Orientalism transposed : the impact of the Colonies on British culture

First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies.The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies.Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 List of Contributors 8 List of Figures 10 Introduction 16 1 Orientalism transposed: the 'Easternization' of Britain and interventions to colonial discourse 16 I. Identity, agency and masquerade 26 2 Resistance and performance: native informant discourse in the biographies of Maharaja Sayaji Rao III of Baroda (1863-1939) 28 3 About face: Sir David Wilkie's portrait of Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt 61 4 Cross-cultural cross-dressing: class, gender and modernist sexual identity 78 II. The aesthetics of the colonial gaze 102 5 The memsahib's brush: Anglo-Indian women and the art of the picturesque, 1830-1880 104 6 To see or not to see: conflicting eyes in the travel art of Augustus Earle 132 7 'Beyond the stretch of labouring thought sublime':Romanticism, post-colonial theory and the transmission of Sanskrit texts 155 8 Cameron's photographic double takes 173 III. Intercoloniality 202 9 Death, glory, empire: art 204 10 Tipu Sultan of Mysore and British medievalism in the paintings of Mather Brown 217 Bibliography 235 Index 256 "The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalizing discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies."--Jacket