In Orientalism, Edward Said famously theorizes “a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient” (Orientalism [1994], 95). In England Re-Oriented, Humberto Garcia continues the work of extending Said's vision. He turns from Europeans in the East to Asians in the West. His focus is neither on leaders like Napoleon nor on overarching discursive patterns, but rather on individual writers––Joseph Emin, Sake Dean Mahomet, Shaykh I'tesamuddin, Abu Talib Khan, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, and Lutfullah Khan––who write about their experiences abroad. With this archival shift, Garcia finds that Said's categories of analysis are even more unstable than Said himself envisioned. In fact, Garcia argues that these authors see themselves within a contiguous Eurasian masculinity that challenges assumptions of English patriarchal, imperial dominance.
Garcia's introduction limns a “pluralistic,” “diverse,” and “composite” (3) Britain (2–3) enmeshed with a Persianate world that is similarly “multilingual” and “permeable” (6). The texts he analyzes imagine what he calls “alter-Europe,” comprising “the communal feelings, shared behaviors, odd reciprocities, and ironic performances that transmit Eurasian values multilaterally” (3). Crucial are the “homosocial commensurabilities” (6) of Persian and British gentlemen's “performative identity” (5), as well as the “playful yet critical cosmopolitan idiom” such gentlemen share with Englishwomen. Simply put, Garcia's intervention is a turn to “people's movements in space and time,” to the “local” (7) where an “enchanted third space between empires” (2) takes shape.
Chapter 1 outlines the perceived ideological, racial, and linguistic affinities that facilitate male bonds within the British East India Company. Establishing a “two-way street” (23) of cultural exchange, Garcia argues that Asian writers navigated English patronage networks, reading publics, and literary genres with agency. Chapter 2 charts how the romance-inflected masculinities Armenian memoirist Emin traded with Elizabeth Montagu and Edmund Burke served his as well as their political agendas: Emin critiques his countrymen through comparison to English manhood while also exemplifying the polite Whig gentleman-soldier.
The third chapter follows Mughal emissary I'tesamuddin's disenchantment with English theater and Englishwomen. The Mirza's loyalty to the Company vies with his belief that its duplicitous agents fall short of the Persian gentlemanly conduct they mimic. Chapters 4 and 5 see Indian migrants Abu Talib and Mahomet construct “alter-Europes” in Ireland, then among London's noblewomen and actresses. Both pen sentimental military memoirs styling Anglo-Irish and Indian soldiers and their home fronts as compromised by imperial warmongering; Abu Talib also vindicates harem women's agency (contra Mary Wollstonecraft), instead viewing Englishwomen as benchmarks of the English empire's depravity. Chapter 6 finds parallels in Yusuf's and Queen Victoria's affective responses to industrializing England as a dazzling fairyland, reading Yusuf's Urdu travelogue as an expression of wonder at the masculinist tenets of his “Sulaimani religion . . . perfected in Queen Victoria's Mughal arcadia” (227). The final chapter posits Luftullah's memoir as a viral critique of British xenophobia and violence in the wake of the 1857 Indian mutiny facilitated by burgeoning news media. In an epilogue, Garcia reconsiders orientalism and its legacy through the Regency dandy figure.
This book redefines the collective gaze of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts: the authors see the West through the East and as the East, revealing that such binary terms do not hold. If, at times, what the book considers under the rubric of masculinity might be more expansively explored as national values or personal ethics, its attention to figures like Montagu and Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire provides a counterweight. Although there is room to contextualize the text's misogyny when observing, for example, “English noblewomen behaving like slutty performers” (209), and although the book's title elides its engagement with the Scottish and Irish as well as the English, these oversights pale in comparison to the interdisciplinary, multilingual, and transnational synthesis this book has achieved.
England Re-Oriented's appeal transcends long eighteenth-century studies. Students and scholars of empire, gender, race, religion, and/or transcultural encounter in any period will learn something from this book, as will those interested in feminist and queer theory, affect theory, and performance studies. Garcia's fundamental challenge to East-West ideology as well as his attentiveness to the long arc of discourses of power and identity will be of use to scholars of the Renaissance.
