The Enemy Within’: Liminality, Otherness and Neo-Victorian Gypsies

Gypsies, or Romanies, are a collective against whom, for centuries, white Europeans have posited a series of racial prejudices and stereotypes. Qualified alternatively as criminals, child kidnappers, or tricksters, gypsies have long been portrayed in British literature as liminal individuals, positively perceived as linked to nature and the pastoral ancestry of European populations, on the one hand, but contrary to the values of modernity, on the other (Nord 3-4), as well as often linked to Eastern mysticism in their usual representation as fortune-tellers or palm-readers. Nineteenth-century literature exhibited such preoccupations with the figure of the gypsy and its liminality and otherness, as it is illustrated in works such as Jane Austen’s Emma (1816), George Elliot's Silas Marner (1861), Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1891), or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This paper aims at analysing the renewed presence of the gypsy in neo-Victorianism, focusing in part on Guy Ritchie's film Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) but especially on Sara Stockbridge's neo-Victorian novel Cross my Palm (2011), in which the central character Rose, a gypsy fortune-teller who entertains high-class Victorian ladies in palm-reading soirées, gets entangled in a plot of murder, treason and deceit evocative of Victorian sensation novels in the 1860s and 1870s. Setting off from the idea that neo-Victorian fiction rearticulates repressed voices from “silenced other Victorians” (Voigts-Virchow 115), this paper will trace how gypsy characters, whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible, are brought to the very centre of the narration in neo-Victorian fiction. Stockbridge’s Cross my Palm (2011) provides a spatialising perspective on gypsiness in Victorian London, using the tension between the Victorian imperial centre and its suburban periphery to illustrate gypsies’ persistent dislocated status, especially applied to Romanies’ stereotypical image as nomadic people and the ensuing difficulty to pinpoint their identity. Additionally, Stockbridge’s novel provides a revision of the usual trope of gypsies associated to child kidnapping, or in Jodie Matthews’ words, “the ‘Gypsy’ child-stealing myth” (Matthews 137) and its relation to (neo)Victorian conceptions of the family. Through a close analysis of the above mentioned texts, and paying particular attention to the topography of Victorian London as well nineteenth-century Europe, I will provide a reading of gypsiness in contemporary neo-Victorian literature using as a backdrop racialised representations of the gypsy collective and their enduring representation as alien figures which keep permeating contemporary European culture and society, as it is attested by events such as the harsh dismantlement of Romani camps in 2010 in France or the pervading accusations of child-kidnapping to gypsies in different legal or criminal cases.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

“I Was Never So Unmanned Before”: (Emasculating) Imperialism and the Late Victorian Crisis of Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction

The Victorian Fin de Siècle was a period characterized by decay, anxiety and identity fragmentation. Within the convolution of race, gender and class which was evinced in those decades, the crisis of masculinity outstands as being closely tied with the state of the British Empire in the late Victorian Era. This paper aims at scrutinizing a series of underread lateVictorian texts, namely Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and a selection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlockian short fiction, to exhibit the intimate relationship between colonial tropes and (fe)male characters in late-Victorian popular culture. In particular, the contact or confrontation with the Oriental Other and the negotiation with a violent colonial past are appropriated to raise alarms over the perceived emasculation of British males and the weakening of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ manhood. In more general terms, the texts under analysis in this paper epitomize fin-de-siècle doubts over whether British men were fit enough to deal with the arduous task of keeping an ever-growing empire and specifically to confront the Oriental other, which is quite telling at a time when gender roles were increasingly shaded.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Adapting Victorian Gypsies for the Screen: Ethnicity, Otherness and (In)visibility in Neo-Victorian Popular Film

This paper aims at analysing the presence of gypsy characters in two neo-Victorian popular films, namely Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman (2010) and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011). The cultural construction of nineteenth-century gypsies, those “Others within Europe” (Boyarin 433) whose presence in Victorian fiction was peripheral, spectral and at times invisible (Nord 3-4), is simultaneously exploited and contested by these two neo-Victorian screen narratives to raise issues of otherness and invisibility on the screen. Setting off from the premise that screen texts, just like print texts, can also be participant in the neo-Victorian project of reimagining the underside of Victorian culture for contemporary audiences (Whelehan 273), this paper traces how the adaptation of Victorian gypsies for the screen, true to the palimpsestuous potential inherent to the process of adaptation (Hutcheon 6) and sharing the double drive between past and present which characterises the neo-Victorian genre (Arias and Pulham xiii; Shiller 539), hybridises our cultural memory of the Victorian Age on the screen while concurrently raises concerns over the persistent liminal status of gypsies in contemporary European culture. In particular, this paper illustrates how the tropes prototypically associated to gypsies (namely their nomadic lifestyle, mysticism, alienated existence or their perceived association to criminality) which can be traced back to Victorian culture are deployed on the neo-Victorian popular screen (with varyingly succesful outcomes) to comment on their (in)visibility in the European popular imagination.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

'I Have Every Reason to Love England': Black (neo)Victorianism and Transatlantic Fluidity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Within neo-Victorianism, or contemporary fiction which rewrites the Victorian age, Marie-Lousie Kohlhe has pointed out a critical “reluctance to engage head-on in cross-cultural comparisons, which seem essential in order to get fully to grips with exactly how cultural memory of the nineteenth century is mediated and shaped by a genre that is hardly exclusively ‘British’ in any self-contained sense” (Kohlke 2009, 255). Setting off from that premise, I tackle the neo-Victorian genre in its global dimension by focusing on the transoceanic links between Antebellum America and Victorian Britain as it is exhibited in two postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, namely Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) and Nora Hague's Letters from an Age of Reason (2001), both of them dealing with African Americans crossing the Atlantic ocean towards Victorian Britain. These texts provide a remediation on significant loopholes in Victorian literature, namely the absence of race as an explicit subject in general and the under-representation of interracial love affairs in particular. Similarly, these neo-Victorian texts provide imaginative acts of fictional recovery coalescing with historical reconstructions on the growing presence of African Americans in Victorian Britain which, according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, feature as a gap in the historiography of Black British history (Holbrook Gerzina 2003, 5). The transatlantic interplay between African Americans and nineteenth-century Britain, or “Black America’s romance with Victorian Britain” (Dickerson 2008, 4) was not free from contradictions, though, given that African Americans were then appealing to a country which at the time was setting the foundations for late-Victorian scientific racism, a project which secured the British Empire’s subjugation of non-white races and provided the basis for modern-day racism (Brantlinger 2011, 6-7). The transatlantic fluidity between Black America and Victorian Britain reveals a double drive, a conduit for mutual influence which finds resonance in the recovery of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s term for the hybrid, fractal and transcultural circulation of subjects and ideas across the Atlantic ocean as a result of the slave trade which unearths black subjects as historical agents with an intellectual history (Gilroy 1993, 4-6). In the novels under analysis, the Atlantic ocean comes to stand for a liquid conduit facilitating both the reconstruction of broken transatlantic family ties and the appropriation of European radical discourses in order to support African-American abolitionism. Ultimately, I contend that for the African-American characters in the texts under scrutiny, Victorianism represents a model of respectability, democracy and modernity, the very values of citizenship that black slaves were denied by the American slave system. The inherent contradictions of associating the Victorian age, the epitome of imperialism and colonial domination, with the liberation of African-American slaves only reveals the complexities of the term ‘Victorianism’ and what it has meant to past and present generations.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Cultural Haunting and the Trace of the Colonial Other in Arthur Conan Doyle's Short Fiction

In Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Susheila Nasta argues that “the arrival in Britain of several generations of black and Asian 'immigrants' in the period following decolonization and Independence was not simply the residue of the end of Empire, it was the culmination of a long but hidden relationship, a relationship that has persistently been written out of the nation's political, cultural and literary histories” (Nasta 3). In light of this statement, this paper aims at tracing the presence of the Colonial Other in late-Victorian culture via a reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Black Doctor” (1898) and “The Brown Hand” (1899). These under-read tales provide a constructive counterpoint to widespread and far more popular late-Victorian narrations of reverse colonization such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), which exemplify the “brutally abjected, demonized or stereotyped” treatment of race in nineteenth-century English literature (Daileader 75). This paper is informed by literary-historical excavations into black British history such as Antoinette Burton's At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter (1998), Rozina Visram's Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (2002) and Peter Fryer's Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). Additionally, I draw upon Kathleen Brogan's concept of 'cultural haunting', in which “the individual's or family's haunting clearly reflects the crisis of a larger social group”, to delve into issues of ethnicity, race and exoticism out of “a poorly documented, partially erased cultural history” (Brogan 2). Ultimately, I argue that, although the tales under analysis must necessarily be framed within Western representation of the Colonial Other and they evince traces of Edward Said’s model of Orientalism, they conversely provide a more benign portrayal of the presence of diasporic collectives on Victorian Britain, more aimed at representing issues of integration, transculturation and diaspora rather than contamination and invasion. Key words: cultural haunting, colonial Other, Conan Doyle References: Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1998. Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting. Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 1998. Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Black Doctor.” 1898. Tales of Terror and Mystery. By Conan Doyle. Ohio: Summit Classic P, 2012. ---. “The Brown Hand.” 1899. The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen. By Conan Doyle. Ohio: Summit Classic P, 2012. Daileader, Celia R. Racism, Misogyny and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto P, 1984. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto P, 2002.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

(Neo)Victorian Globalisation and Sino-Indian Relations in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011)

In light of renewed perspectives on Victorian global politics and international relations, this paper provides a close reading of Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke (2011). Set in 1839, this second instalment in the so-called Ibis trilogy portrays the trade of opium in early nineteenth-century Canton (today’s Guangzhou) and the Pearl River, casting a variety of characters into the waterways of Victorian imperial exploits right in the prelude to the First Opium War (1839-1842). The close reading provided in this paper pursues two objectives. Firstly, I analyse Ghosh’s neo-Victorian novel as marked by parallels between its narration of the prelude to the First Opium War as a crux in the history of nineteenth-century global trade and current political conflicts arising out of neo-liberal policies and globalisation, including Western military interventions under gunboat diplomacy. In this sense, I follow Sneha Kar Chaudhuri’s suggestion that the novel presages “twentieth- and twenty-first-century diaspora, globalisation, multiculturalism and their attendant dangers, such as drug-trafficking, continuing economic exploitation, and armed conflict over resources” (Chaudhuri 2011: 142). Secondly, I argue that the novel’s reconstruction of India’s involvement in nineteenth-century opium trade in China provides renewed perspectives on Sino-Indians relations in the Victorian period and today. In particular I argue that River of Smoke reconstructs a nineteenth-century Pan-Asian perspective on Indian Ocean relations by illustrating idioms, relations and spaces which escaped the control and hegemony of Victorian imperialism. Ultimately this paper concludes by suggesting that the novel reveals the continuities of the rhetorics of Free Trade and Victorian imperialism in the ideology of neo-liberalism and globalisation today, revealing the Opium Wars as a conflict which determined to a great extent current West-East relations.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A note on the Gauge Symmetries of Unimodular Gravity

The symmetries of Unimodular Gravity are clarified somewhat.Comment: 4 pages, v2: acknowledgments correcte