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Epilogue

Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, James Morier, and the Queering of Hajji Baba

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2020

Humberto Garcia
Affiliation:
University of California, Merced
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Summary

The epilogue ponders how the media reorientations that vexed Central and South Asian travelers to pre-1857 Britain sedimented over time, exposing an impotency latent in the discursive power formation now known as orientalism. The classic case study is James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, which I interpret as satires against the English dandies and damsels who adopted Persian dress and demeanor to display social exclusivity rather than against Iranians like Abul Hassan Khan: the Persian ambassador whom Morier hosted in England in 1809–1810 and 1819. The ambassador’s queering in the English news circuit prompted Morier, a social climber anxious to claim masculine gentility, to project Londoners’ transculturation in Qajar fashions onto an Iran wallowing in Regency effeminacy – the Anglo-Persian dandy whose uncertain sexual orientation recoils on the British empire’s homosocial gentlemen.

Type
Chapter
Information
England Re-Oriented
How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857
, pp. 294 - 315
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Epilogue
  • Humberto Garcia
  • Book: England Re-Oriented
  • Online publication: 06 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862486.009
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  • Epilogue
  • Humberto Garcia
  • Book: England Re-Oriented
  • Online publication: 06 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862486.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Epilogue
  • Humberto Garcia
  • Book: England Re-Oriented
  • Online publication: 06 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862486.009
Available formats
×