Immortal Joy: William Blake and the Cultural Politics of Empire

Abstract

At that momentous historical turning point, towards the end of the eighteenth century, in which almost every attempt to represent otherness seemed to slip into the exoticizing political aesthetic that would enable and justify imperial conquest, it was a matter of some urgency to be able to think of the foreign without resorting to (or sliding into) the language and figures of exoticism. What I want to suggest in this essay is that Blake drew on and reformulated for the exigencies of his own time a heterogeneous underground mystical tradition that stressed the unity of European and Afro- Asiatic cultures, rather than the sharp differentiation between Europe and its others which would prove essential to modern imperialism. Moreover, far more than has been recognized so far, Blake’s antinomian affiliations provided an important basis for many of his philosophical, religious, political and aesthetic positions. For, as we shall see, Blake’s interest in certain mystical currents which had plunged deep underground long before his own time offered him a way to articulate a logic of cultural difference, heterogeneity and variety that refused the discourse of exoticism. Indeed, his simultaneously political and aesthetic stance on otherness must be seen to enable a carefully articulated position on the cultural politics of imperialism, as well as a discourse of freedom contesting the internal imperialism of the State. Or, rather, Blake’s elaboration of a form of religious and political freedom that would defy what he called ‘State Religion’ was also an elaboration of a form of political and cultural freedom from the discourse and practice of imperialism.