"Dirty Dick" Burton?
Jul. 5th, 2007 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sechan19Thirty-some-odd pages later Said manages to get back to the subject of Sir Richard Burton and his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856). And I thought he'd never do so. Shame on me. I was actually annoyed enough with Said over that issue to set Orientalism aside for the entire time I was in Japan, but in coming home felt that I ought to try and finish it off - albeit with less enthusiasm than before. So far I have found his treatment of Burton interesting (if somewhat snide in places), and I'm considering looking in to some of the sources he references in his discussion.
In particular the following quote was rather apt, especially in view of my most recent re-reading of Stuart Hall's essay, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora."
"[Thomas] Assad sensitively points out that Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest." (195)
Here's an associated quote from Hall:
"What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name' of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation." (234).
While I realize that this elucidation of cultural identity is meant mainly to apply to peoples displaced by people like Burton (rather than to someone like Burton himself), it will be in the back of my mind when I look in to Burton's writings - as I plan to do.
EDIT: I love the Internet. This website has .pdfs of practically all of Burton's major works, making my job of finding his texts extremely easy. Doesn't do a thing for my continued time constraints, of course, but supposedly you can't have everything...
In particular the following quote was rather apt, especially in view of my most recent re-reading of Stuart Hall's essay, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora."
"[Thomas] Assad sensitively points out that Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest." (195)
Here's an associated quote from Hall:
"What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name' of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation." (234).
While I realize that this elucidation of cultural identity is meant mainly to apply to peoples displaced by people like Burton (rather than to someone like Burton himself), it will be in the back of my mind when I look in to Burton's writings - as I plan to do.
EDIT: I love the Internet. This website has .pdfs of practically all of Burton's major works, making my job of finding his texts extremely easy. Doesn't do a thing for my continued time constraints, of course, but supposedly you can't have everything...
