Jc Kuehn

Colonial Cosmopolitanism: Constance Cumming and Isabella Bird in Hong Kong, 1878

Ever since the 1990s, the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ has been reappearing as a critical concept; more precisely, as a ‘new cosmopolitanism’ that is specific to the historical conditions of late twentieth-century/twenty-first-century globalization.1 Inaugurated in criticism by, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Appiah, Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins, Timothy Brennan and Ian Baucom, the connotations and denotations for cosmopolitanism have ranged widely, from the derogatory to the liberal, and from an actuality to an ideal. To map it broadly, in these debates cosmopolitanism is usually seen as either the false idealism of globalization and cultural logic of neo-imperialism, or as globalization’s critical advantage, namely an ‘ethos that attempts to encompass all humanity while remaining attentive to the pitfalls of humanism’.2

A Female Poetics of Empire : From Eliot to Woolf

1. Exoticism as System: Difference and Representation 2. Beyond Orientalism: Exoticising Daniel Deronda 3. Desire, Love and Mixed-Race Children: Plotting Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction 4. Womens Orientalist Harem Paintings: Gender, Documentation and Imagination 5. Veiled Narratives, Double Identities: Womens Travelogues about the Middle East 6. Picturesque Views of Cairo: Touring the Land, Framing the Foreign 7. Infelicities: Representing Hot Love in the Popular Womens Desert Romance 8. Modernist Exoticism: The Voyage Out and In. Conclusion.

Colonial cosmopolitanism: Albert Smith and Rudyard Kipling in Victorian Hong Kong

This essay examines the concept of a “colonial cosmopolitanism”, a contradiction in terms, but a combination that was commonly invoked in the Victorian era. Over the past decade, the concept of “cosmopolitanism” has been appropriated for studies of the Victorian novel, on the one hand, and analyses of Grand Tour and modern(ist) city travelogues, on the other. It has, however, been applied all too rarely to the context of nineteenth-century, colonial travel writing. This essay traces the origins and central points of the cosmopolitanism debate, as well as its usefulness for the context of travel writing, before looking at two Victorian travelogues about colonial Hong Kong: Albert Smiths To China and Back ([1858] 1974) and Rudyard Kiplings From Sea to Sea ([1889] 2011). These two travelogues were written 30 years apart and the essay argues that within these decades, the notion of cosmopolitanism changed from a more “ethical” (Kantian) to a more “economic” (Marxian) version, reflecting the Victorian paradigm shift towards nationalism and Empire.

ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMANN, “EGYPT 1870”

Elisabeth Baumann was born in Warsaw in 1819 to a German mapmaker, Philip Adolph Baumann, and his German wife, Johanne Frederikke Reyer. Her early training took her to Berlin and, from 1838, to the Dusseldorf Academy of Art, a leading one in its day. According to Hans Christian Andersen, who would later write a biography of his friend Elisabeth, the famous German painter Peter von Cornelius much admired Baumanns paintings, and speaking of them he declared, “She is the only real man in the Dusseldorf school,” which was doubtlessly meant as a compliment (see Andersen, qtd. in Von Folsach 83). In Dusseldorf, Baumann was influenced by the prevailing realist trend of the Academy but added to it an idealistic and sensuous quality that would become her distinctive mark. After the completion of her training in 1845, Baumann went to Rome where she met the Danish sculptor Jens Adolf Jerichau, one of the outstanding talents of his time, whom she married a year later. The couple settled in Denmark in 1849 (although Jerichau-Baumann kept a studio in Rome) as Jens Adolf became a professor at, and later President of, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.