England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 (Critical Perspectives on Empire)

By: Humberto Garcia

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Synopsis: What does the love between British imperialists and their Asian partners reveal about orientalism's social origins? To answer this question, Humberto Garcia focuses on westward-bound Central and South Asian travel writers who have long been forgotten or dismissed by scholars. This bias has obscured how Joseph Emin, Sake Dean Mahomet, Sheikh I'tesamuddin, Abu Taleb Khan, Abul Hasan Khan, Yusuf Khan Kambalposh, and Lutfullah Khan found in their conviviality with Englishwomen and men a strategy for inhabiting a critical agency that appropriated various media to make Europe commensurate with Asia. Drama, dance, masquerades, visual art, museum exhibits, music, postal letters, and newsprint inspired these genteel men to recalibrate Persianate ways of behaving and knowing. Their cosmopolitanisms offer a unique window on an enchanted third space between empires in which Europe was peripheral to Islamic Indo-Eurasia. Their queer intimacies encrypt a mediated history of orientalist mimic men under the spell of a powerful Persian manhood.