This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics. Through examining these texts and available performance history, and incorporating historical texts and cultural theory, David Hammerback analyses these works to illustrate a complex of cultural representations: some contested Orientalism, some participated in Western colonialist discourses, while some can be placed somewhere between these two markers of ideology in Western culture and the arts. He also assesses the works which participated in shaping the theatrical face of Western hegemony, ones directly participating in Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said and others. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, French literature, history and cultural studies.

This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics. Through examining these texts and available performance history, and incorporating historical texts and cultural theory, David Hammerback analyses these works to illustrate a complex of cultural representations: some contested Orientalism, some participated in Western colonialist discourses, while some can be placed somewhere between these two markers of ideology in Western culture and the arts. He also assesses the works which participated in shaping the theatrical face of Western hegemony, ones directly participating in Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said and others. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, French literature, history and cultural studies.

This book explores the interrelation of contemporary French theatre and poetry. Using the pictorial turn in the various branches of art and science, its observable features, and the theoretical framework of the conceptual metaphor, this study seeks to gather together the divergent manners in which French poetry and theatre address this turn. Poetry in space and theatricality of poetry are studied alongside theatre, especially to the performative aspect of the originally theological concept of "kenosis". In doing so the author attempts to make use of the theological concept of kenosis, of central importance in Novarina’s oeuvre, for theatrical and dramatological purposes. Within poetic rituals, kenotic rituals are also examined in the book in a few theatrical practices – János Pilinszky and Robert Wilson, Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba – facilitating a better understanding of Novarina’s works. Accompanied by new English translations in the appendices, this is the first English language monograph related to the French essayist, dramaturg and director Valère Novarina’s theatre, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and literature studies.

This book explores the relationship between ideas of the East and the struggle for democratic rights in the Romantic period.

This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Michael H. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India—the first book written in English by an Indian—framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur. Travels presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole. Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.

Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.