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Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, James Morier, and the Queering of Hajji Baba
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2020
The epilogue ponders how the media reorientations that vexed Central and South Asian travelers to pre-1857 Britain sedimented over time, exposing an impotency latent in the discursive power formation now known as orientalism. The classic case study is James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, which I interpret as satires against the English dandies and damsels who adopted Persian dress and demeanor to display social exclusivity rather than against Iranians like Abul Hassan Khan: the Persian ambassador whom Morier hosted in England in 1809–1810 and 1819. The ambassador’s queering in the English news circuit prompted Morier, a social climber anxious to claim masculine gentility, to project Londoners’ transculturation in Qajar fashions onto an Iran wallowing in Regency effeminacy – the Anglo-Persian dandy whose uncertain sexual orientation recoils on the British empire’s homosocial gentlemen.
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