Donna Landry

Horsy and persistently queer: Imperialism, feminism and bestiality

This article is a study in bestial attachment so thoroughly conventional that no one has thought to give it a name. Yet British imperial adventuring gave it international scope. The eighteenth-century travellers Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth, Lady Craven establish a pattern of bonding with and mastering foreign equines repeated by their twentieth-century counterparts Freya Stark and Christina Dodwell. Such opportunities for gender-bending, enabled by the high-mettled intelligence and sensitivity of the Eastern blood horse, invited upper- and middle-class womens participation in the expansion of empire or at least British influence abroad, however idiosyncratically. Tracking human-animal attachments in the literature of English travel reveals a distinct but vexed convergence of propensities: often bestiality and reflections upon or denials of queerness and homosexuality shadow each other - in the writings of Wilfred Thesiger and T.E. Lawrence as well as Montagu and Stark.

Learning to Ride in Early Modern Britain, or, The Making of the English Hunting Seat

During the eighteenth century, Britons developed a distinctive way of riding on horseback that gave them a patriotically charged experience of so-called native freedoms.1 What came to be known as the “English hunting seat,” whether its practitioners were English or Irish, Scots, or Welsh, emerged during the early modern forging of the nation as an imperial metropole.2 Both this new disposition of the body on horseback and the rhetoric of native freedoms as guarantors of cultural superiority and imperial prerogative were manifestations of Britain’s “gentlemanly capitalist” version of mercantilism, of Britain’s participation and rise to dominance within the capitalist world system between the late sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century.3 Indeed, the very question of an English seat may have been most hotly debated precisely during moments of national crisis and identity formation or reformation, though the evidence for this is not conclusive.

English Brutes, Eastern Enlightenment

What is Enlightenment? The concept of fellow and companion species, of creaturely life, opens up new possibilities for re-asking Kants question, and for revisiting historical definitions of the Enlightenment. These historical definitions and the genealogies they presuppose in turn raise questions about ethics and emancipation. How have relations between humans and animals been configured with regard to ethics, given gross disparities of power between species? How might alternatives to the Euroamerican ideal of political equality as the necessary ground for any ethical relation be found? A non-Eurocentric genealogy of the Enlightenment derived from European exchanges with the Ottoman empire reveals possible Eastern precedents for European Enlightenment ideas about kindness rather than cruelty in human-animal relations. The particular case of English people and imported Eastern horses during the long eighteenth century richly reveals Ottoman precedents at work. If horsemanship might be understood to mirror political governance and society at large, Ottoman horsemanship and forms of governance and sociality potentially have much to teach us since the ethics they instantiate does not presuppose political equality as a necessary ground.

QUEER ISLAM AND NEW HISTORICISM

You will remember that the project of largely American ‘New Historicism’ was committed to uncovering the repressed of texts, to unravelling Foucauldian genealogies in all their thick descriptiveness. Judith Butler leapt fully formed from Foucaults multi-volume history of sexuality, claiming that there was no such thing as ‘a sexuality’ or a ‘gender identity’ that existed before its production in discourse, and in the body experienced, performed, and analysed as a material and thus also discursive field. This essay will read into one another new work on the history of sexuality within Islamic cultures, in which a certain queering of the historical record takes place, and novelistic representations of subjectivity and embodied experience within Islam, in which a certain queering of consciousness takes place. What is revealed as ‘the difference of Islam’, I shall argue, is that everyday life is often represented as happening within the theological panopticon. Islam appears to be experienced as a particularly intense set of gazes marking what I will call an enfolded subjectivity. And yet this difference is far from an absolute one. There may be common affects represented even where sexual practices and their epistemological grids differ. What one must remain alert to is that the very mapping of identity onto sexuality both may and yet may not be happening according to Western preconceptions of this process.

The Labouring-Class Women Poets: ‘Hard Labour we most chearfully pursue’

In the foreground of George Stubbs’s painting The Haymakers (1785), a woman rests on her rake, hand on hip, bold-faced and provocative. It is not quite a come-hither look she gives, but very nearly. She also appears unabashed by the viewer’s gaze, and somehow authoritative in returning it so coolly. What she isn’t is meek. She neither courts our approval nor looks demurely downcast. The bold glance could easily signify resistance to rather than compliance with being looked at and represented. She does not hide herself from the painter, the spectator, the imagined appraisal of posterity.

Introduction: on the road in Anatolia, and beyond

For millennia, Anatolia has been peculiarly synonymous with human travel. Anatolia is the Asian landmass resembling a horses head thrusting into Europe, and the heartland of modern Turkey. This special issue of Studies in Travel Writing introduces new perspectives and archives for the study of travel in the domains of the Ottoman Empire and in the Republic of Turkey. Written history began in Anatolia, and it was a history written by travellers: from the production of clay tablets by Assyrian merchants enabling and recording commercial transactions across a vast network centred on Kültepe, near modern Kayseri, to war records, Ottoman administrative reports, accounts by churchmen, pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, adventurers, archaeologists and the inventors of the ‘Blue Cruise’. The introduction lays out a framework for understanding changes in the technology and practice of travel from the earliest records to Ottoman imperial systems and Republican modernisation: from stamp seals to Evliya Çelebi, Irfan Orga, the ‘Fisherman of Halicarnassus’ and Orhan Pamuk. Revising the usual focus in Western scholarship by including new genres, archives and perspectives within the purview of travel writing, this special issue opens up new possibilities for further exploration.

‘Settlers on the Edge, or Sedentary Nomads: Andrei Platonov and Steppe History’

When within a national narrative, “history repeats itself,” what is obsessively reenacted? In Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur (written 1927–1928 but not published in its entirety in Russia until 1988), haunting the characters’ imaginings of a socialist future is a specter with two faces: the nomadic horseman of the steppe who is both their dream of liberty and their greatest terror. The specter of the mounted nomad, the perpetually mobile horseman, haunts the Russian national narrative as it erupts in the October revolution, civil war, and the struggle for socialism. It also haunts the Soviet narrative as it strives to incorporate Central Asian peoples into the dream of a new plenitude, as in Soul-Dzhan (written in 1935, but not published in an unbowdlerized Russian edition until 1999). In this fable about both “a soul in search of happiness,” as Platonov himself described it, and a people, the wandering Dzhan, whose souls are their only possession, Stalin’s Sovietization of Central Asia offers hope (Platonov 2003: x; 151, note 13). The word dzhan—“soul, or dear life”—is a Persian word in the Turkic languages of Central Asia and modern Turkish (Platonov 2003: 24). These wandering souls are linguistically and materially a difference uneasily incorporated within the Soviet, just as the horsemen of “black Turan” who raid the gardens of the fat men of the lowlands are for a time incorporated into that land of plenty, both destroying and dwelling there.

The Noble Brute: Contradictions in Equine Ideology, East and West

Although they might at first seem entirely incompatible, nobility and brutality were the defining characteristics of “his lordship’s Arabian,” a phrase heard often in early modern England. No other animal except the human laborer suffered from such a contradictory identity. Breeding for improvement from Eastern bloodstock, in the light of Eastern ideas about horsemanship and relations with animals, helped produce an imperial discourse in which humans and horses became increasingly interchangeable. One of the richest results of this discursive convergence is Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels (1725, 1735). In light of the transformations accompanying the arrival of Eastern horses, Jonathan Swifts satire stands revealed as even more brilliantly and presciently critical than it has previously been thought to be. Its targets are imperialism, colonialism, mercantile capitalism, the agricultural revolution—as manifested in intensified extraction from land, beast, and human laborer—and instrumental reason more generally.1 Without explicitly saying so, Swift appears to be participating in the comparison of imperial styles of rule that arose in discussions of horsekeeping in this period, and in which European brutality was contrasted with Ottoman leniency.

Said before Said

Nobody should be allowed to remain innocent of Orientalism. More than 30 years after its publication in 1978, the book continues to be indispensable for understanding East-West relations. Orientalism has elicited, and withstood, a host of attacks, some more damaging than others. Yet it has transformed academic history writing concerning the Middle East. The field of postcolonial studies and the critique of imperialism within literary and cultural history would be unthinkable without it. The book is not a history of Western Orientalist scholarship. Still less is it a history of the ‘East.’ Although written during the 1970s, Orientalism endures because it retains a powerful purchase on the world we inhabit. What is most troubling about the book’s continuing relevance is that despite its sensational exposure of Western errors of perception, representation and policy concerning the Middle East, the discourse of Orientalism, the discursive machine for constructing an Orient, making statements about it, and ruling over it, continues apace. The book has endured, tragically, because its object of critique is so robust; Orientalism remains relevant precisely because Orientalism continues to prevail.1

Picturing Benevolence against the Commercial Cry, 1750–98: Or, Sarah Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism

For most of the eighteenth century, the tenderest emotions were frequently accompanied by the clinking of purses. By the century’s end, the connection between money and feeling had become more distant, more highly mediated and mystified. Benevolence no longer appeared in the pages of fiction figured so graphically in coins and banknotes, legacies or annuities, charitable endowments or gifts of money and parcels of land, freely given in a spirit of fellow feeling and sympathy. That fictional representations of benevolence and acts of charity came to hold a less fashionable place than they had once enjoyed testifies to a major ideological and aesthetic shift during this period. As capitalism developed during the long mercantilist moment that preceded the birth of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, political economic theorists replaced earlier religious views of charitable benevolence with a new religion of the market. Adam Smith’s ‘moral sentiments’ were those that best served to constitute the self or subject most appropriate for the capitalist marketplace and commercial society, and were most easily reconcilable with producing the ‘wealth of nations’.1 These commercial tenets of social life displaced earlier debates about self-interest, the motivating force so crucial for Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Bernard Mandeville, in contention with the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson’s defence of the defining human attribute as benevolence, which manifested itself in a tendency towards universal sympathy with fellow creatures. A significant casualty of the war of political economic policy on the benevolent redistribution of wealth was charity towards the indigent poor in the direct form of almsgiving. Beginning in the 1770s and gathering force in the 1790s, political economy in theory and practice rendered risible or impracticable what had formerly seemed the noblest of human desires, or the most communal and politically progressive of Christian dictates.