Anglo-Saxon Race Research Articles

Benevolence or Pretext: An Exploration of U.S. Foreign Policy Toward China in the Early 20th Century from the Perspective of Social Darwinism

Applying Darwin’s principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest to human society, social Darwinists in the late nineteenth century proposed the Manifest Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race. Based on the social Darwinism theory, this paper looks into the United States overseas expansion, especially its foreign policy toward China in the early 20th century. It further argues that the alleged American “protection” for China in military, diplomatic and cultural domain was just an embodiment of racial superiority in U.S. foreign policy, which was a justification for the United States to invade and enslave other countries and establish world hegemony.

The British Royals in Australia

The British Royals in Australia

:Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures

:<i>Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, PostSaxon Futures</i>

The United States of Medievalism

The United States of Medievalism

The 'Invasion of the Yellow Race': Anti-Asian Discourse in Early Twentieth Century Niagara

In the early twentieth century, Chinese entrepreneurs in Niagara were subjected to racist attacks in the media, experienced discriminatory treatment from local authorities, and even became the targets of mob violence in downtown St. Catharines. Using newspaper accounts from the period, this essay illustrates how late Victorian moral reform ideologies influenced anti-Asian discourse and behaviour. ‘Foreigners’ were seen to threaten the virtue of the nation’s women and girls, and by extension, the purity of the Anglo-Saxon race. In March 1918, an inflammatory front-page editorial in Grimsby’s weekly newspaper urged citizens to stop a Chinese restaurant from opening in their community, using provocative rhetoric to incite moral panic about Asians. Nativist government measures such as the federal head tax and provincial legislation prohibiting white women from working in Chinese restaurants, attempted to shield white Canadians from Chinese entrepreneurs by curbing their economic viability. Despite the xenophobia, Chinese immigrants embraced western culture and melded into community life through everyday encounters with Niagara residents in public spaces like restaurants, laundries, and grocers, contradicting a narrative positioning them as undesirable malfeasants.&#x0D;

The Origin of the “Anglo-Saxon” Myth: Early Medieval England in the Historical Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Britain

The concepts rooted in the history of medieval Europe play a major role in modern socio-political discourse. Among those are the terms “Anglo-Saxons” and “Anglo-Saxon”. As the name of German-speaking peoples who settled in Britain in the fifth to seventh centuries, the ethnonym “Anglo-Saxons” emerged already in the Early Middle Ages. Starting from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when English antiquarians began a systematic study of the past of their country, the ethnonyms used by early medieval authors were interpreted precisely as designations of communities similar to the European peoples of the modern times. Throughout the nineteenth century the ethnonym “Anglo-Saxons” was used more and more often in its political and cultural meaning, at the same time, ethnic understanding spun off from it. There emerged an idea of the “Anglo-Saxon race”, which, depending on the specific context, began to be contrasted with the “Celtic”, “Latin”, “African” or “Indian” races. The idea of the emergence of a single English nation as a result of the mutual assimilation of the Saxons and Normans became the cornerstone of the Whig model of history that dominated the Victorian era.

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford

Reviewed by: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford Walter L. Buenger Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. By Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. (New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Pp. 386. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Forget the Alamo? How many times over the last forty years or so have serious historians, exasperated by the debilitating hyper-focus on the Texas Revolution and the clap-trap that went with it, uttered that plaintive cry? Yet the myths, legends, and added-after-the-fact stories outlive their best efforts. In fairness, Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, the journalist authors of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, really do not seem to hope anyone can or should forget the Alamo or that the myth has fallen. As they say in their aptly named closing, “We are What we Remember,” their goal is to change “the story we tell about the Alamo” (340). The book divides into two parts. In the first part the authors strip away almost two hundred years of propaganda, ideologically driven media mania, and self-glorifying myth-making to emphasize “the truth about Bowie, Travis, and Crockett” (340), the importance of slavery in all that happened between 1821 and 1836, and the reality that, although the Alamo was psychologically important to victory at San Jacinto in many ways, death at the Alamo could have and perhaps should have been avoided. In the second part the authors trace the accrual of Alamo propaganda, media mania, and myth, and they describe how since the 1970s historians and activists primarily from Latino, Tejano, and Native American communities have sought an honest past and to escape the heavy hand of the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” (xxv). Veteran historians of the Southwest will find the book’s messages familiar and a bit breathless. The flaws and foibles of James Bowie, William Barrett Travis, and David Crockett, judged by the standards of their time or ours, have long been known, as have such details as Crockett’s probable surrender and execution after the Battle of the Alamo. Stephen F. Austin’s many attempts to preserve the right of Anglos to bring slaves to Texas and to keep them in bondage have long been clear, and those familiar with [End Page 223] founding documents know that Section 9 of the 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas made slavery and White supremacy the law of the land. Many scholars have felt or observed the sting of vitriolic attacks by defenders of the Heroic Anglo Narrative. They have known at least since the publication of Richard R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and Master Symbol (University of Texas Press, 2002) of the ridicule and bias heaped on Tejanos, and how they have been lumped with the treacherous enemy because of the symbolism of the Alamo and Texas Creation Myth. Two things about this book, however, will be especially valuable for historians. It lays out the time line of the myth, and it connects that myth’s evolution to the needs and purposes of each era. The phrase “Remember the Alamo” emerged as what we would now call wartime propaganda in the lead up to the Battle of San Jacinto and helped inspire Texans to take revenge on Santa Anna and his army. It stiffened the spine and will of warriors, but then the myth receded in importance for half a century only to emerge again to reassure Anglos of their place atop the racial and ethnic hierarchy. By 1936, the story had passed into the national and international sphere as a symbol of the advancement across the continent of what was called the Anglo-Saxon race. Curiously, Davy Crockett was a minor character in all this, but in the 1950s Walt Disney and John Wayne turned Crockett into a potent symbol of struggle against an alien foe. Crockett became a key to Cold War propaganda and for many remains atop the pantheon of Alamo heroes. He had to die swinging “Old Betsy,” surrounded by foreign corpses, because that is what true American...

Oscar Wilde in the Wild West: Caricature, Effeminacy and Celtic Primitivism

This paper goes back to 1882 in order to re-visit Oscar Wilde’s lecture tour of the United States and examine it in the context of contemporary perception of effeminacy and Anglo-Saxon view of Celtic otherness. Taking into consideration the specific cultural circumstances of the United States, Anglo-American and Anglo-Irish relations, the paper focuses on the contemporary caricatures of Oscar Wilde as a reflection of gender and racial prejudice evoked by his effeminate and culturally divergent figure. Looming as a backdrop of Wilde’s lectures is the British perception of the United States as an exotic cultural space whose primitivism excites romantic fascination, but whose economic rise and growing political influence provoke anxiety over the prospects of imperial order and Britain’s status as a global leader. Wilde did not arrive in New York as an Irishman, but as a cultural emissary of England. Assuming the role of an aesthetic missionary who revealed modern tendencies of English art to the materialistically inclined American society, Wilde made his performances an implicit confirmation of mother country’s cultural superiority. The effeminacy of the eccentric lecturer was partly accepted as an artistic pose and manifestation of European sophistication, but it was also interpreted as a symptom of degeneration which subverted his masculinity, as well as a mark of Celtic backwardness which prevented integration with the Anglo-Saxon race.

Третья "Лекция по политическому праву" Х. Доносо Кортеса

The article presents the main ideas of the third of ten “Lectures on Political Right” read by the outstanding Spanish political conservative philosopher of the XIX century Juan Donoso Cortés in the Madrid “Ateneo” in 1836–1837. During the lecture, Donoso analyses the political philosophy of Plato and L. G. A. de Bonald, proving that both philosophers, with all their diff erences, created in general the similar “theory of despotism”. Criticising Plato and Bonald from a liberal position, Donoso opposes Enlightenment concept of freedom to their understanding of power as being despotic, and the liberal-bourgeois notion of the individual as reasonable man — to their knowledge of the state as the absolute one. The lecture is analysed in the broad context of the political struggle between the liberal-conservative wing of the moderados party and its opponents on the left (progressists) and on the right (the Carlists). The author proves that some of the opinions expressed by Donoso, who in the second half of the 1830s was at the liberal-conservative stage of his ideological evolution, later will change. In particular, his attitude towards Plato and L. G. A de Bonald will become positive, and a shift in emphasis will be made in the interpretation of G. Vico’s works. Meanwhile, the others (his driven by geopolitical reasons hostility to Russia, his desire to put up the “Anglo-Saxon race” against it, etc.), on the contrary, will only get further development. As a result, the Donoso’s lecture acquires the unique conceptual and theoretical sounding, thereby demonstrating that&nbsp;the&nbsp;political philosophy of Spanish liberal conservatism is an integral part of the all-European one.

Classification Along the Color Line: Excavating Racism in the Stacks

This paper contends that systemic violence is fundamentally a classification problem. The interrogation of the production of racialized library subjects in relation to one another and in relation to political and social conditions may shed light on the intensely complex problems of racism in the United States today. I discuss the ways that sections of library classifications were constructed based on ideas about African Americans in relation to American social and political agendas. My claim is that the structures that were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are deeply embedded in our libraries and have participated in the naturalization of certain racialized assumptions and associations. In the 21st century we continue to maintain, apply, and refine a flawed structure. My aim is to provide a window into how epistemic violence affects American consciousness about race by revealing some of the ways that our library classifications have been woven together by a group of men who cited and informed one another and ultimately, organized and universalized American history. These classifications are structured around assertions about timeless and fixed national values constructed out of progressive conceptualizations of the nation and its citizenry. A reliance on racial exclusion was necessary for this grand narrative, and scientific theories and classifications provided legitimacy and fuel for racist programs. One of key ways that exclusion was legitimated and supported was through the application of evolutionary theory and principles. Social engineering, white supremacy, and conquest were justified and propelled by beliefs in the evolutionary superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is not by accident that these ideas became foundational to classificatory practice in libraries. In fact, Thomas Dousa has drawn attention to the intellectual climate in which late 19th century library classificationists worked - particularly, the theories and classifications of the sciences and nature as devised by Auguste Compte, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin - and argues that these ideas and systems inspired the introduction of evolutionary principles into bibliographic classifications.[i] The present paper is in agreement with Dousa's claim and argues that such a conclusion carries critical implications for understanding libraries' classifications of race and ethnicity. Emphasis is placed is on the legacy of the classification of books about people of African descent as variously named and conceptualized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The last section of the paper examines the classifications as performatives to examine some of the processes by which racism has become systemic on library shelves. [i] Thomas M. Dousa, "Evolutionary Order in the Classification Theories of CA Cutter and EC Richardson: Its Nature and Limits." NASKO 2, no. 1 (2011): 76.

Disunited Daughters of the Confederations: Creoles and Canadians at the Intersection of Nations, States, and Empires

This article compares and connects the experiences of Creoles and Canadians women as they became Americans and French Canadians during the Civil War era. Demographically and politically minoritized in Louisiana and Canada by the Anglo-Saxon race, Francophones engaged in the period between 1830 and 1890 in processes of collective refashioning such as nationalism and creolism that were deeply ingrained in the construction of gender identities. There was a fundamental contradiction between women's roles as mothers of a French race in North America and the fact that they were unsovereign. Gendered conflicts were triggered by different conceptions of homeland that changed the practices of everyday life: going to school, socializing, marrying, praying, deciding where to stay. Belonging to groups of colonized colonizers, these white women questioned their sense of self as they were torn between the United States, Canada, France, Great Britain and the Confederacy.

The Vital and the Statistical

The Vital and the Statistical Jennifer L. Fleissner (bio) Is naturalism "data fiction?" It can scarcely be denied that the roots of what we now know as "Big Data" lie in the consolidation of statistical thinking over the course of the 1800s.1 In particular, applications of statistics to phenomena such as crime and suicide during the later years of the century play a significant role in the disciplinary emergence of what would become the social sciences: sociology, psychology, criminology, and so on. These are, of course, the same years that saw the rise of the literary genre of naturalist fiction, in the U.S. as well as in France and, arguably, elsewhere in Europe as well. Statistics, as a tool for the quantitative analysis of individual and social life, can thus readily appear relevant to that genre's aspirations to scientific status, as codified most famously in Émile Zola's comparison of his novelistic practice to the researches of the physician Claude Bernard in his 1880 essay "The Experimental Novel." Rather than simply affirm naturalism's clear investments in statistical thinking, however, I aim here to place these in dialectical tension with another component—vitalism—that grows just as directly out of the genre's self-conception as a form of scientific fiction (and, in many ways, specifically medicalizing fiction, as Bernard's role implies). As we will see, these two features of naturalism's scientific aspirations often take quite different forms and, as a result, play against one another as much as they harmonize. The present essay will explore these before moving to the particular case of a novel by Frank Norris, the American writer who most directly modeled himself on Zola in his posthumously published first effort, written in the mid-1890s, Vandover and the Brute (1914). On a broader level, I hope to show, the recognition of vitalist currents in naturalist work can enable us to place the still pertinent question of quantitatively driven methodologies, [End Page 9] and their applicability to human and social questions, within a longer historical trajectory that runs backward as well as forward in time. For all its scientific aspirations, naturalism clearly remains fascinated by large, impersonal forces that are conceived of as resistant to quantification and that gain their authority through their immediate and at times overwhelming effect on the senses. Here, logics of aggregation appear that are not in any way statistical in nature. Rather, from Norris's vast fields of wheat and grains of desert sand to Zola's cornucopias of market goods and mighty human crowds, we see a satisfaction taken in a largeness often presented as, in itself, an emblem of power. In the face of such massive conglomerations, human technique appears humbled; one can only allow them to roll majestically or terrifyingly forward like waves. Thus, the statistical and all other tools of rationalization must finally stand aside in the face of what are depicted as the movements of nature or "Life" itself. Should such visions be termed "vitalist," to use the term often associated with holistic conceptions of the life force? It is certainly possible to make such a claim; indeed, the common association of vitalism with thought and imagery of this kind can begin to account for why the term often provokes such immediate negative reactions. As noted by Georges Canguilhem, the French historian of medicine whose writings remain one of the most valuable resources on this subject, the Nazis did draw directly on the turn-of-the-century vitalist writings of biologists like Hans Driesch, "using theories of Ganzheit ('wholeness') to advocate against individualist, atomist, and mechanist liberalism and in favor of totalitarian forces and social forms" (72). It is fair to say that similar potentialities can be found in Norris's essays depicting the Anglo-Saxon race as an "elemental energ[y]" following its natural destiny toward progress through conquest ("Frontier" 1188). Some tempering of such irrationalist visions by statistics' insistence on the relativity of norms might well appear highly welcome. And yet as Canguilhem goes on to note, of course, fascism might better be understood as combining its vitalist imagery with rational techniques, such as eugenics, of a highly modern...

Anglo-worlds in transit: connections and frictions across the Pacific

AbstractThe emerging cultures of late nineteenth-century steamship mobility can be distinguished broadly by ocean basin and by specific route. In the Pacific, a steamship connection between Sydney and San Francisco was envisaged to forge and sustain strong bonds between regional ‘branches’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. This article moves beyond the rhetorical purchase of assumed affinities, to explore the more layered ways in which difference was articulated in transpacific encounters, and the attendant uncertainties and frictions in these evolving relations. When compared to routes bridging the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, with familiar imperial hierarchies and formalities behind them, British and colonial travellers in the Pacific were frequently unsettled by the more democratic and republican attitudes of the American crews and passengers they encountered. At the same time, Britain’s long-standing supremacy on the high seas provided a benchmark against which American enterprise and power in the Pacific could be assessed and found wanting.

Building Congo, Writing Empire: The Literary Labours of Henry Morton Stanley

The Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley was one of the most important figures in the foundation and early development of the Congo Free State. But he was also the most consistently popular European travel writer of the late nineteenth century, and his bestselling accounts of African expeditions did much to foster the ‘myth of the Dark Continent’. These adventures were characterized by dramatic and violent encounters with ‘natives’ and fleeting impressions of the flora and fauna of Central Africa. Stanley’s preferred formula was a sensational quest towards an ostensible goal: the ‘finding’ of Livingstone or the search for the sources of the Nile. His Congo and the Founding of its Free State (1885) offered something ostensibly more prosaic: a ‘story of work and exploration’. While Stanley’s book was received with enthusiasm by many, the markedly ‘European’ nature of the project also presented problems. His famous search for Livingstone and his subsequent ‘Anglo-American’ expedition across equatorial Africa had been funded by the British and American press and both missions hailed as the exclusive achievements of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’. But now Stanley was exploring and working for the Francophone King of the Belgians. This article argues that Stanley explicitly presents his literary productions (journalism, travel writing, and lectures) as an important part of the work of exploration and empire building.

Little England: nineteenth-century Tasmanian travel writing and settler colonialism

Tasmania was a distinctive location for nineteenth-century travellers, and a regular feature of the rich print culture that emerged from the British Empire. Regularly dubbed a “little England” because of its physical and environmental features, the island provided an early source of imperial ideas about Greater Britain and the spread of the Anglo-Saxon race. This paper traces the emergence of the “little England” trope in travel writing, emphasising the importance of this form for knowledge formation. It argues that the contested and violent history of Tasmania, especially the treatment of Aboriginal people, complicated the trope by making explicit the violence that underpinned British imperial expansion. Debates about the morality of colonisation both in the colonial period, and in recent scholarly publications, reveal the high visibility of Tasmania and the complex inheritances of its colonial past locally and in Britain.

Old and New Englanders: Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded AgeBlufordAdams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 38, Issue 3 p. 303-304 Book Review Old and New Englanders: Immigration and Regional Identity in the Gilded Age , Bluford Adams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Yves Laberge, Yves Laberge Groupe de recherche EA 1796, ACE en Études américaines, Université de Rennes 2Search for more papers by this author Yves Laberge, Yves Laberge Groupe de recherche EA 1796, ACE en Études américaines, Université de Rennes 2Search for more papers by this author First published: 08 September 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12386Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume38, Issue3September 2015Pages 303-304 RelatedInformation

Secular Pleasures and FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Nineteenth-century British poetry famously drew upon religious models for secular ends. As M. H. Abrams argues, William Wordsworth offered a modern counterpart to theodicy justif[ying] suffering as necessary means toward ... achieved maturity. Fiction that was ostensibly preoccupied with worldly matters similarly adopted religious paradigms and vocabularies. Pointing out much common ground religious and secular literature share, Barry Quails shows that Victorian novels addressed the pilgrim's query, 'What is truth?' (1) As these literary critics show, fiction and poetry together reabsorbed preoccupations that before had been specific to theological discourse. The overlap between religious and secular modes of thought has been a topic of interest in current cultural critiques as well. Works such as William E. Connolly's Why I am Not a Secularist (2000), Talal Asad's Formations of Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity (2003), and Vincent Pecora's Secularization and Cultural Criticism (2006) treat secular as a mutable and internally contradictory set of concepts and practices, which, like religion, deal with suffering, shape attitudes toward body, and potentially lead to destructive collective formations. (2) prominent recent contribution to this emergent field is Charles Taylor's Secular Age (2007), a comprehensive exploration of origins and trajectory of secular thought in West) Taylor challenges commonplace modern narrative that treats rise of secularity as liberation from irrational delusions. He argues that modern subjects who sought to ascribe meaning to human experience without reference to a transcendent power had to invent new ideologies and myths about human life and its role in cosmos. As Secular Age suggests, to approach secular as a social construct is to look beyond its claims to rational objectivity and explore how it crafts fulfilling accounts of existence. In this essay, I turn to a Victorian text that offers an early articulation of some of insights that have come to inform critical study of secular today: Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which had arguably become by far best known and most popular poem in English language at end of nineteenth century. (4) In this poem, FitzGerald imagines a secular experience that resists reign of reason. Musing on transcendental matters cannot help speaker to make sense of life or his own existence, but neither can rational inquiry. Longing instead for A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou / Beside me singing in Wilderness, he relates to material world around him seeking and embracing pleasure. (5) Through senses of wonder, connectedness, and enchantment inspired self's engagement with natural world, FitzGerald transfers some of most fulfilling aspects of religion onto a secular experience. Discussing sensuality and materialism in Rubaiyat, some Victorian reviewers drew attention to poem's secular orientation. (6) a reviewer in National Review, for example, suggested that FitzGerald ably captured zeitgeist (1899): there is now some recent change in mood of Anglo-Saxon race that has caused this wide response to Omar-in-FitzGerald. It is, one must imagine, that there has been of late a wide and rapid decline in religious belief, so that a vast number of English people are able to understand and largely sympathize with old rebel against orthodox Islamite Puritanism of East. (Holland, p. 649) Another reviewer claimed that inexactness of FitzGerald's translation had allowed for infusion of a modern element into quatrains. That we have heard a good deal of late about Omar Khayyam is not due ... to any increase in number of Persian scholars, but to fact that existing translation harmonises with a special phase of modern thought, commented reviewer, diligently comparing individual quatrains to their Persian originals (Cadell, p. …

The Mexican Image through Southern Eyes: De Bow's Review in the Era of Manifest Destiny

De Bow's Review was the leading magazine of the South during the antebellum period. This historical study examines the journal's meaning-making about Mexicans and reveals how the magazine, as the principal voice of the section's plantation, commercial, banking, and mining interests, promoted the image of a broken, degenerate Mexico and proclaimed that only the “Anglo-Saxon race” was capable of bringing progress amid the American project of empire-building. Though Mexicans’ racial status was unresolved in the 1840s, De Bow's Review correspondents later assigned to them the status of non-masters unfit to self-govern and, therefore, fit only to serve and to be ruled by their Anglo-American conquerors. The context of the correspondents’ claims of Mexican inferiority suggests that they simultaneously engaged in an unspoken struggle to differentiate the South from the North by defining Mexican inferiority in relation to Southern values of bravery, honor, and dominance.

The Limits of Literary Realism: Of One Blood's Post-Racial Fantasy by Pauline Hopkins

Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race. —Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces In the preface to her first novel, an excerpt of which appears above, Pauline Hopkins offers a critical assessment of the cultural stakes of fiction. According to the prolific writer and editor, fiction and history should serve mutual ends: the uplifting of the race. Pointing to the artistic and archival merits of both disciplines, Hopkins implores her fellow African Americans to take up the pen. As Hopkins seems to suggest, fiction’s primary power lies in its pedagogical potential. Fiction has the ability to educate literate African Americans about their rich and painful past, and this past can in turn enrich literary production, as it is replete with material that might easily be adapted for the sake of artistic development and political agitation. Addressing African Americans specifically, Hopkins indicates that it is the responsibility of the race to produce the writers who will narrate this past “with all the fire and romance” that it deserves. Calling for a fiction of mimetic detail and romantic affect, Hopkins echoes white writer Albion Tourgee’s claim, made some several years before, that realism alone cannot convey “the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life” (411). In Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1902–1903), Hopkins advances her views on the limitations of literary realism and puts her ideas about the aesthetic virtues of romantic fiction into practice. Published serially in the Colored American Magazine, the episodic novel blends realism with romance to explore issues of ancestry, miscegenation, and tangled kinship. In this respect, the novel is generically and thematically akin to much of nineteenth-century African American writing. But in some fundamental ways, Of One Blood is one of the most intricate, if not bewildering texts. Indeed, critics often describe it as “unruly”—taking their cue from the title of an anthology edited by John Cullen Gruesser. To be sure, the novel draws from several romantic traditions—the gothic, adventure, utopian genres—and adopts a bifurcated plot line—one American, one African—that splits the novel into two separate narratives. 1 The text begins in America, focusing on Reuel’s

English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (review)

Reviewed by: English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Patrick Brantlinger English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Heidi Kaufman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 243 pp. $85.00. Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that "Jewish discourse" is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said's Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. Christianity, after all, emerged from "the Holy Land" and ancient Jewish sources. Kaufman recognizes that Victorian novels are palimpsests, and that one of their underlying texts—more often than not the [End Page 192] principal one—is the Bible (p. 94). Jews also occupied an influential albeit liminal place in 1800s Britain. Among the novels that Kaufman analyzes is Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847) by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, hardly a minor figure in nineteenth-century British and, indeed, global history (pp. 82-92). Kaufman begins by analyzing Britain as a "nested nation" (pp. 1-26), meaning that it was never purely "English" but contained a mix of peoples, cultures, and religions, including, from the Middle Ages on, Jews and Judaism. Just as the Bible contains both Old and New Testaments, moreover, so Anglicanism contains and supposedly goes beyond Roman Catholicism, while all versions of Christianity are obviously indebted to Judaism. As Kaufman demonstrates, this indebtedness is acknowledged in a variety of ways in many Victorian novels, even when they express antisemitism. In her second chapter, she examines the depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. Both authors simultaneously express and struggle to overcome antisemitism. Harrington was Edgeworth's self-conscious albeit ambivalent attempt to deal with the antisemitism she had been criticized for in some of her earlier work. And in treating the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Dickens invokes the story of Abraham and Isaac and shows both Gordon and Gashford fantasizing about becoming Jews. Gordon actually did convert to Judaism. "In the upside down world of the riots," Kaufman notes, "Gordon, the president of the Protestant Association, becomes a Jew while Jewish homes are marked as belonging to a 'True Protestant'" (p. 55) to escape the violence of the rioters. Chapter Three shows how Judah's Lion, an 1843 novel by evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, deals with a return to the Holy Land in a way comparable to the "new crusade" of Disraeli's aristocratic Young England hero, Tancred. Tonna's Anglo-Jewish protagonist Alick Cohen "watches British flags hoisted over Middle Eastern territories" (p. 60) and is proud to be both Jewish and British. Judah's lion, which Richard I supposedly added "to the English national flag on the occasion of its conquest over Jerusalem during the Third Crusade" (p. 60), symbolizes the historic and religious unity of England and Palestine, with British imperial expansion into the Middle East as the parallel to Alick's conversion to Christianity. Like other Victorian authors, however, Tonna runs into the difficulty that Jewishness had come to be understood as racial, and not just as cultural and religious: Alick converts, but biologically he will forever be Jewish—a stumbling block for those who considered the white, Anglo-Saxon race superior to all other races. In Tancred, Kaufman goes on to claim, "Christian culture is not defined against a Jewish other but as a product of Jewish origins" (p. 83). Disraeli was [End Page 193] less interested than Tonna in religion, however, and more interested in race, and particularly in reversing the standard racial polarities. Kaufman believes that Tancred meets his match in the Jewish Eva, and that her Judaism trumps or at least complements his Christianity, which is partially true. But she overlooks Tancred's friendship with the Young Syrian Fakredeen and also Tancred's encounter with "the Angel of Arabia" on Mt. Sinai, who tells him that "Arabian" or Semitic peoples have produced all of the world's great empires and religions. Fakredeen and the Angel add Islam to Tancred's melting pot, and Disraeli's term "Arabian" is more...