‘Were it worth knowing’: what Rebecca Kinsman can and cannot say about the Chinese in Macao

Abstract

This essay accepts that discourses (in the Foucauldian sense) shape what we know and can know about the world, but this process is extraordinarily complex. The 1840s can be viewed as a time of particularly significant ideological shifts in imperial and colonial attitudes towards China. Critics have often highlighted a transition in colonial representations of China from Romantic ‘Orientalism’, which tends to exoticise alterity as distant or alien from the observing self, to the later Victorian imperial gaze (so well described in Pratt's Imperial Eyes), which tends to ‘incorporate, in an ethnographic gesture, otherness in a framework of familiarity and sameness’ (Kuehn, 79). The essay does not view this general trend as a strictly linear process, however, and contends that a range of approaches to alterity were available to, and often employed by, Anglo-American writers of the time. With the above in mind, I investigate the way in which various competing nineteenth-century tropes interact with Quaker ideology to mould Kinsman's representations of the Chinese in Macao in some of her letters during the mid-1840s.