if the map of Obradović’s travels is enlarged by supplementing the autobiographical text, the kinetic force driving his travels seems to show certain regularities by its very nature. The regularities are revealed in certain passages of the autobiography, where Obradović finds his inner self mirrored in the surrounding natural world. The practice of self-reflection while traveling, especially on foot, has a long tradition in travelogues. The autobiographical subject of The Life and Adventures questions the relationship between himself, the world, and God in every step that he takes through the Book of Nature. If travel is the central activity in the epoch of the Enlightenment, the travelogue and autobiography of a great traveler might illuminate contemporary theories of migration. An intense feeling of inadequacy and alienation from his surroundings forced Obradović as a very young man to leave everything behind and to start seeking his better home: At this point I think that my life really begins. In my ninth or tenth year, being left without father or mother or sister, I came to regard myself as a stranger and an alien in the very place where I was born, and my heart seemed to prophesy to me that I should travel in many lands.20

Three decades later he enrolled in the University of Halle in Prussia, the occasion of which once again reflected this desire. How strong

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was his desire to affect his native environment positively and how deeply it was based on the values of the Enlightenment can be seen in the following quotation, where Obradović describes the profound impression he had of his first encounter with a university: In this abode of the Muses and of all manner of divine sciences, when I saw how more than a thousand young men were studying, how they ceaselessly ran from one auditorium to another, how they developed and enlightened all the beautiful noble capacities of their soul, broadening and deepening their understanding of varied branches of learning; and when I compared these places and men with beautiful but poor and barbarous Albania, and with Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, which were lands worthy of even greater compassion because they were dearer and more precious to me, then I often sighed and shed bitter tears, saying to myself: “When will there ever be in those fair lands schools like this? When will their young men drink in these sciences?” . . . Looking at the sort of books that every day were planned, written, and published in those German lands, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of sorrow whenever I thought how among our own people they kept shouting: ‘Go bring us books from Russia!’ And what sort of books? Of the books that in Russia are translated from the learned languages or composed and published in Church Slavic and Russian there is not even a catalogue that would at least inform us of their names. Ceaselessly meditating on these topics, I remembered the desire that had come over me while I was still in Dalmatia and the plan that I had formed there of gratifying the earnest and pressing need of our people to have some books written and published in the popular language spoken by all of us. . . . So in the name of the Lord let the good work begin.21

It was exactly at this biographical point, when he found himself in Halle in his early forties, that he started to write his autobiography. Although it is usual that an autobiography is written at the end of one’s life, when the author rounds off his or her existence with careful scrutiny, Obradović’s autobiography starts at a turning point in his life, when the hero is at the beginning and not at the end of his career as a writer. By shedding light on the hero’s fascination with sacred texts and monastery life as “a wrong example not to be followed,” which marks his early life, the second part of Obradović’s autobiography describes a series of life episodes as confirmation of Bacon’s introduction in his essay “Of Travel”: “Travel, in the younger Sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.”22 It is exactly from such knowledge and experience that at the closing of the autobiography the hero’s firm decision arises to start speaking in

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his mother tongue, not solely for his own benefit anymore, but also for the benefit of his people. While the first part is thematically conceived as a critique of the church and its hagiographies, and both parts in their entirety represent an “inverted biography,” Obradović’s work at the same time points to a “genre clash,” a break with the hitherto dominant medieval Byzantine literary tradition, which introduces Serbian literature of the second part of the eighteenth century to the romanticized autobiography as a genre which, besides the novel, dominated the Western European literary scene. In that way, the structure of Obradović’s autobiographical text reflects the global shift and the alternation of cultural models after the Great Migration. “The spirit of enlightenment” in Obradović’s narrative reveals that the autobiography became an inverted hagiography.23 The goal of the individual in the Age of Reason was not, as in the Middle Ages, to become a saint or to come as close as possible to this ideal. Instead, the enlightened being establishes two parallel requirements: to be mature, which means free from the authorities, and in this sense to be modern.

Modernity Most members of the Western European upper classes went on the Grand Tour and returned home in a few years. By contrast, Obradović, an early orphan, did not have anyone back home for whom he would yearn to return; and without a fixed income, he was also financially unable to return at will. Arguably, there was no home for Obradović to return to even if he had wanted to; for Karlovci, Smederevo, and the monastery of Hopovo, from where he set out “into the world,” are the only places that can be located in today’s Serbia. Yet Obradović did return, albeit near the end of his life. This is what he writes at the end of his autobiography, upon his decision to leave England, describing his yearnings and the desires that guided him not on his individual life path anymore, since he had already satisfied his personal urges for self-improvement, but rather on the path of his people: All this magnanimity, all this English kindness, worthy of eternal remembrance, I should never have experienced had I not been in need. Now it depended solely on myself whether I desired to remain in England all my life, since as I enjoy giving lessons, once I had entirely mastered the language of the country I could have made a very good

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living there. From the cradle to the grave a man must have some ruling passion that completely dominates him. A child cares for nothing so much as for play; a youth desires learning or some other pastime: each individual follows his own inclination. At this time my desires were concentrated on publishing something further in my mother tongue. I judged by my own experience how useful and how pleasant it would have been for me in my youth to read something sensible in my own familiar dialect.24

Despite his affinity for foreign languages and cultures, Obradović held his own language and people closest to his heart. Thus, he left his life in the heart of enlightened Europe to “act in the service of his own people” and “print somewhat in the language in which common people spoke.” In addition to the fact that Obradović did return to his own homeland, there is another similarity that his travels share with the Grand Tour: for Obradović, as commonly for the upper classes in Western European countries, travel was a form of preparation for assuming a leadership position, either in government at home or in diplomacy abroad. With his enthusiasm for rationalist philosophy and sentimental literature, which he materialized through the publications of his original works and his translations from other languages, Obradović influenced the national awakening of Serbs and contributed to the cultural and political changes in Serbian society at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Due to the political, economic, and religious circumstances that followed the Great Migrations, Serbian people were partially prepared for the Enlightenment reforms and the modernization that Obradović generated through his works. One of the key reasons for his broad success was the fact that he wrote all his works in the vernacular Serbian language. In this way, his wide readership won him popular acclaim even before his return to the homeland. By using the vernacular instead of the language of the upper class (Russian-Slavic, a specific mixture of Church Slavonic, Old Russian, and Serbian), Obradović helped shape a distinct Serbian identity. By writing and translating sentimental and enlightened literature, moreover, he helped encourage a culture of humanity and religious tolerance among Serbs. In a word, he was an icon of the Enlightenment. Obradović’s program of Enlightenment, along with other important political circumstances at the beginning of the nineteenth century, contributed to the awakening of the conquered Slavs and led them toward their uprising against and their liberation from the

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Ottoman empire. It is important to emphasize that Obradović’s literary and philosophical work had an impact not just among the Serbs but also among all Southern Slavs in the Balkans: Croats, Macedonians, Slovenians, and even Bulgarians. Research into the reception of his work among Romanians, Albanians, and Greeks in the nineteenth century shows that his works were translated into Romanian and Greek during his lifetime. At the time of the First Serbian Uprising of 1804, under the guidance of Ðorđe Petrović Karađorđe, Obradović supported the freedom fighters not only with literature but also with material aid, which he sent from Trieste in Italy, where he lived at the time. In 1806, Karađorđe invited him to return and help with the founding of new institutions in the recently liberated Belgrade. At the end of 1807, the first school of higher education, named the Great School (Velika škola) and later to become the first Serbian university, was opened in Belgrade. Naturally, Obradović was indispensable to its opening; he also became a member of the new Serbian government (Praviteljstvujušči sovjet), was named Minister of Education, and became one of the major counselors to the Head of State. At the end of his mission, he was greatly honored to become not only a private tutor to the son of the founder of a new royal dynasty in liberated Serbia (the first dynasty in five centuries, following the extinction of the medieval Nemanjić dynasty), but also a “tutor” to the entire Serbian people as a founder of the university and the first Minister of Education. Thus, on the one hand, tutorship as the staple activity which enabled the hero of the autobiography to continue his journeys also gave true and ultimate meaning to his traveling – the return to his country. On the other hand, this factual event at the end of the author’s life proves that he succeeded in realizing his intention to serve his people, which was suggested as a mere wish in the last letter of his autobiography. In this way, his life’s journey as described in the autobiography ends at the very moment when real-life endeavors begin, metaphorically standing for the people’s journey toward enlightenment. Obradović accepted travel as an Enlightenment ideal, a way of learning through encounters with foreign cultures and languages. The autobiography ends at the point where his educational aims for Serbs began to materialize, and his crowning achievements were the beginning of institutional education for the entire population and the formal process of modernization begun at the end of the seventeenth century, when the Great Migrations of Serbs prepared the way for Obradović’s travels.

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Notes 1. Pismo Haralampiju (Letter to Haralampije, Leipzig, 1783); Život i priključenija Dimitrija Obradovića, narečenoga u kaluđerstvu Dositeja, njim istim spisat i izdat (The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradović Who as a Monk Was Given the Name Dositej, Written and Published by Himself), the first part of his autobiography (Leipzig, 1784); Sovjeti zdravoga razuma (Counsels of Sound Reason, Leipzig, 1784); Slovo poučiteljno gospodina Georga Joakima Colikofera (An Instructive Discourse by Herr Georg Joachim Zollikofer, a German Preacher of the Reformed Church, Leipzig 1784); in 1788 he published in Leipzig the collection of fables Basne including the second part of his autobiography (Fables of Aesop and Various Other Fabulists accompanied with his original Moral Explanations and Instructions); Sobranije raznih naravoučitelnih veščej (Collection of Various Moral Articles for Profit and Amusement, Vienna 1793); and Etika ili Filosofija poučitelna (Ethics or Moral Philosophy, Venice 1803). He published several poems. The best known, Ode on the Liberation of Serbia and Ode on the Insurrection of the Serbs (1804), were inspired by the national uprising. Some of his works were published posthumously: Mezimac (The Last-Born, the second part of a Collection of Various Moral Articles published in Budapest in 1818) and Ižica or A Wreath of the Alphabet (1830) – good manners, translations and quotations from Greek homilies, mostly from St. John Chrysostom; and his correspondence with national and international dignitaries, aristocrats, and royals. 2. For more about the Serbian reception of Fénelon’s ideas on constitutional government and the ideal ruler, see Grbić, “Telemachus,” pp. 237–62. 3. See Деретић, Пут српске књижевност идентитет. 4. Bacon, The Essays, p. 42. 5. Obradović, Life and Adventures, p. 282. 6. Withers and Livingstone, “Introduction,” p. 2. 7. Cresswell and Merriman, Geographies, p. 5. 8. For a general view of the Great Migrations, see Ћоровић, Историја Срба, and Самарџић and Веселиновић, Историја српског народа књига 4. 9. Вукашиновић, Српска барокна теологија, p. 32. 10. Вукашиновић, Српска барокна теологија, p. 39. 11. Obradović, Life and Adventures, p. 205. For a definition of the religious Enlightenment(s) as the opposition to the secular Enlightenment see David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. 12. Obradović developed in his manifesto of the Serbian Enlightenment, very close to Voltaire’s work The Treatise on Tolerance, the idea of the importance of religious tolerance among people in the Balkans. See Grbić, VorEntscheidungen, pp. 189–210. 13. Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, p. 1000.

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168 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Dragana Grbic´ Ломпар, “просвећености,” p. 429. See Грдинић, “Хуманистички аспект путовања,” pp. 95–110. Grbić, VorEntscheidungen, p. 31. Obradović, Life and Adventures, p. 301. A long German mile equals about 5.75 English miles. Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 72. Nail, Figure of the Migrant, p. 72. Obradović, Life and Adventures, p. 152. Obradović, Life and Adventures, pp. 282–3. Bacon, The Essays, p. 41. Ломпар, “просвећености,” p. 434. Obradović, Life and Adventures, p. 297.

Bibliography Bacon, Francis, The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Cresswell, Tim and Peter Merriman (eds), Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects (New York: Routledge, 2016). Деретић, Јован, Пут српске књижевност идентитет, границе, тежње (Београд: Српска књижевна задруга, 1996). Grbić, Dragana, VorEntscheidungen: Halle-Leipzig, Wendepunkt im Leben von Dositej Obradović, ПреКретања. Хале-Лајпциг, прекретница у животу Доситеја Обрадовића (Belgrade-Halle: Institut za književnost i umetnost, Seminar für Slavistik, Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für die Erforschung der Europäischen Aufklärung, 2012). Grbić, Dragana, “Telemachus – Dositej Obradović’s Last Wish: The Serbian Reception of Fénelon,” in C. Schmit-Maaß, S. Stockhorst, and D. Ahn (eds), Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), pp. 237–62. Грдинић, Никола, “Хуманистички аспект путовања – Доситеј и наше време,” in Никола Грдинић (ed.), Тема: путовања (Нови Сад: Завод за културу Војводине, Друштво за проучавање XVIII века, 2013), pp. 95–110. Ломпар, Мило, “Дух просвећености у српској аутобиографији,” in Петар Пијановић, Живот и дело Доситеја Обрадовића (Београд: Завод за уџбенике и наставна средства, 2000), pp. 429–34. Misch, Georg, Geschichte der Autobiographie: Von der Renaissance bis zu den autobiographischen Hauptwerken des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Bern, Frankfurt: Franke, Schulte-Bulmke,1969). Nail, Thomas, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Obradović, Dositej, The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradović Who as a Monk Was Given the Name Dositej, Written and Published by

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Himself, trans. and ed. Georg Rapall Noyes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953). Sorkin, David, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Самарџић, Радован and Рајко Веселиновић, Историја српског народа књига 4, Срби у XVIII веку (Београд: Српска књижевна задруга, 1986). Вукашиновић, Владимир, Српска барокна теологија (Београд: Српска патријаршија, 2008). Ћоровић, Владимир, Историја Срба (Београд: БИГЗ, 1989). Withers, Charles W. J., and David N. Livingstone, “Introduction: On Geography and Enlightenment,” in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (eds), Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 1–28.

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Chapter 7

Orientalism in Transit: Company Men, Colonial Historiography, and Other Handmaidens of Empire Olivera Jokic

This chapter examines records of the work of a group of men affiliated with the British East India Company in the 1790s. The chapter’s title alludes to the title of Dominick LaCapra’s work on the practice of historiography. In the book’s introduction, LaCapra explains that “history is always in transit,”1 much like other disciplines of interpretation, because it is alive to the mobility of its own interpretive position. To remain historiography, LaCapra suggests, history must account for its own motion in establishing pasts and presents, reluctant to offer definitive interpretations and resistant to transcendence.2 I borrow LaCapra’s phrase because it offers a means to think in new ways about histories of migration as integral to histories of modern nations and states constituted out of histories of empire. At a moment when the criteria for admission into national communities are undergoing acute scrutiny and pressure from thousands of migrants seeking physical protection from the catastrophic disintegration of their nations, remembering colonialism as an integral part of the transformation of European nation-states into “imagined communities” (in Benedict Anderson’s famed phrase) is a reminder that these ideological and spatial formations required and encouraged physical displacement and detachment from the native soil for some of their citizens. Here, a cluster of colonial documents left behind by a group of British men working in India at the turn of the nineteenth century provides preliminary material for such a history of empire as a history of work done by migrants – a history in transit. This group of men with colonial careers comes into view from archival texts labeled “materials sent to John Bruce, the Company

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Historiographer.” The “official historiographer” of the East India Company between 1793 and 1817, Bruce was hired at a moment of global political crisis to assist with the writing of a book of history that would represent favorably in London the transnational work the Company was doing in South Asia. The book was meant to ease the political process of renewing the Company charter through Parliamentary structures and become the kind of publication that would make the Company’s activities less offputting to a public tired of hearing about corruption and scandal.3 Bruce was placed in his job by Henry Dundas, a member of the East India Company Board of Control and the first Home Secretary for whom “home” could begin to include India. To get to compelling material about the British presence in India, Dundas gave leave to Bruce (who had never been to India himself) to write to various East India Company officials in the emergent colony. Although many of the men were socially out of reach for Bruce, he was to ask them to help in gathering the “evidence of experience” about Company activities, and in speculating about their territorial expansion. Some of Bruce’s correspondents were men we now recognize as “Orientalists”: scholars John Shore, Jonathan Duncan, and the greatest star of them all, Sir William Jones, were recommended to Bruce (or, rather, Bruce to them) precisely because they were learned experts on the place to which they were sent to serve as colonial administrators. It seems less than surprising now that one of Bruce’s most helpful correspondents was one Philip Dundas, the nephew of Henry Dundas. Stationed in Bombay, he was powerful enough on account of his personal connections to enforce compliance with the historiographer’s requests for epistolary “evidence of experience” when most of his potential collaborators remained unresponsive. In 1798, to accelerate the flow of contributions to Bruce’s project, Philip Dundas became chair of a committee in Bombay “appointed to collect materials for the Company’s Historiographer.” Several archival volumes preserve some of these materials, and one volume in particular includes the Proceedings of this committee and the names of its members.4 The project of which these papers are the record draws in men variously invited and positioned to discuss their expertise as a function of their relationship to the Company, its political and commercial project, and its political and professional hierarchy. Handmaidens of the early empire in the office, these men were often propelled into the risks of a colonial career by a lack of opportunities in England, by a dubious personal record, or by favorable personal connections. They could represent themselves simultaneously as reluctant self-exiles and

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cutting-edge explorers; as traditionalist men in service to a patriotic cause; and as modern, mobile agents of the expanding nation-state whose new elite statuses converged around demonstrated competence and merit.5 This is also a history of migrants in competitive jobs available only to men, and their documents contribute to a history of modern masculinity predicated on the notions of mobility and expertise. To recall these migrants in their obscurity is to draw attention to the contributions to the records of empire of various creatures of the office, and to the office itself as a kind of geography, a world in motion. Building careers in a landscape seldom discernible in narratives about the march of empire and the indomitable appeal of statehood, at a physical distance from British lands and formal political structures, these men drew on the postures of Western masculinity and derived specific forms of authority from their proximity to more powerful men at work, at a time when very few were willing or able to say what the outlines of their jobs were and how they coincided with the outlines of the nation. The work of empire looks here like the work of documentation supplied by men who moved on its behalf, on the pretext of knowledge about the logic whereby detachment from the native soil did not amount to statelessness or deracination. This is also why their work is hard to read: we know little about what it is their work documents, because we know little about the kinds of figures they are. The Orientalism of their texts becomes interesting for writing histories of migration and empire, not as an unambiguously noxious byproduct of European encounter with (and taste for) misrepresentations of the “East,” but as a byword for the privileged relationship between citizenship and displacement, an instrument with which to describe not the relationship of European men to their colonial others, but the stakes of their relationship to one another.

Documented Relations Looking at colonial documentation now can remind us of the continued operations of this logic, and of the centrality of migration to modern citizenship. With reservations about narratives that identify European modernity and citizenship with firm attachment to states and their imperial futures, we could recover the sense of colonialism as one name for the process through which modern states made ambivalence and mobility the defining qualities of their national and political imagination. Dis-identification of the petty men of the office

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from the fixity and localization of statehood, of the colonizers and the colonized, and of their historians, subjects to examination our common generalizations about gender and authority, not only as they relate to these men’s class status, but also in terms of the more complicated positioning that results from moving far and fast. This reimagination of colonialism requires a kind of thick description of migrants and migration, to imagine the movement of “privileged” persons across borders, natural or political, propelled by a combination of abstract ideals, volition, ambition, and administrative circumstance. This is an alternative to thinking about migration as tantamount to victimhood effected by the “social forces of expulsion,” such that migrants are by definition “failed citizens” expected to produce “alternative forms of social organization,” whose minority status is tied to the sparse archives on which their truth claims can rest.6 In place of such “minor histories” of “raids, revolts, rebellions, and resistances,” a look back at a moment in the history of European colonialism offers a way to reimagine ideological and physical roving and mobility at the center of modern European statehood and belonging, and masculinity as a category defined by mobility rather than by normative stasis. This kind of redescription of colonialism is at odds with Orientalism as the name for a raw rhetorical strategy of political and cultural domination, a discourse defined by its disdain for thick description. Especially when traced historically in conjunction with a history of “liberal” ideas about the presence and uses for others in the world, Orientalism’s effectiveness has been contingent upon disparities of power tied by proximity to the sources of knowledge, and to ideas about legitimate distinctions between the rulers and the ruled.7 Edward Said’s Orientalism first clearly redefined the tenor of its titular term, which once designated the benevolent interest of some Europeans in the cultural and historical traditions of Asia. For Said the term focalized a political strategy that was hardly the “innocent” and “antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples,”8 and more precisely named the “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”9 The book made public tremendous ambivalence about the historical relationship between Europe and its ideas of the “East,” and opened a vast new field of inquiry into the relationship between European and colonial history, between Enlightenment liberalism and the politics of domination, between cultural production and capitalism, and so also into the relationship between state projects and the politics of state subjects’ identification with shifting national geographies.

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Orientalism trained a new generation of readers to focus on the coincidence of national outreach and colonial overreach, and no serious scholarship is now imaginable that remains unaware of imperialism as a formative element of state-obsessed histories and cultures such as the European. The expansion of the term’s relevance from a historical account of representation to a theoretical model descriptive of any colonial relationship provoked fierce criticism. From the interpreters accusing Said of postcolonial resentment and paranoia, to readers insisting that his was a bad methodology, critics treated Orientalism as a pseudohistorical narrative detached from all evidentiary and contextual detail that shaped the changing relationships between the colonizers and the colonized. If Orientalism, the critics argued, is a force that defines all colonial endeavor and marks all imagination of the East, then what is there to do about the records of such imagination, or about the empire itself?10 Questions about whether Orientalism has ever been a “real thing,” a historical cultural relationship marked by social and political bad faith, now appear conjoined with questions about epistemologies and documentation of empire. Under what conditions does a form of representation read as Orientalist and therefore ethically dubious? What does such an image represent and to whom, and how is it important to note its deviation from a more “realist” mode? What is the distinction between the archival document and a work of fiction about a colonial place, and how does it undermine the stability of a historian’s political and interpretive position? John Bruce was himself concerned with the authority of materials he would use in his historiography, and used the phrase “evidence of experience” to describe the ideal form of writing he was soliciting from his reputable sources. The conveyance for this “evidence of experience” was the letter, a genre presumed personal, portable, and transparent. The documents that emerged from Bruce’s work now appear in the Home Miscellaneous Series of the India Office Records, a collection that archivists have called the “rag-bag” of the British colonial archive. Eighteenth-century texts were relegated to this series in the nineteenth if they deviated from the archive’s thennormative genres, or if their content defied inclusion in revisionist narratives about unflagging imperial confidence.11 Despite the backing of Henry the Ninth, as Henry Dundas was known among those who recognized the breadth of his connections and the depth of his moving powers, Bruce’s project made little headway. This was of course possible to explain by the reluctance of Bruce’s collaborators

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to divulge any information about their actual activities in India, either out of fear of being caught in the act of betraying the trust of their employers, or because their understanding of the epistolary form and its unpredictable circulation made all disclosures potentially public and incriminating. The archival documents left behind by Bruce’s helpers demonstrate what form reporting from the colony might take in order to make all reports viable as “evidence of experience,” and how writing about such “experience” could be a kind of assignment from the employers in London reinterpreted and circulated on assignment away from home. Studying colonialism as a project that liked to assume the letter and related documentary genres to be vehicles of transparency is to watch these genres on the move, and to reenvision histories of the nation-state as a capacious construct that could and did permit detachment from the home country; it even encouraged roaming and roving. Colonialism, in this light, could be seen as an active examination of the modalities and temporalities of physical and ideological attachment to distant spaces in the name of the nation-state. It could take a range of forms (of writing), all of them contingent on the relationship of the aspiring colonizer to other men doing the work of empire, and not only vis-à-vis the colonial subjects under formation.

The Work of Knowing (Other Men) Philip Dundas and his collaborators report in these archival documents on their seemingly empirical learning about the colony, but also about the sources of confidence in their access to knowledge and its apparent superiority. Variously remembered by colonial historiography or not remembered at all, minor players in what often appears like an abstract colonizing machinery, they are also interesting historical figures whose recovery from oblivion requires some recall of the “work” they were doing, including that of “service” to a project whose scale and purpose were not clear at the time. What exactly these men were experts on, and what kind of “evidence of experience” they could write and send, is fascinating in part because the committee received orders from London that pointed out “the particular objects to which our enquires are directed,” including: 1st history of India and such part of that of China as is connected with our Trade 2nd Progress of our trade in general

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3rd Geography 4th Chronology 5th Government 6th Laws 7th Political Revolutions 8th Progressive stages of the Useful Arts, Manufactures, and Sciences 9th Ditto of the Fine Arts 10th Former and present state of foreign and international trade

Whereas the headings record assignments for the committee, Dundas and committee members are here on record as commentators on the philosophy, logistics, and viability of Bruce’s project. Once the instructions arrive in Bombay through the institutional structure and via the personal relationships among men in particular positions, they get treated as assumptions about the work and the connections that may require some study. The project of historiography becomes an assignment for a network of writers asked to produce documentation, who begin to give it a more pragmatic treatment. Where are the knowledge and information requested to be collected? How can these particular men be of assistance in the isolation of their compound, or in their distance from the office? Who are the experts they could consult? They conclude, for instance, that “the history of India has already been treated of at different times and by various authors,”12 and since such publications must be familiar to the historiographer, it would “therefore be equally vain and useless in us to attempt to make extracts from the books we might be able to collect.” They are limited as well in their language competence, but there are many gentlemen belonging to the Bombay establishment who from their knowledge of the Country language and the more extensive diffusion of the Oriental literature, may have it in their power materially to assist us with new information for the historiographer to correct errors in former accounts.

As for the knowledge not already in the books, Philip Dundas confesses, “to find new matter I apprehend will be very difficult in a Country whose natives are so little apt to change any of their habits.”13 The disquisitions of the committee are fascinating documents of what seems like a period of uncertainty about what the value of knowledge about India might be, whether as “experience” or as “Orientalism,” and about the ways commerce related to “useful” and “fine arts” practiced by the “natives,” and why such information might

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be relevant in London. If the “good” Orientalists, those interested in the indigenous arts and languages of Asia for their “liberal” reasons, could understand the history of Asia as a history in transit, here was potentially a new generation of thinkers about history arrested. Speaking for the committee, Philip Dundas informs the readers that, The remaining part of the orders of the Court of Directors relate to the progressive stages of the useful arts, manufactures, sciences and fine arts. Here again we must be under great difficulty for as the art of printing has not existed in India there can be few materials by which a knowledge of past events can be gained and much must depend on oral tradition. Most of the useful arts in India have I presume been stationary and that principally from the indolent disposition of the natives which leaves them little tendency to improve, and perhaps some of these arts are on the decline. From the nature of the climate, their wants being few, their exertions were therefore less necessary, and possibly all handicraft trades are nearly now in the same situation they were some centuries ago.14

Proceedings from these meetings entertain the idea that there are separate, sequential “Mahommedan,” Persian, and “Hindoo” traditions in the liberal and fine arts of India. Their “present state” Dundas assesses to be very defective, and if any of them ever were at a very high pitch, others were scarcely known in India. Poetry has been cultivated by the Persians and I believe by the Mahomedans, but whether in any remarkable degree by the Hindoos I know not. Various specimens of poetry have been published, I believe as much as European industry has collected. Painting I believe was never brought to any perfection in India and is at present in a very rude state.15

Mr. Taylor, a member of the committee, adds that he is inclined to think that the study of fine arts is a project with no adequate means of following with any certainty, or indeed probability of success. There can be no doubt that at times particular genius will display in Men, so as seemingly to rescue his [sic] Age and Country from barbarity, but such instances are rare, and not to be considered in a general view.16

The committee members seem to submit entire philosophical treatises on the relationship of art and society, discussing the cost and potential benefits of each one’s participation in larger projects defined

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by networks of other men. Their discussions provide some illuminating glimpses of the ways good opinion and connections could not only shape careers and provide recognizable appurtenances of masculinity and status, but also tie masculinity to forces and futures impossible to anticipate. Colonial archives document a shift in the conceptions of masculinity that had to seek sources of authority in displacement and distance, as well as in practices of liminal legality and ethical probity. The liminality or ambivalence could be justified by reference to the larger questions about the nature of the Company presence in India, its character as a tax-collecting governing authority, and the murky conceptions about the limits between their jobs and tacitly acceptable “private trading” during their years in service. One of these informant-advisors, Murdoch Brown, a plantation overseer in India, is described as a “Scotsman of considerable enterprise,” a quality evidenced by his extraordinary resourcefulness in staffing his plantation in accordance with the law obtaining for the English settlers. We find him documented on a later occasion, around 1811, discovered to have enslaved the low-caste workers on the plantation from which he then profited, arguing that his practice was a natural extension of the local custom and “Muslim law.” He was rebuked by the Advocate General for engaging in a practice that was not only “no longer a British prerogative in India,” but “particularly destructive to national honour and character.”17

Wherefore the Orient? The documentation this kind of work left behind is unlikely to produce accounts of “cultural encounters,” “intermediaries,” or “exchange.” Instead, it is material for a history that can concern itself with its own shifting sources of authority over knowledge about colonization, and with the relationship of modern historians of empire to the empire’s own writers whose documents are impossible to read as “evidence of experience.” In place of timeless, impersonal narratives of imperial confidence, turpitude, and historical inevitability, these documents can challenge the formulation of Orientalism that associates mobility and volatility with failures of state formation, and rudderless identities with exiles and refugees. While they assess India’s chances of escaping barbarity through fine arts to be very slim, the committee members voice admiration for the indigenous tradition of “the true system of Hindoo laws, religion and customs,” containing such “lessons on the political government

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of society as to convince us, we are but children in the science which is the most essential to man.”18 Not one to conceal the outlines of his political concerns, Dundas explains that the founders of the Hindoo laws and religions far from thinking like the modern French, that all men are equal, seem to have taken for the basis of their political and religious systems, the inequality that must necessarily exist among men in society, a truth which however evident it appears, yet probably cost many ages of experience and millions of lives, ’ere it could be so perfectly understood as to become, in a manner, an axiom, or a truth granted, and enable those sages to divide men into so many classes and so to circumscribe the will, passions, occupations, and duties of each class as to render them separately useful and necessary to each other, and collectively, to support, each cast according to its dignity in the state, of the general association or government.19

Consequently, the division of society into casts “will be found to be one of the most sublime” practices, “established upon principles durable, I may say, as the races of men for which they were framed.”20 Understanding “the causes of inequality of condition amongst men in society” – and here we get back to the more familiar terrain of history in transit – Dundas claims, requires no effort of genius; nor stands in need to be made evident, of all the metaphysical reasoning which J. J. Rousseau and others have bestowed on the research. They are to be found in the conformation of the Man himself, which is so varied, as not to have offered two individuals perfectly similar probably since the creation.21

What was initially a statement of disdain for the artistic barbarity of the “natives” becomes a paean to their unappreciated political wisdom. Dundas concludes that, the foolish influence drawn from the philosophical truth, “that all men are born equally independent of each other,” viz that therefore they are or ought to be so in society is so absurd, that it is hardly credible any civilized people should have been for a moment misled by it. Those who admit of its truth, even with its explanatory addition of “in the eye of the law” will/must without hesitation pronounce the Hindoo system to be towards the major part of the community, a compound of ridiculous prejudices, and habits, totally inconsistent with liberal or enlarged ideas. But the sage who has examined into the nature of man, and discover’d in what his real happiness consists, who has observed the good and evil

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incident to him in this life, and weighed the benefits and disadvantages accrued to him from society, knows, that happiness is not the result of riches or of rank in society, but of that security which gives him peace of mind, however confined his sphere. We will say, that the Hindoo system of government was, compared to all the others we know of, as the works of mature judgment to the production of infancy.22

It is hard to provide a confident reading of this jubilant report about the visionary nature of Indian government, which was being phased out by his employers just as Dundas was praising it. The difficulty of interpretation is tied to the spotty knowledge about the protocols of reading texts such as these, about the kinds of readers who received them in the eighteenth century, without knowing what to make of a figure such as that of Philip Dundas, in the face of his uses for Orientalism. The text lets him appear to be a political and cultural theorist of colonialism, but what part was that of being in “colonial service?” Were his positions on the history of Indian government listened to, or was he more like a well-connected bloviator given the opportunity to sound like an imperial visionary to those who determined the direction of colonial government? What to make of the paradoxes of his desire and disdain for historical change and meritocracy, or the love of technological advancement among the political “children” of Britain and France swayed by a “J. J. Rousseau?” This is how we may converge on “minor biography” and “careering” as a helpful mode of accounting for colonialism and Orientalism, only not in the old, dry and dusty way, designed to lionize or vilify those who found themselves near or inside what now clearly looks to have been a colonial project. In the new sense, the study of persons and careers, especially their swerves and moves in the homosocial world of the colonial office, and among those it excluded, could be a way to see how available conceptions of the colonial project determine our need for Orientalism. The men on the committee are called on to make authoritative statements about the role of “history,” “art,” and “culture” in what is now recognized as a colonial project for which the Orientalizing of colonial subjects became a crucial element of the civilizing mission for the later empire and postcolonial resentments. Yet their uses for Orientalism in their late eighteenthcentury writing, in the banal process of going to work at an office for a modern state, is then relevant because the administrative office still works for the state in this way. Even when its officials physically remain in the home country, the office disseminates national imaginings about the significance of other places for historical narratives

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about imperialism, producing mobile identities, including “economic migrants,” “refugees,” and “cosmopolitans,” without having to spell out the logic that produces these vital distinctions. In the limitations of its documentation, that is, in its commitments to writing as a means of recording and elucidation, we could see, in place of a vast and unmitigated expansion, a series of projects that require migration, but give differential treatment to the persons on the move. The migrants moved by an emergent empire negotiated the dependence of individuals on the protection of a nation-state, their proximity to the rhetorical strategies of national consolidation, but also their willing eschewal of commands issued by the state and by the empire as its integral component. They could become European men-in-the-know, and be at liberty to express ambivalence about Europe as a model of political or epistemological authority. They could observe no history of art or architecture in India, but have great respect for the idea of government in such a place, since it showed none of the disdain for tradition and familiarity exemplified by “J. J. Rousseau” and the people of France. The documentation such men produce is informative less about the indomitable force of empire, and more about the way the ambiguity of these men’s relative position and performance of gender in the office creates the conditions for modern subjectivity, where an affiliation with the project of nation-state-building can be treated as a mirage, or just a temporary job for one man to do in the company of others. Colonialism as a project we know by its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents is then a cultural and a state logic in which we continue to participate, a process long in the making and difficult in ending, and rarely a grand and easily grasped monolith that happens to others and somewhere else.

Notes 1. LaCapra, History in Transit, p. 1. 2. LaCapra, History in Transit, p. 2. 3. For the political history of Bruce’s assignment, the outlines of his correspondence project, and the sociability of the official letters, see Jokic, “Commanding Correspondence.” 4. Sketch, Home Miscellaneous Series (hereafter HM) 456C. 5. I provide one account of the hierarchies of European colonial masculinity, and of the kinds of texts in which they were expressed, in Jokic, “Sentimental Documentation.”

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6. Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, p. 6. Nail proposes a “kinetic history” of migration to replace the statist ideas about its history (presuming the primacy of both state and stasis). Such movement is always said to result from loss of status, such that the migrant is by definition a failed citizen (pp. 2–3). 7. For accounts of the relationship between liberalism and empire, see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, and Pitts, A Turn to Empire. Pitts suggests that a shift occurred from a generous understanding of difference faced by early imperial envoys to the colonized regions to an avowed supremacist confidence of the nineteenth century and later, which took European empire to be a kind of manifest destiny for the conquered and for their invaders on a civilizing mission. 8. Said, Orientalism, p. 333. 9. Said, Orientalism, p. 3. 10. For a more detailed discussion of the place of Orientalism in scholarship about eighteenth-century colonialism see Gallien and Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism.” 11. See Pearson, Introduction to A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents. 12. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 28. 13. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 28. 14. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 37. 15. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 41. 16. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 197. 17. Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire, p. 116. 18. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 385. 19. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 389. 20. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 391. 21. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 393. 22. Sketch, HM 456C, p. 407.

Bibliography Gallien, Claire and Olivera Jokic, “Eighteenth-Century Orientalism in Contemporary British Historiography and Literary Criticism,” Literature Compass, 12(4), 2015, pp. 121–33. Jokic, Olivera, “Commanding Correspondence: History and ‘Evidence of Experience’ in the Letterbook of John Bruce, the East India Company Historiographer,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 52(2), 2011, pp. 109–36. Jokic, Olivera, “Sentimental Documentation: Writing the Empire of Feeling in Memoirs of Asiaticus,” in Ellen Welch and Vanessa Alayrac (eds), Intermediaires culturels/Cultural Intermediaries, Études internationales sur le dix-huitième siècle/International Eighteenth-Century Studies Series (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014), pp. 259–82.

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LaCapra, Dominick, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). Major, Andrea, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Nail, Thomas, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). Pearson, J. D. (ed.), A Guide to Manuscripts and Documents in the British Isles Relating to South and South-East Asia, vol. 1 (London: Mansell, 1989). Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1979). Sketch of the Proceedings of the Committee (Philip Dundas, Robert Taylor, Ps Maister, Nathan Crow, H. Scott, and Jos. Boden) appointed to collect materials for the Company’s Historiographer, Bombay, 31st July 1798, Home Miscellaneous Series 456C, India Office Records, British Library, London.

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Chapter 8

The Turkish Refugee as Vagrant Slave: Spaces of Disconnection and Dispossession in Ishmael Bashaw’s Refugee Narrative Claire Gallien

Today, when we think of populations placed in a “state of statelessness,” the image that comes nearly instantaneously to mind is that of the refugee – an individual defined by the UNHCR as “someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.”1 It certainly is important to note that the category is an historical construction2 and that critics would be ill-advised to dehistoricize and essentialize the term by applying its contemporary meaning retroactively – and in particular to the period that interests me here, namely the eighteenth century.3 The term “refugee” is not a twentieth-century invention. The Oxford English Dictionary records one of its first appearances in Christopher Wase’s 1671 translation of Benjaminus Priolus’s The History of France under the Ministry of Cardinal Mazarine. The earliest definition of the term in English solely referred to “[a] Protestant who fled France to seek refuge elsewhere from religious persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries.” For instance, John Evelyn mentions in his diary “[t]he poore & religious Refugieès who escaped out of France in the cruel persecution,”4 and The Tatler demands that “all the French Refugies in those Dominions . . . be naturalized.”5 In the novel Roxana (1724) by Daniel Defoe, the narrator, a native of France who fled to England, pretentiously observes: “I retain’d nothing of France, but the Language: My Father and Mother being People of better Fashion, than ordinarily the People call’d Refugees at that Time were.”6 Forced conversions to Catholicism began in France in the early 1680s, and – with the Revocation of the Edict

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of Nantes in 1685 – Protestantism was outlawed in the kingdom, which forced tens of thousands of French Huguenots to flee their country for the Netherlands, America, and England, especially London, where they contributed to the expansion of Calvinism, to the development of commerce, particularly in the silk industry, and to intellectual life.7 This definition of the refugee as a (French) person fleeing his or her country because of religious and political persecution was reinvented toward the end of the eighteenth century during the French Revolution.8 The seventeenth- or eighteenth-century refugee is “stateless” in the sense of being rejected by his or her state, and therefore deprived of the protection that the state is supposed to provide to its subjects. In the book entitled The Turkish Refugee (1797), on which this chapter focuses, the statelessness of the refugee causes extreme precariousness, the negative effects of which can only be lessened by the charitable actions of individuals. Although “refugee literature” did not exist as a genre for the period that concerns us here, the refugee question or situation was certainly addressed in a number of texts, including court and parliament proceedings, pamphlets, sermons,9 and even novels, as in the case of Defoe’s Roxana.10 In the main, they were stories that focused on a particular national or religious group, such as the French Huguenots or the “poor Palatines,” that related how that group was persecuted, escaped persecution, and sought protection in Britain. These texts were published in order to attract the attention of readers to the groups’ plights, trigger compassion, and encourage the practice of Christian charity. Also, crucially, refugee tales served not only the refugees but also indirectly the English authors who would use these tales as political platforms to express opinions on the role of the state and the church, on foreign and national governments, and on the rule of law. Ishmael Bashaw’s The Turkish Refugee belongs to this literary category. The title page presents the “author” as a Turkish merchant, who was taken prisoner by a Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean, who fled Catholic persecution, arrived in England, and converted to Protestantism. A point of clarification with regard to voice must be added at the outset. In this chapter, I use “author” to refer to the English writer who co-opts Bashaw’s voice and pens the story, and “narrator” to describe the impersonation of Bashaw in the text. This distinctive terminology is in reality one that I borrow from the publisher, who intervenes twice in the book – in the preface and at the very end in the last sentence, which is italicized. Both the publisher and the author are anonymous and, apart from a few details that may be drawn directly

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or deduced from the narrative, very little is known of them. As far as the author is concerned, the publisher informs us in the preface that he is one of the “ministers of the gospel” who knew Bashaw.11 This element of identification is minimal but bears some significance concerning aspects of the presentation that is given of Bashaw as protagonist. As for the publisher of the text, no indication is left in the book that could help us to identify him. His preface is dated February 14, 1797, which means that eight years elapsed between the moment Bashaw’s story was committed to paper and the moment it was published. I will return to this question of dating the narrative later in the chapter as the publisher actually mentions two dates for the manuscript, which may be mere heedlessness on his part or an interesting coincidence. Conversion is a key moment in Ishmael Bashaw’s experience as a refugee, and it is one that not all refugees shared. The Huguenots did not have to convert upon their arrival in England, so their assimilation was relatively uncomplicated.12 The other important group of refugees in early-modern England were the Palatines, who had fled religious wars in Germany in the early eighteenth century. Their arrival in England triggered much debate, as it was unclear whether they were Protestants or Catholics, whether they should be forced to convert or be repatriated; in other words, what to do with them and how they would integrate. They were initially settled in the camps of Blackheath and Camberwell. Some writers attacked the immigrants and their defenders.13 Other political commentators, such as Daniel Defoe in his Review, criticized the actions of the government, welcomed immigrants as additions to the public wealth, and suggested that the refugees be relocated to regions that were sparsely inhabited.14 In contrast to Defoe’s and other writers’ treatment of the Palatine refugees, the case of Bashaw is presented as a singular one – singular in the sense of being different from other refugees’ journeys, and in the sense of an experience that is individual and not collective, or at least not presented as such. No link is established between him and a larger Muslim community that would have sought refuge from Spanish persecution in the Mediterranean15 and established themselves in England. Despite his conversion to the Christian faith and his marriage to an English woman called Elizabeth Forms,16 the Turkish refugee is presented as someone who has never properly resettled and probably never will, unlike other refugee groups and other vagrant communities, whose moves were monitored under the 1662 Settlement Act and its subsequent revisions.17 Interestingly enough, and this is an essential point I will return to in the course of

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the chapter, the English author denies similarities between Bashaw and other “successful beggars and mendicants”18 – that is, those who did not claim poor relief from parish authorities and were not enrolled in workhouses – but asserts Bashaw’s total isolation from people he was likely to have interacted with on a daily basis. In other words, the Turkish refugee cannot escape the cycles of violence, persecution, vagrancy, and poverty he was caught in, except when succored by charitable ministers, land owners, and other members of the elite. Help does not come horizontally, on the basis of intra-class relationships. The narrative provides a frame in which relief can only reach Bashaw from above, from a position where the one who is succoring is necessarily socially superior. However, a dissonance exists between the discursive strategies deployed here and real life. The narrative forces the refugee into a cycle of perpetual returns, while the individual in fact arduously moves on. Why is it, this chapter asks, that the narrative must operate in circles and offer no escape from them? Why is it that it offers no ending and that the end returns to the beginning as in a loop? Why is it that the Muslim “state of being stateless” is diegetically framed in a way that solely relies on precariousness? Why is integration persistently denied? This chapter compares Ishmael Bashaw’s The Turkish Refugee with other types of eighteenth-century testimonial writing in English, including tales of captivity, enslavement, and vagrancy, and in doing so unpacks the political and ideological frames underpinning the construction of the figure of the Muslim refugee. In addition to questioning the ambivalences and paradoxes of charity and pity, my chapter also builds in a longue durée reflection on issues pertaining to writing in the name of refugees, marketing refugee literature, and the elaboration of xenophobic and Islamophobic discourses. The permanent instability of the Turkish refugee is mirrored in the narrative that is attributed to him and which never settles in a specific genre. Indeed, it borrows from numerous generic strands of travel writing, with or without conversion episodes, namely refugee narratives, the picaresque novel, vagrant narratives, and slave narratives. I argue in this chapter that Ishmael Bashaw’s story comes closest to the slave narrative, which is why I end my analysis with a reflection on its intersections with the genre, and discuss the literary and ideological implications of this near-identification, but I also emphasize how it deviates from the slave narrative, leaving the reader with the impression that Ishmael Bashsaw and his story never quite fit anywhere.

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The Turkish Refugee, as the title page notes, is “a narrative of the life, sufferings, deliverances and conversion of Ishmael Bashaw.” This description links Bashaw’s text to other conversion narratives of the period, those of Europeans “turning Turk” but also of Muslims turning Christians. Yet contrary to the familiar “turning Turk” episode, which had been exploited in early-modern drama to symbolize and exorcise xenophobic and religious fears of Islam,19 the Muslim refugee is not “coerced” into conversion but pleads for it. As for the comparison with other early-modern Muslim conversion stories in Europe, Jocelyne Dakhlia rightly points out that the tales normally follow a teleological construction, with conversion as target and endpoint of the story, while in Bashaw’s experience, conversion happens midway into the narrative and does not represent security, nor does it imply integration.20 Conversion and the oath of allegiance to the monarchy were the two steps which were supposed to place the Muslim stranger under the protection of English law. After conversion, the refugee is no longer reduced to “bare life” or life exposed to death (zoe) but can claim rights to a protected life and to the recognition of a personal and social identity (bios).21 This newly won Christian visibility – the title page flags that Bashaw was “publicly baptized” and the narrative later recounts in greater details the episode of conversion and baptism – was premised on the rendering invisible of his Muslim body, including the cutting of his moustache, shaving of his head, and change in dress.22 Therefore, conversion implies a violation of the body; and, as the story shows, it was no guarantee of protection, let alone integration, as this episode is immediately followed by several more years of vagrancy. The narrative ends in London in 1787 but Bashaw’s travails continued, as the English publisher indicates in his preface that Bashaw, “hitherto disappointed in his hopes of a lasting settlement and find[ing] occasion still to lead that wandering life,” was encouraged to publish his story for the purpose of “procuring . . . any substantial and permanent relief.”23 Furthermore, Bashaw retained his alien status, even in 1797 when the book was published, at least in the eyes of the publisher, who presented the fundraising project as an occasion for readers to perform their duty of “hospitality to strangers.”24 Bashaw may also be presented as the hero of a journey taking him across the Mediterranean and then Britain, and his narrative lists, in an episodic style, the various places he called at and people he met on the way, whether the encounters were felicitous or less so, as when he was attacked by highwaymen or abusive butchers. But

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the narrative is often consumed with toponyms to the extent that the map of Bashaw’s journey does not serve the purpose of description, analysis, or imagination. The story starts with the account of Ishmael Bashaw’s birth in 1735 in Adrianople (Edirne) and informs the reader about his family background, his life as a young adult working for the Ottoman administration as “janizary” in charge of collecting revenues, and then as merchant in the Mediterranean Sea. These autobiographical indications are a feature of the genre of the travel narrative, where the traveler explains where he comes from before embarking on the journey, but they are also present at the beginning of stories published by vagrants and former slaves.25 Then Ishmael Bashaw recounts how two Spanish privateers attacked his ship and he was taken prisoner with his Greek clerk, Antonio, in Cartagena, and employed as a slave on Spanish galleys and in public construction work.26 Maximiliano Barrio Gozalo in “Esclaves musulmans en Espagne au XVIIIe siècle” indicates that the phenomenon of captivity and its representations were common on both sides of the Mediterranean, and that this was due to the intensification of raiding between the Ottoman empire and Spain in the eighteenth century. The experiences Bashaw relates, namely quarantine in Cartagena and forced labor on galley squadrons and on public construction sites, are congruent with the experience of Muslim captives in the Mediterranean at the time.27 Bashaw only adds his time in prison for insubordination. The English author seems to have collected information about this imprisonment directly from Bashaw, since it includes personal details. For instance, whereas the administrative archives used by historians talk about the standards of food and hygiene that prison authorities had to comply with when holding captives in quarantine, Bashaw remembers having to ingest pork and wine. Furthermore, the English author compounds these personal memories with secondary sources. For instance, when Bashaw discusses his five years in solitary confinement in the Spanish prison of Madrid, a footnote references “Howard’s account of it in his book on foreign prisons.”28 Another case of narrative “intervention,” which I would rather call narrative alienation, since it turns the testimonial into an alien text propagating untruths against Bashaw, occurs as the English author intermixes his own demeaning and racist comments with Bashaw’s testimony. Jocelyne Dakhlia notes that the stereotypes in Bashaw’s narrative primarily concern Eastern illiteracy, lasciviousness, and violence.29 Even though he came from a well-off family

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of silk manufacturers, had a brother accompanying the Ottoman ambassador to Algiers as his secretary,30 was himself a tax collector able to interact with people in at least four languages – Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, French, and possibly Greek through his clerk – and was married to an English woman, the author insists time and again on Bashaw’s inability to articulate proper English, calling him “a man of no education” and “very imperfectly acquainted with the English language.”31 The trope is repeated in the story itself and a footnote accounts for Bashaw losing his way by describing him as incapable of drawing a sensible itinerary: “The reader will think this traveller’s plans very preposterous, and this part of the narrative will appear very extraordinary. The facts can only be resolved into his indiscretion and ignorance.”32 Additionally, the English author underlines through Bashaw’s voice the refugee’s presupposed illiteracy, which feeds into the stereotype of the uncivilized Arab – to the point of making nonsensical remarks, such as “few among the Turks are able to write or even to read their own language.”33 Similarly, Bashaw is made to insist on his wantonness, on his insatiable sexual desires, especially for Jewish and Christian women: Being of lustful disposition, I indulged it in the manner the Turks frequently do, especially those in affluence and power, by having recourse to the wives of Jews and Christians; whose situation in Turkey is in this respect truly deplorable, being continually liable to this brutal violence, without any means of defence, or their husbands of redress. The recollection of these shameful and barbarous excesses fills me with bitter remorse.34

This paragraph shifts from one register to the next, and these moves when added up lead to the desubjectivation and concomitant tropologization of Ishmael Bashaw. By desubjectivation, I mean that the words he is made to utter in the narrative are very unlikely to be his in real life. By tropologization, I imply that the individual becomes a prototype through which a negatively loaded characterization of a larger community is achieved: the author is writing not merely about Bashaw but rather about male Turks, and even the contours of that category remain vague enough to include Arabs and Muslims, if and when needed. This unacknowledged tendency to misrepresent the individual in order to pass judgment on the collective is compounded at the generic level, where the “singular” voice of the refugee is in reality covered with and obscured by literary genres familiar to the English author and his readers, such as the picaresque novels of

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Henry Fielding published in the 1740s and other vagrant and slave narratives, such as Carew’s The Life and Adventures of BampfyldeMoore Carew in 1745 and Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in 1789. Here, the violence of stealing the voice of the refugee is heightened by the confessional mode used at the end of the paragraph, where Bashaw is made to acknowledge his wantonness publicly, beg for forgiveness, and learn continence in England.35 Similarly, the refugee elaborates on the violence of Ottoman rule when he describes in great detail the corporeal punishments administered against magistrates who have violated the law. The description is so meticulous and the emphasis on the cruelty of punitive actions so remarkable that the lines read more like a passage abstracted from a European travel account than a transcription from Bashaw. The refugee says that in his capacity as janissary he was forced to witness, in the meting out of Ottoman justice, acts of “shocking severity” and “of barbarity as were too much for my spirits, fierce and cruel as I naturally was,” including “flaying the skin from the head of the delinquent while he is alive” and bringing it stuffed to the Grand Signior.36 The stereotype of the barbarous and violent Turk, which was already present in English Renaissance drama,37 is reasserted at both the individual and the collective levels. Bashaw specified that he had been called three times to witness these executions before quitting his position. Yet this emphasis on execution by flaying as characteristically Turkish is puzzling: first, it was a form of torture also used in medieval Europe, and, second, it is not mentioned in English history books or travel narratives. The two main historiographical references available to English readers at the time were The Turkish History by Richard Knolles (1545–1610) and Sir Paul Rycaut (1628–1700), revised by Rycaut in 1699 and abridged for the 1701 edition, and A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709) by Aaron Hill (1685– 1750). In Knolles and Rycaut, death by flaying is mentioned only once, in the case of the governor of Cyprus being defeated by the Ottoman army, and it is described as an exceptional and perfidious event.38 Hill, who was extensively read and quoted because of the encyclopedic nature of his account, provides a list of corporeal punishments used under Ottoman law but never mentions flaying as one of them.39 These tropological sequences cut into the storyline and are dissonant with the tone and style of the rest of the account, not to mention with how Bashaw might have expressed himself had his account been directly transmitted and not rewritten. What

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these entangled additions do, beyond merely stating or commenting, is remind readers of the porosity and vulnerability of the refugee’s voice, which is taken away time and again from the refugee himself, and of the dominance and control of the dispenser of charity and holder of the pen, so that it becomes possible to raise consciousness for a “humanitarian” cause while articulating denigrating remarks against vagrants, Turks, and Muslims. This only appears as a contradiction so long as campaigning for the right to human dignity of a Turkish refugee turned Christian convert is meant to entail a capacity to confront and resist a system that produces such “cases.” Bashaw’s narrative is purposely written to present the refugee as the victim of violence and to lament the lack of hospitality and charity in British society. In presenting the refugee as stateless and rootless, the storyline focuses on some elements in the life of a refugee, while omitting intra- and inter-sectional support, but it also crucially reflects the desire of the English author to focus on destitution instead of replenishment. Repeating by narrative means a pattern of deprivation, the author empties a space that English readers can invest in emotionally and uses that pattern to extort feelings of benevolence. Even though the first-person pronoun is used throughout the book, marking it as a (fictional) autobiography, the real author is the English writer who took down Ishmael Bashaw’s oral account, and rewrote, translated, and (re)formulated large parts of it, so that it could be published and sold for the benefit of the refugee and his family. The first lines of the preface indicate that: The following singular Narrative was taken, unsolicited, from the lips of the unhappy stranger to whom it relates, and is printed without any other view, than to his benefit and that of his family, who appeared to be great objects of compassion. It is penned with the utmost simplicity, without aiming at any sort of embellishments, and without attempting to vindicate or explain any thing that may appear marvellous or inconsistent in the facts related, or censurable in the person himself. If any readers should find any circumstances mis-stated, it is requested that they will candidly impute it either to the ignorance of the narrator, (who is a man of no education, and very imperfectly acquainted with the English language, and even with his own country, which he left in early life;) or to the writer’s having misunderstood him, who found no small difficulty in procuring from him a clear and orderly narrative.40

In other words, the “I” of Ishmael Bashaw is dispossessed twice: by being forced into the category of Muslim refugee, and by being divested of his own voice and disconnected from his real self. We are

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thus confronted with a case of ambivalence where Ishmael Bashaw is not a fictional character – we know for a fact that he was buried at Norwich cemetery41 – but the “I” as used in the narrative is a creation of the English author. This semiotic consideration underlines the political and ideological uses of narration. As evidenced here, the narrative of compassion demarcates between potential bestowers (the readers) and recipient (Ishmael Bashaw) of compassion, and the point is not so much to let the “stranger” speak as to constitute the self, the emotional subject, in reaction to the narrative of the refugee. In this prefatory paragraph, which I interpret as the programmatic literary dispossession of the refugee, language, as key distinction between the human and the animal, is in fact barely granted to the refugee, for while the writer disavows mediation – taking the story directly from Bashaw’s lips – he paradoxically underlines the inarticulate nature of the refugee and the “difficulty in procuring from him a clear and orderly narrative.” In fact, the paradox is only superficial, since the claim that the story was directly drawn from the source was not intended to indicate Ishmael Bashaw’s articulateness but rather to underline the reliability of the English writer, who cannot then be blamed for having invented the tale. On the other hand, the fact that lack of articulation should then be underscored in the opening page has both a specific signification (you, reader, may trust me, the editor/translator/writer of this tale) and a generic meaning, obviating any potential connection between this specific text and native literary traditions and instead activating relations with other texts in English that feature illiterate poor people, strangers, and former slaves.42 For instance, since it shares a number of elements with the genre of travel writing, the narrative could have been framed as a riḥlah (“voyage”) or masālik (“roads”) type of text.43 The term riḥlah is used in Arabic to refer to a journey and more particularly a journey taken to seek divine knowledge, including the pilgrimage (hajj) to holy sites. The founder of the genre, Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217), developed a form of writing that was both creative and informative and was copied by later travelers including Juzayy, the scribe of Ibn Battuta (1304–68/9) in Tuḥfat an-Nuẓẓār fī Gharāʾib al-Amṣār wa ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār (“A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling”), and also al-Sharishi, al-Abdari, and al-Makrizi.44 The other tradition is known collectively as the Kitāb al-Masālik w’al-Mamālik (“Book of Roads and Kingdoms”) and its function was to map and describe trade routes.45 Usually the Persian geographer Ibn Khordadbeh (820–912) is cited as one of the founders

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of the tradition, along with al-Balkhi in Ṣuwar al-aqālīm (“Pictures of the Climes”) written in 921. Al-Istakhri’s Kitāb al-Masālik w’alMamālik (951) is a revised version of al-Balkhi’s, and Ibn Hawqal’s Ṣūrat al-’Arḍ (“Picture of the Earth”) was a revision and extension of the Masālik w’al-Mamālik of Istakhri. Despite the lack of Islamic sanctuaries and centers of knowledge in Western Europe, which was, according to Nabil Matar, the main reason why Muslim travelers had not written much about Europe until the early-modern period,46 travel accounts by Muslim traders, diplomats, and captives existed and are now being translated and analyzed by historians and literary critics.47 Early-modern Muslim travelers to Europe did not write mere lists of toponyms and distances, but mixed personal anecdotes with general information on the land, people, and governments of the countries they visited and stayed in. These were written in Arabic, except for The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), which was written directly in English by the Bengali author. This literature is a potential intertext that remains repressed in Ishmael Bashaw’s account. Rather, as I suggest in this chapter, the English author diverts The Turkish Refugee from the travel literature tradition and strengthens its affiliation to the slave narrative. I therefore read this literary disconnecting as the symbolic reenactment of the experiences of dispossession to which Bashaw as refugee in England was subjected. The English author invests and reorders Bashaw’s story in a way that clarifies a political agenda and religious mission. The story is organized in two main parts. The first part of the journey, before Bashaw reaches England’s shore, fulfills two functions – one of which is to provide information on the background of the traveler and his itinerary, and the second is to open up a liminal space where changes in Ishmael Bashaw’s status may occur, from administrator of the Ottoman Porte, to captive, prisoner and slave, and finally refugee under British law. Bashaw mentions the many Turkish slaves imprisoned in Madrid, apprising his readers of the scope of the commerce in Muslim slaves and the dangers that the Mediterranean Sea represented for them. He then recounts in great details his and his clerk’s escapes from the prison in Madrid, through an oak forest, and on to Porto, giving a taste of adventure to the tale and appealing to the conscience of the “humane reader” who “imagines to himself the terror [they] were in.”48 The “large spreading oak” forest between Spain and Portugal, between dangerous captivity and safe haven, functions as a threshold foreshadowing the more permanent refuge that Bashaw would be seeking under the English oak. It comes therefore

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as no surprise that the first meeting with the English consul in Porto, named John White, should be presented in a way that highlights their unequal positions and that brings to the fore recognizable elements of contemporary slave narratives. Bashaw still wears his shackles when he meets with the consul and instantly submits: “I threw myself at his feet and begged for mercy. He very kindly addressed me, and said, ‘Get up, Ishmael, you shall not be hurt’.”49 This patronizing tone, in the voice of someone who is in power and control, not only reassures Bashaw, it also fixes identities. At this moment in time, Bashaw transitions from captive to refugee even while he remains in a position of subservience toward English authority. This description of bodies engaged in an asymmetrical power relation recalls scenes in slave literature and encourages readers to compare the Turk’s vagrant and precarious life in England not to that of other “rogues” but to that of slaves who have escaped from the clutches of their masters. Contrary to all probability given Bashaw’s supposed illiteracy, the refugee notes that the consul thenceforth held conversation “in a very affable manner,” treating him with “indulgence and generosity.”50 The point here is less to underline Bashaw’s understanding and sharing of social norms and codes with his English host than to stress English sociability in all circumstances, and to encourage the recognition and endorsement by English readers of these norms. Arriving in London, the narrator insists on his foreignness and his loneliness, even though this seems again improbable. After three years spent with the English consul in Porto and arriving in the cosmopolitan city of London, he still insists on being “a perfect stranger” and on being able to “meet with none of my countrymen.”51 Stressing Bashaw’s complete seclusion is one of the strategies used by the author to construct the figure of the refugee as a person who has lost not only all moorings to a place, but also all social connections, and who is therefore powerless. The story of the refugee then is not a story told by the refugee or a story that would make sense for him, but a story that constructs a figure it then exploits for emotional, moral, political, and religious reasons. The episodes of Bashaw’s journey selected by the English author are those that exemplify the narrator’s “deplorable misfortune” and “extreme sufferings,”52 namely repetitive episodes of abuse and mugging, which are a common feature of picaresque novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Repetitions may burden the style of the narrative but they serve the purpose of the English author, which is not only to attract pity for the refugee

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but also to blame lower-class people in general for all the ills happening to refugees: “I met with much abuse from the common people, carters, porters, &c. some of whom pulled me by my whiskers, and others threw me down.”53 Before being attacked with a knife by two robbers on the road from Edinburgh to Glasgow, Bashaw reports being “abused as a Turk,”54 indicating racism as well. Without denying that such acts happened, it must be acknowledged that according to the English author violence – and benefaction for that matter – is an individual act and not the result of systemic pressure. The violence of a system that does not protect against poverty and that does not create the conditions to eradicate that poverty, as well as the violence of a discourse that presents “strangers” as illiterate, lascivious, and bloodthirsty, simply did not register. Violence gets recorded when meted out by other marginalized groups but not by social structures. One aspect of systemic violence has to do with the status of being a former captive or slave, which penalizes the victim of violence. Bashaw never indicates a particular desire to settle in England and does not fantasize about British governance. He comes to England on the understanding that his brother was trading in London and that he would find a supportive community to secure a passage back to Ottoman lands: “I frequented the Exchange and the coffee-houses, in hopes of meeting with somebody with whom I might return home, but in vain.”55 But he soon understands that his return home is going to be compromised: “I was the less eager to go back on account of the shame of having been in captivity.”56 Shame as a form of social exclusion closes down the possibility of integration and keeps the former captive in a state of limbo, forced to stay while not allowed to settle. Yet this form of violence does not get acknowledged by the English author. What he complains about is the violence of lower-class people and the lack of safety on English roads, which are compared to the wilderness of the “deserts,” and in the metropolis of London, which is considered much more dangerous than Constantinople.57 The incident in London when Bashaw is robbed of all his money is presented as the event that impels years of vagrancy, and the remainder of the narrative is devoted to the listing of places Bashaw was directed to and of the people who provided charity along the way. Although Bashaw is termed a “refugee,” his actual situation in England was one of “vagrancy.”58 This discursive blocage, which keeps Bashaw a “refugee” rather than a “vagrant,” does not simply signify the impossibility of a Muslim Turk integrating into English society. I would rather argue that the English author’s perspective

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accounts for the invisibility of other marginal sections of society in the narrative. As a clergyman, the author may have been in charge of the relief or “containment” of the poor in his parish. Tim Hitchcock talks about a system of “containment” of the “deserving poor” in eighteenth-century England: the ones who had acquired settlement certificates and been taken in at a workhouse would be redeemed through charity and their own work.59 Yet he also mentions the existence of other vagrants who, for better or for worse, continued with their lives of begging, and who, just as Bashaw did, slept under the butcher’s shambles or warmed up at the blacksmith’s furnace.60 These “underserving” poor, who were unwilling or unable to receive parish “protection,” were represented as dangerous hordes roaming the countryside and the outskirts of cities, threatening citizens, and in the case of women spreading venereal diseases. Therefore, precisely because Bashaw is rescued by charity he cannot be represented as a vagrant, but must be presented as the victim of vagrancy. In a situation where vagrants are systematically depicted as robbers and criminals, no room can be left for solidarity among them or between them and Bashaw. The literary consequence of that is not only the separation in the text between Bashaw and other vagrants but also the disjunction between his narrative and other narratives of vagrants recorded by philanthropic societies. Indeed, as I am discussing vagrant literature, it is important to note the multiplication of texts from early-modern proclamations, ordering and directing the relief, employment, and punishment of the poor, to complaints lodged by mayors and aldermen and the advice provided in response to them, individual proposals and schemes for the reduction of poverty and vagrancy, and the essays and reports of the Philanthropic Society, which, as the title page of one its pamphlets informed readers, was “instituted in 1788 for the prevention of crimes, and for a reform among the poor.”61 The Society and its branches devised means to regulate charity, and one strategy was to publish the narrative of former vagrants. One example is The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew (1745). It was presented as an account “related by himself” but in fact the text used an external narrator who depicted Carew in the worst light imaginable, as a stroller, a robber, a liar, and a person of many guises, who would trick people, especially women, whose charity he would use to finance crime: Once more, This Narrative may be of Use as it sets forth the general Misapplication of what is bestowed in Bounty on Strolers, whose Title to an Alms, appears only their tatter’d Dress, well-toned Complaints,

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apparent, and too often counterfeit Weakness, Lameness, &c . . . and every Farthing blindly bestowed, that tends to encourage Idleness and Wondering, is far from being, or deserving the Name of Charity.62

The same charitable communities whose function it was to police and organize the distribution of relief concur with the law in maintaining distinctions and producing narratives that would justify their position in the social hierarchy. In this configuration any convergence of struggles and any customary support and routine interactions between the likes of Carew and the likes of Bashaw is precluded. In Scotland, at Dalkeith, Bashaw encounters the Duke of Buccleugh, who invites him to the kirk.63 This first step toward conversion occurs midway through the book and takes the form of an interfaith dialogue about the nature of the scripture and of the prophets Jesus and Muhammad. Bashaw expresses a deep desire to convert, and his hopes are actually thwarted on numerous occasions before conversion and baptism are granted. This episode of interfaith dialogue offers an occasion for the English author to underline the degree of ignorance supposedly afflicting Bashaw. By placing the refugee in such a negative light, the author not only reiterates popular tropes presenting Muslims as ignorant and barbaric, but also emphasizes the fact that Bashaw’s access to spiritual and intellectual elevation could only be achieved through his adherence to Protestantism, which should not surprise us given the author’s status as “minister of the gospel.”64 The author’s prejudices and ignorance concerning Islam are displayed in the dialogue between Bashaw and the Duke of Buccleugh. Bashaw recalls that he “was much struck with the singing, and the reading of the scriptures, both which were new to me; for in the Turkish mosque there is no singing, nor is any book made use of; the emir (or priest) pronouncing every thing memoriter.”65 If memorizing (hifz) is indeed the foundation of Islamic sciences and thus held in great respect, it is not possible that Bashaw as a Muslim would claim that there is no singing and no reading in the mosques, which is an untruth. What was perhaps meant here is that there is no singing and reading during service. Even this is debatable since prayers, especially at mosques, are to be delivered in the form of recitation from the Qur’an, involving rules of pronunciation (tajweed), intonation, and caesuras (tarteel). The English author’s lack of knowledge about Islam is also evident in his confusion between the title of emir (commander) and imam (the one delivering the Friday khutbah or sermon). In addition, his prejudices against Islam are apparent in his confirmation of Orientalist tropes, such as

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calling Islam the religion of Muhammad (“Mahometanism”66) and Muhammad an “impostor.”67 Yet the scene of the interfaith debate is relevant and interesting to scrutinize not only as it reveals the ignorance of the English author but also for the ways in which it relates to two genres at the same time: to the riḥlah tradition in Arabic, which was most certainly unknown to the English author and his readers, and to the slave narrative tradition, which was the subtext that the author actually exploited. The point is that what could have been written in the form of the riḥlah tradition, with an interfaith debate where the Muslim traveler manages to convince his Christian host that Jesus is not the son of God, gets transformed into a stock scene of the slave narrative depicting slaves receiving pastoral instructions before conversion.68 Even though Bashaw changed his status in crossing the Channel from slave to captive, and then refugee, the subtext and literary affiliation of his story remain deeply associated with literature of and about slavery. Apart from the conversion episode, precariousness and violence are also key elements connecting the Turkish refugee’s narrative with other slave narratives, exemplified by The Life of Olaudah Equiano. The publisher notes in the preface that Ishmael Bashaw’s “journey to London, with which his narrative closes, was taken in the year 1789,” but that the publication of his story was much delayed. Apparently, in 1789, Bashaw thought he would finally settle down, but his hopes were dashed and he had to take up yet again a life of wandering and begging, which accounted in the end for the publication of his narrative in 1797.69 As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the 1789 date that appears in the preface is inconsistent with the 1787 date indicated at the end of the narrative. It may of course mark mere negligence on the part of the publisher, but it seems to me interesting that the date 1789 should appear in the preface, as if the publisher was inviting readers to locate Bashaw’s story in the same year that another slave narrative was published, namely The Life of Olaudah Equiano, which is considered as a paradigm of the genre.70 The first great antislavery petition campaign in 1787 initiated what Leo D’Anjou calls “a battle for the public mind” over the slave trade.71 By including the names of those who succored Bashaw, the author also allows readers to retrace a charity network that involves many members of nonconformist churches, including Calvinists and Quakers. These were the same religious groups that were active during the 1787 abolition campaign, raising public opinion and petitioning Parliament. Thus, the narrative serves their moral self-promotion and aims at extending a network that was already visible to a general public of readers.

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In this particular context, it makes sense that the editor would use the form of the slave narrative to arouse public indignation, and to raise Christian consciousness over Ishmael Bashaw’s case and focus on the hardship and injustices the refugee suffered along the way. Bashaw’s marriage is presented as yet another singular adventure, but one which does not provide him with any form of stability, since no sooner did he marry Elizabeth Forms than they started traveling, first to the Netherlands, hoping to get a passage on a ship to Smyrna, but then back again to England. The narrator recounts with irony how he invited his wife to spend the night at “the butcher’s shambles” in Ipswich and after a night of frost and snow how they would warm themselves at “a blacksmith shop” and finally get a bed at the “public-house.”72 The account is also full of details concerning the management of cities and the people in charge whom Bashaw solicits along the way, such as the provost whom Bashaw approaches after being mugged on the road to Glasgow, the alderman at Ipswich who signs a pass for Bashaw to continue his journey to Norwich, and the justice of the peace in Norwich. Passes are used by the refugee for applying to public facilities or soliciting people: “I applied with the pass to a constable, who kept the Dolphin public-house. We here got some refreshment, which I offered to pay for, but the landlord, affecting great kindness, would take nothing.”73 All these elements indicate Bashaw’s daily interactions and his capacity to navigate the system. He also obtains temporary employment in a small metalworks and sells his utensils at the market. Yet the narrative places the emphasis not on elements of integration but on elements of rejection, listing physical and verbal abuses, with the case of the butcher in Norwich, who “severely beat [him],”74 and the butcher in Newark who eventually is fined for abusing and swearing oaths against Bashaw.75 After Bashaw’s first child is baptized and dies, the question of his own baptism comes to the fore again, but conversion is repeatedly denied to him until he reaches Spalding and stays there for eight months of religious tutorship and eventual baptism. As a foreigner, Bashaw is given instruction from a book designed for the conversion of “Indians,”76 indicative of a form of differential integration. Conversion implies for Bashaw a complete renouncement of his former identity, marked by physical transformation (change in dress, removal of the turban, cutting of his whiskers), but that outward transformation and the inward one (if one takes his conversion to be genuine) do not easily translate in a life that would be finally stabilized. Just after Bashaw’s baptism, he meets with abuse on the road to Black Barnsley and is ill-treated by the justices of the

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peace, who have him and his wife imprisoned because he is a Turk, and presumably an infidel.77 Bashaw spends an entire year in Bridewell prison, in conditions which the author emphasizes were worse than those of his years of captivity in Spain.78 This again is a sign of the English author’s intervention and redirection of the narrative toward the pamphlet form, using Bashaw’s account to make a case against the failure of the justice system. Unlike typical Muslim conversion narratives or other travel narratives, Bashaw’s journey does not move forward. It is full of diversions and delays, of restrictions and returns, as when Bashaw and his wife “proceeded to Lincolnshire, for the third time.”79 Toward the end of the narrative, Bashaw tells his readers of being “desirous of getting into some other business, by which I might earn a livelihood, without the necessity of roving from place to place,”80 and of depending on letters of recommendation for safe passage and employment. But his subsequent attempts to settle are thwarted and the narrative foregrounds disagreeable affairs that are sometimes mitigated by the intervention of benefactors. The deaths of Bashaw’s children at a young age are all recorded and used to raise the compassion of readers: “The affectionate parent will sympathize with me in reading the account of this severe trial . . . The tender mother will also drop a tear.”81 The narrative ends without an ending, which surely is indicative of the hastiness with which the story was collected, but which also underscores the non-linear nature of the refugee narrative itself: Being worn down with difficulties and disappointments, and weary with being tossed about from place to place, I determined upon taking a journey to London, in hopes by the recommendation of friends in the country, of getting such assistance as might enable me to become an inhabitant in some other place, where I might spend the remainder of my days in peace, and subsist by my honest labour.82

The publication of the book is proof that the dream never materialized. “Here Mr. Bashaw’s narrative ends. This journey to London was undertaken in the year 1787. For the issue of it the Reader is referred to the Preface.”83 Bashaw’s voice, co-opted by the English author and framed by the English publisher, is not only trapped by others who control his narrative, it is also brought back to its very beginning. The story ends very abruptly, and in a sense it mirrors the episodic, unpredictable, and dangerous turns of events that were constitutive of Ishmael Bashaw’s life. The end offers no conclusion, but rather an invitation to return to the beginning, mirroring the

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unsettled state of the refugee who has to travel back to places he formerly visited in order seek help from the people he once knew. As this chapter argues, the story of Ishmael Bashaw borrows from several literary traditions (refugee literature, travel literature, slave literature) but belongs really nowhere. This generic indeterminacy and the limited interest of the storyline may also account for a general lack of engagement on the part of literary critics. With the exception of Jocelyne Dakhlia, the book has only been mentioned very briefly by Nabil Matar at the end of his essay in Malik’s Anti-Muslim Prejudice: Past and Present, as an early form of Islamophobia that was even worse than the prejudices against former black slaves: “despite his total willingness to anglicise he remained an object of unwavering prejudice. While an African slave in North America could liberate himself and become a man of property and possession . . . [t]he ‘Turk’ remained poor and ostracized.”84 Nabil Matar also offers a summary and short analysis of the book in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery and underscores here again the thorough ostracism of the Turkish or the Muslim Other.85 In this chapter, I have presented the first extensive exploration of The Turkish Refugee, and I show how the plot is structured in a way that emphasizes displacement, dispossession, precariousness, instability, and xenophobic violence. I also reveal how the narrative itself symbolically reenacts the dispossession of the Muslim refugee by silencing his voice, reordering his story, disconnecting it from Eastern literary traditions, and connecting it to slave literature. However, I do not, as Nabil Matar did, draw any general conclusions about the differences in levels of racism and ostracism between Blacks and Turks or Muslims, and would not argue from the specific cases of Bashaw and Olaudah Equiano, for instance, that the integration of the “Moor” is even more remote than the integration of the former black slave. I would not claim either that Ishmael Bashaw’s ever-deferred integration seals his status as ultimate Other. As I have tried to indicate, the figure of the Turkish refugee as impoverished and abused stranger is a textual construction that feeds into a range of xenophobic and Islamophobic prejudices on the part of the English author, and that also serves his philanthropic mission. This description of the Turkish refugee as absolutely destitute, ostracized, and estranged flies in the face of other modes of interaction and integration from below that the historical archive and the philanthropic text are bound not to record. But it would make readers prisoners of the text to base our understanding of the possible realities of Ishmael Bashaw’s experiences exclusively on what the English author tells us.

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Notes 1. UNHCR, What is a Refugee? 2. Bhabha, “Embodied Rights,” pp. 3–32; Akoka, “Crise des réfugiés ou des politiques d’asile?” 3. For an account of the modern definition of the term see: Shaw, “The British, Persecuted Foreigners,” pp. 119–42. 4. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 4, p. 552. 5. Bickerstaff, The Tatler, §2. 6. Defoe, Roxana, p. 2. 7. See Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage and The Huguenots of London. 8. See Carpenter, Refugees of the French Revolution. 9. See, for instance, The Duty of Relieving the French Refugee Clergy Stated and Recommended (1793), Williams’s The Good Samaritan (1793), and Address from the Committee for the Relief of the French Refugee Clergy and Laity (1796). 10. Along with Defoe’s fiction, we also find a literature of semi-fictionalized life stories such as The French Convert (1696), The Case of John Chabbret (1706), Corn-Cob’s Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (1787), in addition to Bashaw’s Turkish Refugee (1793). 11. “[Bashaw] brought with him recommendations from many respectable and well known friends in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, which induced several ministers of the gospel to exert themselves on his behalf. At this time it was that one of them, being greatly struck with his case, took it down in writing, with a view to print it for his [Bashaw’s] benefit” (Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. ii). 12. See Gwynn, Huguenot Heritage, Huguenots in English Sea Port Towns, and The Huguenots in Later Stuart Britain 13. See Addison, The Examiner. 14. Defoe, Review, and A Brief History of the Poor Palatine Refugees (1709). See also Otterness, “The 1709 Palatine Migration,” pp. 8–23. 15. In this respect, Ishmael Bashaw represents not an isolated case but an instance of a larger population of Muslim slaves in eighteenth-century Spain. See Barrio Gozalo, “Esclaves musulmans.” 16. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 22. 17. On the question of poverty, vagrancy, and settlement legislation, see MacFarlane, “Social Policy and the Poor,” pp. 252–77; Landau, “The Eighteenth-Century Context of the Laws of Settlement,” pp. 417–39, and “The Regulation of Immigration,” pp. 541–71; and Hitchcock, “Rough Lives,” pp. 197–214. See also the online project “London Lives.” The 1662 Settlement Act defined settlement according to place of birth, thereby assigning the poor to their parishes of birth, restricting the possibility of labor migration for the poor, and providing the legal basis for their expulsions. Incentives were provided for justices to hand down unwarranted vagrants, and a whole system of commuting on

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18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

Claire Gallien carts was put in place to expel and relocate them. Under the auspices of the 1662 Act (revised in 1685 and on numerous occasions throughout the eighteenth century), outsiders arriving in a new parish would have to notify parish officers of their presence. Thus, Bashaw indicates his presence to aldermen when arriving in new towns, usually bringing with him letters of recommendation to facilitate his passage and resettlement. The two new Acts of Settlement in 1691 and 1697 modified the system to make it more manageable by allowing settlement rights to people who could prove their links to a given parish via birth, marriage, apprenticeship, or regular employment, or who could rent a house worth £10 per annum, pay parochial taxes, or serve as a parish officer. In fact, it appears that by then forcible removal of people would only be possible when the person sought relief from parish authorities. This system remained in force throughout the eighteenth century until the passage of the New Poor Law in 1834. I borrow this term from Hitchcock, “Rough Lives,” p. 198. Parker, “Preposterous Conversions,” pp. 1–34; Vitkus, Turning Turk; Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion,” pp. 35–67; Babaoǧlu Balkiş, “Defining the Turk,” pp. 185–93; Bergeron, “Are We Turned Turks?,” pp. 255–75. Dakhlia analyzes three accounts, namely Chinano’s, Rigep Dandulo’s, and Isuf Basha’s, in comparison with Bashaw’s. See Dakhlia, “Assujettis au baptême?,” pp. 161–87, especially part I, “Tropes et absences historiographiques,” and part IV “Un Turc écossais?” I am working here with Giorgo Agamben’s distinction between zoe and bios in Homo Sacer. “He then sent for a barber to cut them off and shave me. The bishop took my whiskers and put them into a paper. He then bid me take off my Turkish dress, and ordered a suit of cloaths to be brought for me. When I had put them on, he said, ‘now Ishmael, you look like an English man and a Christian’” (Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 30). Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. iii. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. iv. On the conventions of slave narratives, see Olney, “I Was Born,” pp. 46–73. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, pp. 5, 6. The historiographical literature is expansive but in addition to the article quoted in the main text, namely Barrio Gozalo, “Esclaves musulmans en Espagne au XVIIIe siècle,” the following have been useful in the elaboration of this chapter: Moureau, Captifs en Méditerranée; Epstein, Speaking of Slavery; Colley, Captives; Kaiser, Le commerce des captifs. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 6. Dakhlia, “Assujettis au baptême?” Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 14.

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38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

205

Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. i. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 17. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 7. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 3. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 15. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 3. On this question, see D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama; Vitkus, Three Turk Plays and Turning Turk; Burton, Traffic and Turning; Dimmock, New Turkes; and Birchwood, Staging Islam in England. Knolles and Rycaut, Turkish History, vol. 1, pp. 331–2. See Hill, A Full and Just Account, pp. 16, 18. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. i. I would like to thank Jocelyne Dakhlia for pointing this out to me. The obituary section of The Gentleman’s Magazine for the year 1815 mentions his death: “At Norwich, Ishmael Bashaw, a Turkish merchant, from Constantinople. He was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and escaped wonderfully to England, when, becoming a convert to the Christian faith, he was publicly baptized at Spalding, co. Lincs. He was born at Adrianople in 1735.” Olney mentions gaining literacy as a key feature in slave narratives. See “I Was Born,” p. 50. See Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Travellers; Netton, Seek Knowledge; Khair, et al., Other Routes; Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore. Pellat, “Ibn Djubayr.” Pinto, Medieval Islamic Maps. “[A]nd not because they had no knowledge, no expertise, or no interest in it as has been assumed by Orientalists.” See Matar, In the Lands of Christians, pp. xiii–xv. See, in particular, Matar, In the Lands of Christians, but also Fisher, The First Indian Author in English, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, and Counterflows to Colonialism; and Chambers, Britain through Muslim Eyes. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 10. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 12. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 14. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 14. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 15. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 16. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 21. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 15. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 15. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 15. In fact, Bashaw’s situation can be equated with that of “the marginal migrant,” as Leslie Page Moch calls members of this social group in

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206

59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

Claire Gallien her analysis of eighteenth-century continental migration. By this term she means a person with “no routine migration itinerary” but who had to be constantly on the move in search of food and work: “Even those with a work plan met with misfortune and, lacking protective labor solidarities or group help, turned to vagrancy and begging to get by. Those who were crushed by the experience of migration usually lacked the social solidarity of harvest workers and masons: they become part of the ‘floating population’ that roamed the countryside of the late eighteenth century, filled the outskirts of the great cities, and peopled the workhouses, prisons, and hospitals. Many crossed the thin line that distinguished poverty from indigence and harvest worker between jobs from professional beggar or permanent vagrant” (Moch, Moving Europeans, p. 88). Hitchcock reminds us that historians rely on records that discuss the “deserving poor” who were assisted by the parish, and that nothing can be determined through these sources about “the casual poor, the wandering peddler and unsettled drunk” (“Rough Lives,” p. 197). On the other hand, the “successful” beggars who were able to secure a living from begging and other pauper professions are largely absent from the records and therefore ignored by historians (p. 198). See Hitchcock, “Rough Lives,” and Fumerton, Unsettled. The Philanthropic Society, n. p. Carew, The Life and Adventures, p. v. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 19. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. ii. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 19. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 40. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 20. For instance, in chapter X of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, the former slave recounts his conversion to the faith of Jesus Christ. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. iii. In addition to Olney, “I Was Born,” see also Bugg, “The Other Interesting Narrative,’’ pp. 1424–42. D’Anjou, Social Movements and Cultural Change, p. 193. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 25. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 25. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 27. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, pp. 37–8. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 29. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 31. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 32. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 37. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 41. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 45.

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82. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 47. 83. Bashaw, Turkish Refugee, p. 48. 84. Matar, “Britons and Muslims in the Early Modern Period,” pp. 7–25, p. 24. 85. Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, pp. 172–5.

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Shaw, Caroline Emily, “The British, Persecuted Foreigners, and the Emergence of the Refugee Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi (eds), Refugees and Cultural Transfer to Britain (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 119–42. UNHCR, What is a Refugee?, http://www.unrefugees.org/what-is-a-refugee. Vitkus, Daniel J., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Vitkus, Daniel, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Williams, William Bell, The Good Samaritan; or, Charity to Strangers Recommended. A Sermon, . . . By the Rev. William Williams . . . Published by Request, and for the Benefit of the Said Clergy (High Wycombe: S. Cave, 1793).

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 43 adventurers, 77–8, 80, 86, 88 as mercenaries, 81–2 Agamben, Giorgio, 18, 28, 32, 34, 44 Aliens Act, 128 Allen, Jessica L., 53 Almeida, Joselyn, 89 Anderson, Benedict, 170 Andrews, William L., 52 Anthropocene, 2 Antigua, 55–6, 68 Anti-Slavery Society, 52, 55, 56 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 3 autobiography, 151, 162, 164 Bacon, Francis, 153, 161, 163 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 91 Bashaw, Ishmael, 3, 6, 185–202 as a refugee, 195, 196 as a slave, 189, 195 The Turkish Refugee, 185–202: author of, 186, 189, 192, 198, 201; conversion in, 188, 198, 200; cyclical narrative of, 187, 201–2; dating of, 186, 199; as masālik, 193–4; as riḥlah, 193–4, 199; as a slave narrative, 187, 189, 194, 199, 202 as a vagrant, 196–7 Bauman, Zygmunt, 18, 26, 32–4, 45 Belich, James, 3 Bergson, Henri, 19 Bethell, Leslie, 91 Bildungsroman, 10, 151 Black Atlantic, 51, 62 Black Hawk, 6, 8, 10, 101–9, 111–12 as an exile, 102 Life of Black Hawk, or Ma-KaTai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, 102:

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constellation in, 103, 106–9, 112; epic temporality in, 103, 108, 112; and Antoine LeClaire, 102, 104, 105; oral tradition in, 105–7; and J. B. Patterson, 102, 105 Bolívar, Simón, 77, 78, 82, 91 Bowles, Commodore William, 90 Blaufard, Rafe, 78, 91 Brown, Matt, 77, 78, 79 Brown, Murdoch, 178 Bruce, John, 170–1, 174 Burke, Edmund, 126, 132 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 132 Burke, Peter, 8 Burney, Frances, 127, 132 Brief Reflections Relative to the Emigrant French Clergy, 129, 132 as an exile, 127, 129 Journals and Letters, 127 The Wanderer, 3, 8, 125–43: coastal space in, 129–30, 133; French emigrants in, 125, 128–9, 132; and the Gothic, 136–7; precarity in, 126–7, 130, 133–4, 136–7, 142; Stonehenge in, 140–2 Butler, Judith, 18, 44 Buzard, James, 8, 25, 126 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 17, 24 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 24, 25, 26, 31 Don Juan, 3, 7, 9, 17–44: capitalism in, 17, 18, 20; as epic, 9, 17, 18, 19, 37–41; homo beatus in, 18, 24, 29, 44, 45–6; homo sacer in, 18, 28–9, 32, 34, 44, 45; modernity in, 18, 38, 41; ottava rima in, 9, 18, 19, 29, 39–41, 44; precarity in, 9, 17, 18, 32, 36, 37, 43, 44; the

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Index tourist in, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 32–6, 42, 43–4; the vagabond in, 17–20, 22, 24, 26, 32–6, 44 as an exile, 25 Calder, Angus, 53–4 Campbell, Thomas, 54 Carew, Bampfylde-Moore, 191 The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, 197 Catlin, George, 109, 110 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 3, 38 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2 Chartier, Roger, 159 Cheek, Pamela, 134, 136 citizenship, 1, 134, 172 Cochrane, Admiral Thomas, 78, 82, 83, 86, 87 liberation of Chile, 83 as a mercenary, 80, 89, 90–1 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil, 82–3 representations of, 79 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 134 Colley, Linda, 128 colonialism, 7, 170–3, 175, 181 British, 65–7, 88 and nationalism, 88 and Orientalism, 180 settler, 104, 114 Spanish, 77, 81 and statehood, 173, 181 Connell, R. W., 79 Conrad, Peter, 40 Craciun, Adriana, 132 Criollos, 77, 78, 79 Croker, John Wilson, 40 cultural rhetorics, 102–4 Dakhlia, Jocelyne, 188, 189, 202 D’Anjou, Leo, 199 Davies, Carol Boyce, 52 Dawson, Graham, 81 De Certeau, Michel, 103 Defoe, Daniel Moll Flanders, 195 Review, 186 Robinson Crusoe, 3 Roxana, 184, 185

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213

Deretić, Jovan, 152 Devine, T. M., 63 diaspora, 7, 8, 61 African, 51, 54 Scottish, 53, 59 diaspora-ization, 51, 53 Dickens, Charles, A Tale of Two Cities, 130 Doody, Margaret Anne, 128, 130, 133, 134, 135, 142 Duggett, Tom, 138 Dundas, Henry, 171, 174 Dundas, Philip, 171, 175, 176–7, 179–80 Dyer, Gary, 35–6 East India Company, 6, 7, 8, 10, 170–1, 178 Eltis, David, 3 Enlightenment, 6, 10, 152–4, 161–2, 165, 173 and modernity, 164 Equiano, Olaudah, 191, 202 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, 191, 199 ethnography, 7, 8 exile, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 127, 129, 171 Fénelon, Telemachus, 151, 160 Ferguson, Moira, 67 Fielding, Henry, 191 Tom Jones, 195 Foucault, Michel, 24 Fuller, Margaret, 8, 10, 101–4, 108–16 The Dial, 108, 110 Summer on the Lakes, 101, 109–16: classical mythology in, 103, 109, 114–15; collation in, 103, 109–12; editor persona in, 110–12; translatio studii et imperii in, 103, 109, 112–15 as a tourist, 102, 104, 109, 115 Fumerton, Patricia, 6 genre, 10 globalization, 33 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, Sorrows of Young Werther, 38 Gozalo, Maximiliano Barrio, 189

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214

Index

Graham, Maria, 79, 87–8, 89 Journal of a Residence in Chile, 82 Grand Tour, 34, 160, 164, 165 Greenblatt, Stephen, 5 Hall, Captain Basil, 78, 84–8 Extracts from a Journal, Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, 82 Hall, Stuart, 51 Harrison, William Henry, 101 Hayward, Jennifer, 88 Heinowitz, Rebecca Cole, 89 Hill, Aaron, A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 191 historiography, 170, 174, 175–6 Hitchcock, Tim, 197 Hunt, Stephen, 135 Ibn Jubayr, 193 Ibn Khordadbeh, 193 India, 171, 176–7, 178, 180–1 Indian Removal Act, 102 industrialization, 2 Islamophobia, 187, 188, 190–1, 202 Jackson, Andrew, 102 Jarvis, Robin, 134, 135 Johnson, Claudia L., 129 Katz, Cindi, 17, 20 Keane, Angela, 127 Knight, Alan, 81 Kurdi, Alan, 31 LaCapra, Dominick, 170 Lambert, David, 68 letters, 8, 10, 174 transparency of, 175 Lima, 78, 82, 83–4, 87–9 Livingstone, David, 154 Locke, John, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 153 Lokke, Kari E., 132 Lukács, György, 38, 44 Lynch, John, 84 MacQueen, John, 63, 68 Marx, Karl, 2

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masculinity, 8, 9, 81, 172 aristocratic, 89 British, 8 Criollo, 8 hegemonic, 79–80 mercantile, 80–2, 89, 91 military, 78, 79, 88, 89, 91 and mobility, 173, 178 Western, 172 Matar, Nabil, 194, 202 Mergenthal, Silvia, 140 Messerschmidt, James, 79 Miers, John, 79, 87, 88, 89 Travels in Chile and La Plata, 82 migrant narratives, 3 migration and domesticity, 2 and empire, 172, 181 forced, 7, 155 French, 125, 128–9, 132 and gender, 7, 9 literary history of, 7, 10 mass, 6 mercantile, 9, 155 as metaphor, 4 military, 7, 9, 155 and precarity, 17, 44–6 and race, 7 representations of, 4 Scottish, 63–4 Serbian, 150, 154, 156–9 and subjectivity, 6 twenty-first-century, 1, 10, 44–5, 170 voluntary, 6, 9 Misch, Georg, 159 mobility, 4, 172 and aesthetics, 7 and literary form, 9, 10 literary study of, 5 and masculinity, 173, 178 modernity, 5 and mobility, 5 and the nation-state, 5 uneven development of, 6 More, Hannah, 126, 140, 143 The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, 139 Moritz, Karl Philip, Anton Reiser, 152 Murphy, Carmel, 131

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Index Nachumi, Nora, 130 Nail, Thomas, 2, 4, 17, 19, 162 regime of motion, 4, 19 Napoleon Buonaparte, 21 nationalism British, 126–8, 132–3 Sauk, 108 Native Americans, 7, 9, 112–13 Anishinabek, 111 Cherokee, 111 and dispossession of land, 101, 108, 111–12, 115–16 Meskwaki, 101–2, 105–8, 112–15 Ojibwa, 110 and oral tradition, 105 Ottawa, 110 Sauk, 8, 10, 101–9, 112–15 novel, 3, 38, 44, 151, 187, 190, 195 Obradovic, Dimitrije Dositej, 6, 10, 150–3, 155, 158–66 Letter to Haralmpije, 159 The Life and Adventures of Dimitrije Obradović, 151–3, 159–66: as autobiography, 151, 159, 163–4; as Bildungsroman, 151; Enlightenment tendencies of, 152, 165; representative status of, 152, 155, 165–6 and Serbian migration, 158–9 as a teacher, 160, 161, 166 as a traveler, 153–4, 159–62 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 82, 83 Orientalism, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180 Paéz, José Antonio, 79 Paquet, Sandra Pouchet, 56 Philanthropic Society, 197 Piesse, Jude, 2 Pitt, William, 128 Powell, Malea, 102–3, 106, 109 Pratt, Mary Louise, 114 precarity, 9, 17, 18, 32, 36, 37, 43, 44–6, 55, 185, 187, 192, 195, 199, 202 Prince, Mary, 3, 6, 9, 51–2, 62, 63, 68–9 as an exile, 53, 55, 57, 68

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215

The History of Mary Prince, 7, 51–3, 55–7, 68–9: editorship of, 52–4, 56–8, 62, 67; as a slave narrative, 51, 54–5 slavery and, 54–7 Pringle, Thomas, 7, 9, 52–4, 55, 56, 57–69 African Sketches, 59 and the Anti-Slavery Society, 52, 55, 69 “The Bechuana Boy,” 54, 58, 65 and colonialism, 65–7 “The Emigrant’s Cabin,” 61–2 “An Emigrant’s Song,” 60, 61 “The Exile’s Lament,” 61 The History of Mary Prince, 52–4, 56–8, 62, 67 Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, 59, 62, 64, 67 “To Scotland,” 62 and Scottish diaspora, 53, 59–63 “Song of the Bushman,” 65, 66 Prokopovich, Feofan, 158 Racine, Karen, 77, 80 Ramirez, Luz Elena, 91 refugee(s), 1, 5, 7, 8, 17, 31, 54, 58, 66, 125, 134, 178, 181 definition of, 5, 184 French, 128, 130–1, 185 origins of, 184–5 precarity and, 185, 187, 192, 195, 199, 202 statelessness and, 184–5 religious conversion, 67, 186, 188 to Christianity, 58, 188, 198, 200 forced, 157, 184 Roberson, Susan, 110 Rodríguez, O., 84 Romanticism, 2, 4 and nationalism, 127 and Salisbury Plain, 138–9 and wandering, 125, 134–6 Ross, John, 111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions, 151 Said, Edward, 4, 41, 43, 44, 173–4 Salih, Sara, 52 Salisbury, Jay D., 136

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216

Index

Salisbury Plain, 126, 138–9 San Martín, Francisco José de, 8, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84 liberation of Lima, 78, 82–4 and military masculinity, 78, 84 representations of, 79, 83–91 Schoolcraft, Jane, 109, 110, 111 Scotland, 53, 59, 61–3, 69 and empire, 63, 67, 178 and migration, 63–4 and slavery, 63, 68 Serbia cultural identity of, 150, 155 First Serbian Uprising, 153, 166, Great Migrations in, 150, 156–7, 164, 165, 166 and Habsburg Empire, 150, 154, 155–8 and Ottoman Empire, 150, 154–7, 160 and Western Europe, 150–1, 153, 154–8 Serbian Daily News, 154 Settlement Act, 186 Sharpe, Jenny, 58 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound, 21 Shum, Matthew, 58 Simpson, Erik, 81 slave narrative, 9, 187, 189, 194, 199, 202 and Christianity, 10 and diaspora-ization, 51–2 slavery, 10, 51, 55–8, 63, 189 abolition of, 52, 63, 64 Scotland’s role in, 63, 68 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations, 2 Smith, Charlotte, 126, 132, 133, 143 “Beachy Head,” 131 The Emigrants, 131, 132 Smollett, Tobias, Roderick Random, 195

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South Africa, 52–3, 58–9, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69 Southey, Robert, 4, 39 Stabler, Jane, 40 Steele, Jeffrey, 109, 111 Steiner, George, 5 Stevenson, William Bennett, 79, 86–8, 89, 90 A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of 20 Years Residence in South America, 82 Strand, Eric, 36, 41–2 subjectivity, 10 Taylor, Diana, 104–5 Thelwall, John, 126, 140, 143 “Pedestrian Excursion,” 139, 141 The Peripatetic, 131, 134 Thomas, Sue, 68 Thompson, Judith, 1 tourism, 7 travel, 153–4, 162 travel writing, 3, 10, 26, 28, 109, 111, 151, 187, 189, 200 Masālik, 193–4 Riḥlah, 193 vagrancy, 8, 187, 196–7 Vale, Brian, 78, 83 Vizenor, Gerald, 111 Walker, Cheryl, 108 Wars of Independence, South American, 77–82, 89, 90, 91 Williams, Helen Maria, 91 Withers, Charles, 154 Wolfson, Susan, J., 132 Woolf, Virginia, 91 Wordsworth, William, 4, 126, 134, 140 Lyrical Ballads, 139 Salisbury Plain, 138, 143 Wyrtzen, Lesley, 44–5 Xhosa, 65, 66

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