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“There's No Place like Home” - At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain. By Antoinette Burton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 278. $55.00 (cloth). - King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes. By Neil Parsons. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xviii + 322. $50.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Peter Hoffenberg*
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Abstract

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Type
Reviews
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

1 The secondary literature on British and colonial travel and travel writing is now rather impressive. Among the helpful studies are Buzard, James, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,” 1880–1918 (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 155–61, 285331CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eisner, Robert, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993), esp. pp. 125–76Google Scholar; Fussell, Paul, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Ghose, Indira, ed., Memsahibs Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth-Century India (New York, 1999)Google Scholar, and her Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, N.C., 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pemble, John, The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Special Issue: Travellers, Journeys, Tourists,” Australian Cultural History, no. 10 (1991)Google Scholar. Oftcited nineteenth-century travelogues from the empire include Burton, Richard F., Goa, and the Blue Mountains; or, Six Months of Sick Leave, ed. Kennedy, Dane (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; Fay, Eliza, Original Letters from India, ed. Forster, E. M. (London, 1986)Google Scholar; and Trollope, Anthony, Australia and New Zealand (London, 1873)Google Scholar.

2 Clare Midgley suggests that such studies are among the “New Imperial Histories.” See her review, New Imperial Histories,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 4 (1996): 547–53Google Scholar.

3 Burton refers to Mukharji, in At the Heart of the Empire (pp. 44, 46, 179, and 186)Google Scholar, and in Making a Spectacle of Empire: Indian Travelers in Fin-de-Siecle London,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 127–46Google Scholar. Mukharji visited Britain in 1886 as an employee of the government of India, for which he was the highest ranking South Asian in the Department of Revenue and Agriculture in Calcutta. As an assistant for exhibitions and assistant curator in the Art and Economics section of the Indian Museum, he was charged with helping to organize and advertise trade goods before, during, and after the popular Colonial and Indian exhibition at South Kensington. Official reports were quite complimentary about his efforts.

4 An example of this trend for South Asian history is Bayly, C. A., “Returning the British to South Asian History: The Limits of Colonial Hegemony,” South Asia 17, no. 2 (1994): 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Political connections among radicals on both sides of the Atlantic are drawn by the contributors to Jacob, Margaret C. and Jacob, James R., eds., The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (Boston, 1984)Google Scholar.

6 A. G. Hopkins considers transnational economic, political, and institutional issues in light of the recent emphasis on cultural ones in “Viewpoint: Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History,” Past and Present, no. 164 (1999): 198243Google Scholar.

7 Unlike many other overseas visitors to Britain, de Tocqueville spent time in and commented on Ireland. See de Tocqueville, Alexis, “Journey to Ireland (1835),” in Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. Mayer, J. P. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1988), esp. pp. 118–92Google Scholar.

8 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, 1963)Google Scholar. See Edward Said's extended comments on Fanon and his work in Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. Among the most suggestive studies of travel as a way to link the metropole and the colonies and, in doing so, to challenge more commonly assumed distinctions is Grewal, Home and Harem.

9 Sinha, Mrinalini discusses such issues in “Britain and the Empire: Toward a New Agenda for Imperial History,” Radical History Review 72 (1998): 163–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Twain, Mark [Clemens, Samuel], The Innocents Abroad; or, the New Pilgrims' Progress (San Francisco, 1869)Google Scholar, and The Innocents Abroad: A Book of Travel in Pursuit of Pleasure (London, 1870)Google Scholar.

11 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Coombes, Annie E., Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1994)Google Scholar; Green, Jeffrey, Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain, 1901–1914 (London, 1998), esp. pp. 4267Google Scholar; Lindfors, Bernth, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington, Ind., 1999)Google Scholar; and Tabili, Laura, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994)Google Scholar.

13 The sense of “distance” between colonial performers and their metropolitan audiences is emphasized in Benedict, Burton, “International Exhibitions and Nationalism,” Anthropology Today 17 (1991): 59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The phrase comes from Shepard, Ben, “Showbiz Imperialism: The Case of Peter Lobengula,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. McKenzie, John M. (Dover, N.H., 1986), pp. 94112Google Scholar.

15 For an alternative position, see Fryer, Peter, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984)Google Scholar, and Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction (London, 1988)Google Scholar. Reflections on the twentieth-century role of race and on the importance of the nonwhite ethnic and religious communities in the British Isles include Madge Dresser, “The Color Bar in Bristol, 1963,” in Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1, History and Politics (New York, 1989), pp. 288316Google Scholar; Gilroy, Paul, “There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, 1987)Google Scholar; Kushner, Tony and Lunn, Kenneth, eds., Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Waters, Chris, “The Pink and the Black,” Transition 69, no. 1 (1996): 210–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the essays collected under the title of Minorities,” in Samuel, Raphael, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 3, Minorities and Outsiders (New York, 1989), esp. pp. 230–55, 270–87Google Scholar.

16 The National Portrait Gallery holds negatives and proofs from this 1905 tour. See “Pigmies [sic] at the House of Commons,” 1905, negative no. 22,270.

17 Waugh, Evelyn, Scoop (London, 1938)Google Scholar.

18 Lutfullah, , Autobiography of Lutfullah: An Indian's Perception of the West, ed. Tirmizi, S. A. I. (New Dehli, 1985), esp. pp. 403–35Google Scholar.

19 Cited in Levi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John, and Weightman, Dorren (New York, 1974), p. 44Google Scholar.

20 Burton, Antoinette, “Contesting the Zenana: The Mission to Make ‘Lady Doctors for India,’ 1874–1885,” Journal of British Studies 35, no. 3 (1996): 368–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and From Child Bride to ‘Hindoo Lady’: Rukhmabai and the Debate on Sexual Responsibility in Imperial Britain,” American Historical Review 103, no. 4 (October 1998): 1119–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Ramusack, Barbara N. and Burton, Antoinette, “Feminism, Imperialism and Race: A Dialogue between India and Britain,” Women's History Review 3, no. 4 (1994): 469–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burton, Antoinette, ed., Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

22 See Baucom, Ian, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Location of Identity (Princeton, N.J.: 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Schwarz, Bill, ed., The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (New York, 1996)Google Scholar.

23 See, e.g., Pierson, Ruth Roach and Chaudhuri, Nupur, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race (Bloomington, Ind., 1998)Google Scholar.

24 This point is also made by Lewis, David Levering in The Race to Fashoda: European Colonialism and African Resistance in the Scramble for Africa (New York, 1987)Google Scholar.