Notes

1. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie quotes at length from Macaulay’s minute, interspersing the original text with editorial comments emphasizing the parliamentarian’s dismissal of India’s dialects as “poor and rude,” and its literature, history, and science as risible (376). Some three hundred years before Macaulay’s 1835 articulation of the goals of English education in India, the spirit of the 1537 Act of Henry VIII, designed to promote “a conformity, concordance and familiarity in language, tongue, in manners, order and apparel” among the Irish, Britain’s white neighbors, offers a comparable example of the modus operandi of the civilizing mission. There are echoes of the same spirit in the words of Lord Justice of Ireland Sir William Parsons a century later: “We must change their course of government, clothing, customs, manner of holding land, language and habit of life” (quoted in Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 10).

2. Forms of Westernization and Englishness may well have been reduced to triviality and farce as they were translated and domesticated in the Indian context. Moreover, the models for mimicry may not always have been Englishmen, but could have been Anglicized Indians or Anglo-Indian racial hybrids. The colonized also mimic each other, particularly those of a better class and position in society, producing copies of copies of an elusive but nonetheless identifiable range of displaced effects associated with Westernization and its coding as modern.

3. In Quantum Anthropologies, Vicky Kirby contends that “culture” is the name given to an otherwise “articulate enclosure without limits,” producing “Nature as Culture’s creature . . . to mark its denaturalization,” in a move that betrays an incorrigible commitment to “the logic of origins and causal determination, simply replacing one domain or one notion of initiating efficacy with another—not Nature but ‘nature,’ that is, Culture” (12–13). Kirby goes on to explain that “everything is always/already a cultural construction” as “an elaborated form of Cartesianism . . . [that] foregrounds ideation and the human mind’s now enlarged and collective success” (14). Having argued earlier in her book that grammatology and deconstruction do not furnish a predictable set of methodological rules, Kirby suggests that the divide between the sciences and the humanities is linked to “the fear of opening the concept ‘text’ to an outside whose determinations do not begin and end with the human subject. . . . Instead of opening the question of the object again . . . science is read as the bad boy to the humanities’ denigrated yet superior sensitivities” (15). Kirby’s argument rests on the extension of textuality to nature in order to “[appreciate] that our corporeal realities and their productive iterations are material reinventions” such that life “reads and rewrites itself” and marks on the page appear as “effective transubstantiations” (xi). Kirby’s work offers exciting possibilities for a simultaneous mobilization of materialist and deconstructive methodology.

4. In his reading of the “physiology of style” in Proust, Walter Benjamin reminds us, “his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body” (Illuminations, 214).

5. Although Sneja Gunew argues that “learning to speak English structured, or at least choreo-graphed, bodies in certain ways,” she is more interested in its emotional impact than its physiological one (“Technologies of the Self,” 736). Elsewhere she writes, “femaleness acquires different forms in the new [second] language” (“Feminism,” 12).

6. What Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, calls “the extreme fact of the body” intrudes on consciousness with undeniable insistence (126).

7. Similarly dissatisfied with some parts of Ashton’s translation, Dennis Redmond translates the phrase as “the corporeal moment” and knowledge as “cognition” (http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html).

8. See Barkan, The Retreat.

9. Critics of hybridity and its poststructuralist coordinates abound. Some postcolonial critics complain that “the postmodern preoccupation with the crisis of meaning is not everyone’s crisis” (Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” 243). Even those sympathetic to postmodern frameworks have asked for a more meaningful historicization of the concept of hybridity. Abdul JanMohamed accuses Bhabha of repressing “the political history of colonialism, which is inevitably sedimented in its discourse,” and of ignoring “Fanon’s definition of the colonizer/colonized relation as a ‘Manichean struggle’—a definition that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate representation of a profound conflict” (“The Economy,” 60). Materialist critics question Bhabha’s overreliance on the discursive and enunciative dimensions of postcolonial resistance. In “Signs,” Benita Parry writes, “The construct of binary oppositions, if epistemologically faulty, retains power as a political category” (15). Ella Shohat finds the idea of culture as in-between unsatisfactory, complaining that “post-colonial theory’s celebration of hybridity risks an anti-essentialist condescension toward those communities obliged by circumstances to assert, for their very survival, a lost and even irretrievable past” (“Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” 110). Ahmad’s summary of Bhabha’s notion of hybridity “as a critique of essentialism” and “a carnivalesque collapse and play of identities” denounces its production of a subject “remarkably free of class, gender, historical time, geographical location, indeed any historicisation or individuation whatever” (“Postcolonial Theory,” 370–71). Young recognizes that Bhabha’s elaboration of hybridity (as well as mimicry) as a threat to colonial authority produces a complicated, and for some critics an ultimately dissatisfying sort of “agency without a subject” that is “not a form of resistance as such” (White Mythologies, 148). Anthony Easthope argues that Bhabha’s reliance on a Derridean notion of the presence/difference binary offers no account of the identity that is undermined by hybridity (“Bhabha, Identity, and Hybridity,” 344). Wary of the potential for misunderstanding, Daniel Boyarin warns that while Bhabha’s hybrids represent “a difference ‘within’” the subject, “the literal ascription of hybridity on the part of hegemonic discourses to one group of people, one set of practices, disavows the very difference within by externalizing it” (“Hybridity and Heresy,” 343). Žižek (The Ticklish Subject, 220) and Friedman (“Global Crises”) find that the concept of hybridity is valuable only for a cosmopolitan elite. From the perspective of political economy, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, however, endorse Bhabha’s “critique of the dialectic,” while insisting that postmodern forms of power operate not in binarist modes but in hybrid and heterogenous ones (Empire, 143–45).

10. In one of the pedagogic master texts in the field, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin claim that “hybridity and the power it releases” stand out as “the characteristic feature and contribution of the postcolonial” (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 183). As I explain in “Hybridity, Redux,” the concept of hybridity is closely associated with Bhabha even when it is deployed without the careful provisos and contexts that inform the critic’s work. Moreover, its circulatory force relies in part on key developments in critical theory. Bhabha’s theorization of colonial hybridity and mimicry is informed by a compendium of the most influential theoretical contributions of the twentieth century by a diverse range of thinkers, including Bakhtin, Lacan, Foucault, Benjamin, and Derrida. Bhabha’s ideas arrive upon a reading public seasoned by decades-long engagement with ideas generated by the linguistic turn (Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in anthropology; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, and John Dewey in philosophy; Ferdinand Saussure and J. L. Austin in linguistics; and George Herbert Mead in sociology), supplemented by the poststructuralist theories of Derrida, Lacan, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Twentieth-century developments in critical theory have also influenced discussions of race and identity. African-American Studies scholar Robert M. Young suggests that in 1985 during the highpoint of poststructuralist theory, Gates’s edited volume Race, Writing, and Difference aims “to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race” (“The Linguistic Turn,” 336). In the volume referred to by Young, Bhabha’s essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” launched a powerful assault on the colonizer/colonized binary using a deconstructive modality in combination with a postcolonial thrust. Structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and deconstruction are terms with specific genealogies and coordinates. See the introduction to Poststructuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Young, and Robert J. C. Young’s White Mythologies, chapter 1, for detailed and nuanced discussions of this terminology.

11. Marwan Kraidy establishes a relationship of synonymity between the two in the title of his book Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. The widespread use of the term “hybridity” in connection with globalization has occasioned concern among some critics. Paul Gilroy is one of many critics impatient with “banal invocations of hybridity in which everything becomes equally and continuously intermixed” (Against Race, 275). Gayatri Spivak points out, moreover, that the extrapolation of hybridity as a generalized problematic nonetheless does not indemnify the term against the need to explore its political ramifications: “If you were to say that hybridity is everywhere, irreducible, then all of the old problems apply” (quoted in Hutnyk, Critique of Exotica, 35).

12. “Don’t separate word and history!” Derrida enjoins in his comments on apartheid in an open letter clarifying his position on text, language, and history. Derrida asks, “Has the word apartheid effaced its ‘sinister renown’ because the South Africans wanted to retire it from circulation and precisely because of its ‘sinister renown’?” He notes that “in spite of their efforts to ‘retire’ this ‘sufficiently stigmatized’ term, the renown has not been effaced: it has gotten more and more sinister. This is history, this is the relation between words and history” (“But, beyond . . . ,” 161). If we pursued the deconstructive project of locating a history for hybridity by following the paleonymic burden of the sign so that “the history will not be forgotten,” hybridity emerges not only in mimicry as repetition with a difference but also as repetition in biological reproduction, despite the colonial interdiction against racial crossing (159). Significantly, Bhabha tethers his formulation of hybridity to a historically charged context by referencing James Baldwin’s meditations on the “American color line” in “Black and White and Read All Over.” Bhabha insists that “hybridity . . . is no jejune post-Modern lark, nor is it simply my invention.” Baldwin’s meditations on the “Negro” as hybrid strike Bhabha as profoundly generative for his own investment in the production of difference in the crucible of contact. Bhabha points out that “hybridity is not . . . about new ‘alloys’ conceived in an amoral state of historical amnesia” but “a form of social and psychic recognition; it is an awareness of the graftings, transitions, and translations through which we define our present” (114–16). Instead of assuming a disabling incompatibility between historical and poststructuralist approaches, this stance on hybridity suggests a joint maneuver, even if Bhabha nonetheless avoids any discussion of the sinister conjugation of racist notions of biology in historical discussions of hybridity.

13. Surveying its development in the Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Andrew Smith notes that “in everyday usage,” the term implies “the mingling of once separate and discrete ways of living.” Although the term still carries traces of “essentialist assumptions” and “structural inequality” at “the theoretical level,” “the language of blood and racial descent,” Smith observes, “has been precluded” (251). Shu-Mei Shih observes “the strongly ambivalent relation” of “South Asia-based postcolonial theory” to race studies and a more general “ascendancy of . . . neoliberal color-blind racism” (“Comparative Racialization,” 1347, 1354). In Hybridity, Anjali Prabhu notes the “tendency . . . to move away from . . . the notion of race” toward ideas of “multiplicity, plurality, and difference in a less specifiable way,” except for texts that are “closer to a ‘social ground’” (xiii). Discussions of métissage and créolité are more apt to acknowledge the historical origins of the terms in the Caribbean context, even if their current usage has also moved in the direction of celebrating “synergistic cultural forms” (122). In Autobiographical Voices, Françoise Lionnet preserves the term métissage in reference to Glissant to honor “the racial context,” even though, as Anjali Prabhu has observed, the term “more generally in her writing refers to an enabling ‘reading practice’” (8). Valérie Loichot’s valiant attempt to distinguish biological métissage and créolité in “Creolizing Barack Obama” acknowledges the distinction while pointing to its inadequacy for grasping the complexities of identity.

14. See Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 9, and What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 13.

15. William James, widely considered the father of embodied cognition, points to Nicolas Malebranch as the mouthpiece of the intellectualist creed that rejects the body and the senses as a source of knowledge: “Impose silence on your senses, your imagination, and your passions, and you will then hear the pure voice of interior truth, the clear and evident replies of our common mistress [reason]” (quoted in James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 76). In writings straddling psychology and philosophy, James labors to challenge this legacy and rehabilitate the unity of the mind–body, thought–feeling, and precept–concept. In the same volume that identified and deplored the long-dominant “traditional intellectualist creed” (76), he writes of the mutuality of sensation, perception, and knowing: “‘Things’ are known to us by our senses, and are called ‘presentation’ by some authors, to distinguish them from the ideas or ‘representations’ which we may have when our senses are closed. I myself have grown accustomed to the words ‘precept’ and ‘concept’ in treating of the contrast, but concepts flow out of precepts and into them again” (45). “Sensation and thought in man,” he concludes, “are mingled” (45). In the groundbreaking “What Is an Emotion?,” he observes that physiologists had limited their exploration of the brain’s functions to “its cognitive and volitional performances,” a consequence of “dividing the brain into sensorial and motor centres” (188). Thomas Dewey’s subsequent development of the idea of the “body-mind” makes a similar move, choosing a term that bespeaks the history of their bifurcation along with his rejection of this history. For Dewey, employing the hyphenated phrase “simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation” (Experience, 217). In “Sociology of the Senses,” Georg Simmel points out that “we perceive our fellow-men . . . through the medium of the senses” (356).

More recently, neurologist Gallese and linguist Lakoff argue that “conceptual knowledge is embodied, that is, it is mapped within our sensory-motor system. . . . The sensory-motor system not only provides structure to conceptual content, but also characterises the semantic content of concepts in terms of the way that we function with our bodies in the world” (“The Brain’s Concepts,” 456). In neurocognitive terms, Damasio explains, “The ensemble of sensory detectors are located throughout our bodies and help construct neural patterns that map the comprehensive interaction of the organism with the object along its many dimensions” (Looking for Spinoza, 199). What architectural theorist Juhani Pallasmaa calls “the eyes of the skin” are the organs of sensation and perception distributed throughout our organismic selves (The Eyes of the Skin). In net terms, we take in the world through the senses. To tarry with this proposition is not to posit a new duality between the mind/body or the brain and the senses, but to reengage them in the complex theater of aesthetic cognition with the understanding that in a whole-body conception of cognition, the senses matter as much as the brain. Popular science can sometimes veer in the direction of reinstating a binaristic model, as in the statement that “the brain isn’t always in charge of the senses. In fact, there is reason to argue the opposite: the senses run the brain” (Brynie, Brain Sense, 113).

16. In his foreword to Andrew Clark’s Supersizing the Mind, philosopher of mind David Chalmers summarizes the extended mind thesis thus: “When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind” (ix). In his earlier book, Clark suggests in a similar vein that it would be “wise to consider the intelligent system as a spatio-temporally extended process not limited by the tenuous envelope of skin and skull” (Being There, 221). Clark perceives cultural tools such as iPhones not merely as tools but as extensions of the cognitive system. In insisting on the “mutually modulatory influences linking brain, body, and world,” Clark’s work is suggestive for exploring the impact of the use of products and a range of things on cognition (163).

17. As a mutable archive, the body overflows with information about the histories working through it; everything that “touches it,” Foucault explains, “diet, climate, soil,” is part of the body’s emergence (Herkunft) into history; its complex encounter with history is inscribed, moreover, on its “nervous system . . . temperament . . . digestive apparatus . . . diet,” and so on (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 82–83). Arguably, as Slavoj Žižek notes, “there is nothing ‘inner’ in this true ideological identity of mine—my innermost beliefs are all ‘out there,’ embodied in practices which reach up to the immediate materiality of my body” (“Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” 680). In her reading of hybridity and passing, Sara Ahmed acknowledges this materiality through the “work and labour” involved in the “act of theft” of the desired identity. Ahmed identifies passing as a “technique of the self,” and submits that “bodies become reconstructed through techniques which serve to approximate an image” (“She’ll Wake Up One of These Days,” 98, 101).

18. In “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” Judith Butler questions the existence of a body prior to inscription, as if “there is a body that is in some sense there, pregiven, existentially available to become the site of its own ostensible construction” (601). In Bodies That Matter, Butler calls for “a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface,” insisting that “these are both persistent and contested regions” (66–67). Responding in part to Butler, Kirby nonetheless asks for additional consideration of the “textual adventure of the peristaltic movements of the viscera, the mitosis of cells, the electrical activity that plays across a synapse, the itinerary of a virus” (Telling Flesh, 76). She advances the idea of “corporeography,” arguing that “the body is more than a visitor to the scene of writing . . . it is the drama of its own remarkability” (154). In Neural Geographies, Elizabeth Wilson advocates “readings of biological matter wherein biology is thought as excess to the limits of presence, location and stasis that theories of biological determinism and theories of gender alike have ascribed to it” (65). Butler, Kirby, and Wilson’s work, along with that of other feminist scholars such as Susan Bordo (Unbearable Weight) and Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies), engage at length with the problematic divide between the body’s materiality and its life as an accretion of sociocultural effects.

19. Leading geneticist R. C. Lewontin emphasizes the role of the social in genetic studies: “We are material biological objects developing under the influence of the interaction of our genes with the external world” (Biology as Ideology, 122). In an aphoristic pronouncement, he declares, “To be genetic is not to be unchangeable” (35).

20. The terminological slide between “body” and “biology” employed here is common in the sciences, but may require an attitudinal shift for the humanities, which routinely cede the biological organism to the sciences while claiming the social body inhabiting worlds of discourse as its rightful ground. In Messengers of Sex, Celia Roberts argues that “shifting meanings of ‘biology’ and recurrent slippages between biology as a science and biology as body or material flesh” make it “notoriously difficult for both scientists and social theorists” to hold “these two versions of biology apart” (2). I submit that responsible humanistic inquiry into the problem of a good life must recognize and appreciate the informative slippage between body and biology.

21. See Baucom, “The Human Shore.”

22. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 13. In a 1993 essay, Terry Eagleton observed, “There will soon be more bodies in contemporary criticism than on the fields of Waterloo” (“It Is Not Quite True,” 7). And yet, it is in the work of Eagleton himself and his readings of Frankfurt school aesthetics in several works, including The Ideology of the Aesthetic, that links between aesthetics, politics, and sensory cognition were first being elaborated, with suggestive implications for a relinkage of questions of aesthetics, history, and human biology.

23. Among a number of scholars invested in this research, the writings of neurologist Antonio Damasio are often credited with popularizing the idea of embodied cognition and “the brain’s body-furnished, body-minded mind” (Looking for Spinoza, 206). In an early bid for a recognition of the mind–body nexus, Margaret Cavendish, one of the few women writing on natural philosophy in the early modern period, speculated that “sense and knowledge cannot be bound only to the head or brain” (quoted in Anderson, “Living in a Material World,” 192). “I believe,” she argued in her 1666 work, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, “that the Eye, Ear, Nose, Tongue, and all the Body, have knowledge as well as the Mind” (115–16, letter 36). Acknowledging the prevalent creed of the time, she writes with some irony thus: “Some learned allow, that all knowledge and perception comes by the sense, and the sensitive spirits; who, like faithful servants, run to and fro, as from the sensitive organs, to the brain and back, to carry news to the mind; and yet they do not grant, that they have any knowledge at all: which shows, they are very dull servants; and I wonder how they can inform the mind of what they do not know themselves” (153).

24. W. J. T. Mitchell argues that as “an imperial practice, aesthetics enlists all the rhetorics of religion, morality, and progressive modernity to pass judgment on the ‘bad objects’ that inevitably come into view in a colonial encounter” (Picture Theory, 147). David Lloyd’s discussion of race also incorporates the role of aesthetics in the idea of “normal developmental schema,” suggesting that the “racism of culture is . . . an ineradicable effect of its fundamental structures” (“Race under Representation,” 63). Lloyd does not use culture to indicate “its generalized sense of the totality of life-forms of a particular society or group,” but rather “the sense of aesthetic culture,” which functions through “the formulation and development of a narrative of representation” (63–64). Simon Gikandi has developed the coimplication of aesthetics and ideology in various pieces from a 1997 article to a 2011 publication, Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Gikandi demonstrates the mutual imbrication of slavery and the development of taste, arenas that are usually segregated in discrete analyses.

25. Put otherwise, the cultural is racial; the idea of distinct cultures has been vitally instrumental in the construction of racial categories in the first place. Anthropologist George Stocking argues that early twentieth-century social sciences were dominated by “a vague sociobiological indeterminism, a ‘blind and bland shuttling between race and civilization,’” with the “Lamarckian notion of acquired characteristics” as “the bridge over which this shuttling took place” (Race, Culture, and Evolution, 265). The idea of culture, he observes, “explained all the same phenomenon . . . in strictly non-biological terms,” most effectively when it repudiated the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” (265). Pascoe explains that even in the formulations of race scientists, “racial essence stretched seamlessly from physical shape to character, morality, psychology, social organization, even, in the more elaborate schemes, to language. In other words, race scientists invested the term ‘race’ with all the explanatory power we now associate with the term ‘culture’” (“Miscegenation Law,” 117). Etienne Balibar mounts a similar argument in discussing cultural differences in neo-racism in “Is There a Neo-Racism?”. Finally, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work in anthropology led him to the conclusion that “far from having to ask whether culture is or is not a function of race, we are discovering that race—or what is generally meant by the term—is one function among others of culture” (A View from Afar, 15).

26. Kamala Visweswaran argues that Boas and his students may have fueled “the machine of scientific racism” by “expunging race from social science and assigning it to biology” (Un/common Cultures, 53).

27. See Epstein, The Politics of Difference in Medical Research; Fausto-Sterling, “Refashioning Race”; Blum, “Racialized Groups”; and Kaplan, “When Socially Determined Categories Make Biological Realities.”

28. Fanon declares, “If culture is the combination of motor and mental behavior patterns arising from the encounter of man with nature and with his fellow-man, it can be said that racism is indeed a cultural element” (Toward the African Revolution, 32).

29. In “The End of Temporality,” Fredric Jameson complains that the proliferation of body theories “replicate[s] the deeper tendency of the socioeconomic order itself, which is a nominalistic one and seeks, in its uniquely historical ‘death of the subject,’ to reduce the historical dimensions of existential experience” in part through “the reduction to the present and to the body alike” (713). Denouncing “the valorization of the body and its experience as the only authentic form of materialism,” Jameson fears that the bodies thus theorized may be evacuated of history (713). Terry Eagleton has also warned against the “new somatics” that fetishize the “libidinal body” over the “labouring” one, within a politics careening between “vacuous universalism and myopic particularism” (Illusions, 71, 120). Adorno and Fanon’s writings, however, instead of fixating on the present, together situate the politics of the body within a long historical arc on the one hand, and in the context of its manipulation and domination under the rule of capital on the other.

30. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the role of the body in human experience and rejects the Cartesian mind–body split, insisting that “there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” (xi).

31. Although Ehrhard Bahr complains that “the authors [Horkheimer and Adorno] employed a rather naively realistic physiological theory of perception” (“The Anti-Semitism Studies of the Frankfurt School,” 132), Adorno’s notes on aesthetics in his eighth seminar suggest a broader formulation and a rejection of considerations of “the senses in isolation” and of an “ontology of the senses” in favor of the clear understanding that “the senses are historical” (quoted in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 140–41).

32. Akira Lippit’s exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture in Electric Animal includes many references to the work of Adorno and Horkheimer on the animal as other in the making of the human in philosophical discourses.

33. David Spurr claims, “Under Western eyes, the body is that which is not proper to the primitive, the sign by which the primitive is represented. The body . . . is the essential defining characteristic of primitive peoples” (Rhetoric of Empire, 22). Anthropologist David Howes points out that expeditions set out explicitly “to measure primitive predilection for the lower senses (taste, touch, smell)” (Sensual Relations, 5). He elaborates the sensory foundations of the construction of race thus: “In the very act of measuring the body parts and registering the sensory acuity of ‘primitive’ peoples, anthropologists were constituting themselves as rational Europeans and their subjects as sensuous savages” (4). Howes’s project is invested in seeing how “we learn social divisions, distinctions of gender, color and race, through our senses” and in exploring how “sensual relations are also social relations” (xi). Even though early modern accounts suggest that the European sense of sight was less acute than that of “savages,” vision has enjoyed a primacy among the senses in Western culture for a variety of reasons, and with multiple consequences: the long reign of ocular centrism in studies of racial and cultural difference, as well as an associated preoccupation with the more permanent products of human endeavor—written versus oral text, art, painting, architecture, captured sound in visual form as in sheet music and score rather than oral performance. At the same time, imperial eyes have famously indulged selective vision, not seeing so much as producing a landscape available for colonization and the benefit of the colonizer. In other words, the emphasis on visuality is not always indicative of particular acuity or discernment, and is enmeshed in what Pratt has called “the relation of mastery predicated between seer and seen” and “explicit interaction between esthetics and ideology” in colonial situations (Imperial Eyes, 204–5).

34. Adorno submits that the relation between reflection and reflex is complicated, for “subjects are not only fused with their own physical nature; a consistent legality holds sway also in the psychological realm, which reflection has laboriously divided from the world of bodies” (Negative Dialectics, 221).

35. On the topic of Black Skin, White Masks, Terry Collits observes, “skin . . . is god-given even if its meanings are social, discursive,” while noting that skin and mask are both the border that interfaces with the world (“Theorizing Racism,” 65).

36. “Does not nature keep nearly everything secret” from man, Nietzsche observes, “even about his own body, in order to hold him fast under the spell of a proud, delusionary consciousness, unmindful of the windings of his entrails, the swift flow of his bloodstream, the intricate quivering of his tissues!” (“On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 247). What Damasio calls the body-proper is no longer elided from most accounts of cognition, even if “it is the body’s own tendency toward self-concealment that allows for the possibility of its neglect or deprecation,” as philosopher of medicine Drew Leder points out (Absent Body, 69).

37. Bourdieu argues, “Although art obviously offers the greatest scope to the aesthetic disposition, there is no area of practice in which the aim of purifying, refining and sublimating primary needs and impulses cannot assert itself, no area in which the stylization of life, that is, the primacy of forms over function, of manner over matter, does not produce the same effects” (Distinction, 5).

38. Neuropsychologist V. S. Ramachandran’s groundbreaking essay, “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning,” on the role of mirror neurons and imitation learning in human evolution inaugurated decades of research on cognition and the role of mirror neurons. Its conclusions are debated and controversial, but Ramachandran’s speculations furnish renewed grounds for the significance of mimesis in cultural politics within and among groups in ways not originally intended by the researcher.

39. Tahzeeb and Sabhyata are Urdu and Hindi language words roughly translated as “etiquette” and “civilization.”

40. In a mode reminiscent of Aristotle, Mauss says, “The notion of education could be superimposed on that of imitation.” All children go through “the same education, such that we can understand the continuity of the concatenations. What takes place is a prestigious imitation. The child, the adult, imitates actions which have succeeded.” Moreover, he notes, a child is apt to imitate those who have authority over him (“Techniques of the Body,” 73).

41. Bhabha goes on to speak of “certain kinds of secular, liberal ideas of honor, civility, professional expertise, professional integrity—these too are important community ideals” (quoted in Mitchell, “Translator,” 80).

42. Family resemblances extend to the gut. Whether it is for reasons of “diet, human genes or geography,” the “gut microbes of people in China are different from those of people in the United States” (Judson, “Microbes ‘R’ Us”).

43. More recently, neuroscientific research has probed the influence of habits on brain plasticity: “If we repeatedly engage in a . . . behavior,” neuroscientist Kolb contends, “the behavior itself can alter the brain” (Brain Plasticity and Behavior, 5).

44. Lévi-Strauss underscores the biobodily dimensions of our being and becoming, explaining that “cultures leave their mark on the human body: through styles of costume, hair, and ornament, through physical mutilation and through gestures, they mimic differences comparable to those that can exist between races and by favoring certain physical types, they stabilise and even spread them” (A View from Afar, 17).

45. See Elias, The Civilizing Process, and Bourdieu, Distinction. Some half a century before Mauss’s influential work on habitus and the body in “Techniques of the Body,” French physician turned filmmaker and anthropologist Félix Regnault was also documenting body behavior among different cultures. In “Des attitudes du repos dans les races humaines” and other works, Regnault differentiated between “savages” and the “civilized” through their bodily comportment. In the heyday of racial science, these psychosocial and biocultural propositions about difference insisted on the relay between biobodily aesthetics, race, and culture, alongside the staples of cranial difference and biological determinism.

46. Hortense Spillers’s argument for a reading of the hieroglyphics of flesh as “the concentration of ‘ethnicity’ that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away” makes flesh central in the reading of slavery, in particular through the captive woman’s body as abject flesh incarnate (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67). Spillers’s distinction between body/flesh is formulated for a particular, historically situated reading, but its larger gesture toward “disjunctures [that] come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” resonates with my concern that criticism must become attentive to a more extensive semantic range of bodily expressions beyond color and skin in order to better understand the complex registers of difference in racial and cultural politics.

47. Parts of Chirac’s speech are available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4pun9Cdp6Q. The above translation is mine. Explaining the racist behavior of French Communists toward North African immigrants, Memmi refers to the justifications offered for their brutal evictions from public housing in Paris in terms that will seem familiar in Chirac’s mobilization of sensory triggers. Apart from taking up space that might have been allotted to young couples, “the immigrants make too much noise in the street at night; their cooking smells up the stairwells of the buildings; they play their music too loud . . . and so on” (Memmi’s report of objections against them, Racism, 108).

48. William James, arguably the forefather of embodied cognition, claims that “the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed,” while plasticity implies “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.” In this structure, every stable phase of equilibrium “is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort” (Principles of Psychology, 105).

49. The suppression of the body and the senses in the history of aesthetics, I would argue, is a symptom of the same anxieties that sundered the mind from the body, leading Baumgarten, the architect of the earliest modern exploration of aesthetics, to worry that “one could accuse him of concerning himself with things unworthy of a philosopher” (quoted in Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics,” 7).

50. Insisting on the banality and primordiality of racism, Memmi warns that “each time one finds oneself in contact with an individual or group that is different and only poorly understood, one can react in a way that would signify a racism” because this is a propensity “inherent in the human condition (and perhaps that of animals as well)” (Racism, 23).

51. Mauss’s distinction between sitting and squatting humankind in “Techniques of the Body” is also suggestive for a consideration of the importance of posture not only with regard to social norms but also because posture and health may be related such that the way we eat, sit, or shit may impact our physical well-being.

52. The description is not his own, but Darwin validates it by failing to question the assumption that the latter characters are Aryan in origin: “A crossed race would ultimately become homogeneous, though it might not partake in an equal degree of the characters of the two parent-races” (The Descent of Man, 241).

53. Nietzsche goes so far as to claim that “all prejudices emanate from the bowels,” and that the German spirit “is a case of indigestion, it can never be done with anything” (Ecce Homo, 20–21). In a related vein, Kant’s “concept of disgust refers just as strongly to the morally disgusting,” writes Winfried Menninghaus, explaining that “the defense-reaction of disgust does not only involve the proximity and presence of something repellent; rather, it is also the correlative of an intruding act of consumption” (Disgust, 104–5). “The ‘nature of disgust,’” he concludes, “is consequently to civilize. Kant perceived this long before Freud and Elias, and erected a politics and morals of disgust upon the insight” (109). Hitler spoke openly of the smell of the Jew, associating it with ghetto East European Jewry in Mein Kampf: “I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. . . . [they] became positively repulsive when, in addition to their physical uncleanness, you discovered the moral stains on this ‘chosen people’” (53). According to Jadunath Sinha, classical Indian theory defines disgust (jugupsā) “as the shrinking of the mind characterized by hatred.” Sinha surveys a long list of Sanskrit theorists whose views together seem to corroborate the association of disgust with shrinking, recoil, revulsion, and contraction. He cites Saradatanaya’s division of disgust into ksobh and udvega: “The former is the shrinking of the mind, while the latter is the shrinking of the body” (Indian Psychology, 200). Haidt, McCauley, and Rozin argue that “the most fascinating thing about disgust is that it is recruited to support so many of the norms, rituals, and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves” (“Individual Differences in Sensitivity to Disgust,” 186).

54. In his monumental study, The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias explores the reeducation of individuals with regard to bodily functions as well as the development of a series of prohibitions concerning sensory stimuli as foundational to the civilizing process in the West. The regulation of one’s own bodily effluences and response to those of others, rules about touching, the sounds one makes or listens to, the sights and smells that are appropriate, what and how to eat, and numerous other prescriptions and proscriptions have been part and parcel of the project of Western civilization. Ascesis, self-cultivation, and repression constitute the underbelly of the cultivation of the self and of taste in the cultured individual. Bourdieu’s elaboration of the links between taste, class, and culture, although vigorously debated, nonetheless points to the ways in which aspirations to class mobility in particular allied civilizational aesthetics with bodily ascesis.

55. In The Color of Angels, Classen explores the prominence of visualism in shaping the religious and cultural imagination of the West. Smell, once understood as a useful sensory mode of cognition, is now widely disdained, along with the other lower, more animal senses of taste and touch.

56. Colonial discourse habitually characterized the native as animal. To Lord Hastings, governor general of India from 1813 to 1823, for instance, the “Hindoo” appeared to be little more than animal body, “a being nearly limited to mere animal functions, and even in them indifferent . . . with no higher intellect than a dog or an elephant, or a monkey” (Private Journal, 17). In her review of “Three [Western] Women’s Texts,” Gayatri Spivak discusses the construction of the European self as premised on rendering “indeterminate the boundary between human and animal” with regard to the native to withhold full humanity from its other (249).

57. Kürnberger, quoted in the opening epigraph of Adorno’s Minima Moralia.

58. Genealogical obfuscation caused by lost records and the practice of christening native converts with Christian names make it extremely difficult to establish boundaries between Anglo-Indian and native Christian converts. Moreover, genealogical researchers repeatedly find gender trouble in the archive. In archival work on interracial relationships, Durba Ghosh says she looks out “for subjects with incomplete or partial names because the lack of a complete name signaled the presence of a native female” (“Decoding the Nameless,” 301). Moreover, Buettner notes an 1891 census report citing problems of categorization given “the tendency for Eurasians to enter the European group, and for native Christians to be returned as Eurasians” (“Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 280). Although it is more common to encounter narratives of Anglo-Indians passing for white, passing as Anglo-Indian by native converts to Christianity constitutes an intriguing phenomenon in its own right. The Anglo-Indian community has tried to distinguish itself from Indian Christian converts, continuing the separation into “the graveyards” (Younger, Neglected Children of the Raj, 41).

59. Schedule 366 (2) of the 1950 Constitution of India states, “an Anglo-Indian means a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established there for temporary purposes only” (quoted in Anthony, Britain’s Betrayal in India, 5). In a long list of sliding monikers, this figure has been known euphemistically in the Indian context as “Domestic Occurrence” and “Rear rank European” (Lahiri-Dutt, In Search of a Homeland, 16); colloquially as “Tansh,” “Albino,” “chi-chi,” “mongrel,” “pariah,” “blackie-white,” “Anglo-Banglo,” “Wog,” “Nigger,” “Char Anna,” “Eight Anna” (Gabb, Anglo-Indian Legacy, 22); multilingually as Mestizo, Oolandez, Wallendez, Mustees, Metis, Fringy; and in colonial documents as “Half-caste,” “Indo-Briton,” “East Indian,” “Anglo-Asian,” “Asiatick,” “Asiatick Briton,” and “Britasian.” The Anglo half (quarter, eighth, total) could be English (Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or a hybrid of any or all of these), Portuguese, French, Dutch, Spanish. or any other sort of European male on an extended or short tour through colonial India. The Indian half of “Anglo-Indian” could be Burmese, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Malay, immigrant Chinese, Anglo-Indian, or any other Indian hybrid. “Anglo-Indian,” a plurisignifying term, speaks to the question of the provisionality of language and identity, but no less of hybrid histories that develop through the truck of languages as well as bodies. A series of misnomers finally culminate in a stabilized legal statute constituting a person based on a particular genealogy in the constitutional writ quoted above. To compound the confusions associated with the term, “Anglo-Indian” was also used to designate Englishmen resident in India.

60. For a detailed study of Anglo-Indians in literature, see Glenn D’Cruz’s Midnight’s Orphans and Shuchi Kapila’s Educating Seeta.

61. Now firmly associated with India, the term “caste” itself is borrowed from the Latin castus, meaning “pure,” “unpolluted”: “Apparently at first from Spanish; but in its Indian application from the Portuguese, who had so applied it about the middle of the 16th cent. (Garcia 1563)” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “caste”). Born in confusion, the idea of caste “has been retained in English under the supposition that it was the native name” (Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson, 170). The enormous complexity of the Hindu social order was simplified in the process of translation for Europe, and indeed for modern Indians, such that many Indians now refer to the caste system without qualifying the term. Some of the simplification in most renditions of the caste system stems from European reliance on written Sanskrit sources because the intricacies of the social system in the realm of everyday practice were unavailable to Western scholars. Nicholas Dirks has argued in “Castes of Mind” for an understanding of the idea of caste as a colonial form of knowledge.

62. According to Buettner, “nearly half of the Europeans in late nineteenth-century India fell into the category of ‘poor whites’” (“Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 279).

1. It is possible to question Saleem’s account of his parentage and how he can so confidently assert a line of descent from Methwold. Whether or not this account is true, or indeed his account of anything at all in the novel, in drawing attention to the encounter, Saleem points to a usually unclaimed fragment of hegemonic accounts of the nation, which rarely acknowledges its racially hybrid population in any significant way.

2. In “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie argues, “if a rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class” (Imaginary Homelands, 89).

3. Abandoned by European sires, the British government, and subsequently the independent nations of Pakistan and India, the residue of imperial desire demands but rarely receives due recognition in our theories of hybridity, or indeed in accounts of the nation. The prominent Anglo-Indian Sir Henry Gidney once said, “We represent in our very bodies a synthesis of India and Britain as no other people do or can do, a fusion of East and West” (quoted in Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora, 42). Anglo-Indians at empire’s end, incidentally, had also intermingled with the Burmese and Chinese diasporas. Indian historiography rarely includes these minor characters on the national stage. The deliberate marginalization of Anglo-Indians under the British, and their subsequent absence from mainstream narratives of the Indian nation, is abundantly recorded in studies of the community. Saleem Saleem’s fanciful assumption of the role of mouthpiece for midnight’s children ironically emphasizes this history of erasure. Nor has postcolonial theory accorded Anglo-Indians and other racial hybrids a starring role in the long-running, blockbuster concept of hybridity, even though they might be considered its exemplary embodiment by almost every available definition, whether based in biology as conventionally understood, or in culture, or in the third space between identities. Furthermore, Anglo-Indian lifestyles represented vernacular forms of Weltbürgertum (cosmopolitanism) that had developed in the Global South in cities such as Canton and Calcutta. Routinely upstaged in postcolonial theory by other formulations, the unclaimed hybridity and cosmopolitanism characteristic of this community have gone largely unremarked. This betrayal is commemorated in historical, autobiographical, and literary narratives with titles that point to it with incantatory insistence. Among them are Stark’s Hostages to India; or, the Life-Story of the Anglo-Indian Race, Anthony’s Britain’s Betrayal in India: The History of the Anglo-Indian Community, Hawes’s Poor Relations, Gist and Wright’s Marginality and Identity: Anglo Indians as a Racially-Mixed Minority in India, and Lahiri-Dutt’s In Search of a Homeland.

4. The revelation of Saleem’s true genealogy and its quick dismissal (“it made no difference!”) can leave readers disappointed that a canonical literary text in postcolonial fiction about India should have tantalized us with the promise of a bona fide racially hybrid Anglo-Indian as the voice of the nation, and then diffused his story into a sea of others beset by their own anxieties of belonging and disenfranchisement (136). Critics invested in a spatio-temporally situated history of racial hybrids complain that the racial hybrid in Rushdie’s fiction is reduced to a trendy trope for in-betweenness reliant on “notions of hybridity severed from history” in a mode familiar from influential formulations of hybridity in postcolonial theory (Mijares, “You Are an Anglo-Indian?,” 130; D’Cruz, Midnight’s Orphans).

5. Coralie Younger writes of a series of colonial ordinances designed to keep the community underdeveloped: a 1786 order prohibited wards of the upper orphanage school at Calcutta from proceeding to England to complete their education; a 1791 ordinance barred them from the company’s civil, military, or marine services; by 1795, persons of mixed blood could only serve in the army as fifers, drummers, and farriers; an 1813 order prohibited them from holding or purchasing land, or living farther than ten miles from a company settlement without sanction of the chief secretary (Anglo-Indians, 12).

6. Part of this diaspora was linked to the slave trade in South Asia, a history that is underexplored and insufficiently documented. In “The African Diaspora of the Indian Sub-continent,” Mampilly reports, “little is known about Africans who moved from the African continent to the Indian subcontinent, some as slaves, but others purposefully and freely.” Traders, warriors, sailors, mercenaries, prisoners of war of the Muslim rulers, “Africans also came as midwives and herbalists, and as musicians, sailors and merchants.” Today, Mampilly speculates, “under the extensive Indian affirmative action programs, most Indo-Africans are classified as scheduled tribes, which entitles them to reservations in university seats and other government support.” Sudipta Sen notes that it “was only in 1789 that the East India Company stopped transporting slaves from Africa to the Indian Malabar coast” (Distant Sovereignty, 17). Linguistic traces of this diaspora survive in sound bites encoding complicated histories in words such as habshi, sidi, and kafir (Pankhurst, “The Ethiopian Diaspora,” 190). For further information, see African Diaspora, especially essays by Pankhurst, Basu, and Jayasuriya.

7. The nominal “Caucasian,” however, is arguable, and the designation, when used, was usually limited to upper-caste Brahmins of the North.

8. Hegel, who otherwise relied heavily on James Mill’s assessment of Indian art as “rude” and poorly formed, would nonetheless declare in Philosophy of History that “no language can be regarded as more fully developed than the Sanscrit,” pointing, like Schlegel and others, to a profound linkage between this tongue and those of Europe: “Greek, Latin, and German” (162, 142).

9. For an understanding of the complexities of defining white identity, it is instructive to consider the landmark case of an Indian man named Bhagat Singh Thind in American history. His petition for American citizenship prompted the question: “Is a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood, born at Amrit Sar, Punjab, India, a white person within the meaning of section 2169, Revised Statutes?” In a convoluted opinion, Justice Sutherland “clarifies” the matter thus: “Caucasian is a conventional word of much flexibility, as a study of the literature dealing with racial questions will disclose, and while it and the words ‘white persons’ are treated as synonymous for the purposes of that case, they are not of identical meaning. . . . The words of the statute are to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man from whose vocabulary they were taken. . . . It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today” (“Not All Caucasians Are White”).

10. Longtime resident of India, missionary Bishop Caldwell, on the other hand, notes, “The condition of the Indo-Aryans, in point of intellect and culture, differs [so] widely from that . . . [of] aboriginal tribes . . . that it is difficult to realise the fact that both races have lived together for ages” (7–8). On their physical appearance, he observes “many differences in complexion and type of feature, and also many differences in culture and mental and moral characteristics” (“Languages,” 9). He speaks approvingly of Brahmans who “rank at the head of native society as a sacred, priestly aristocracy, which has not degraded itself by a single intermarriage with the classes beneath it for 2,500 years” (Lectures, 38).

11. As American writer and planter Alfred Stone points out, theories about racial affinities in India met their limits in the fray: “The British scientist may tell the British soldier in India that the native is in reality his brother, and that it is wholly absurd and illogical and unscientific for such a thing as ‘race prejudice’ to exist between them. Tommy Atkins simply replies with a shrug that to him and his messmates the native is a ‘nigger’; and in so far as their attitude is concerned, that is the end of the matter” (“Conflict and Accommodation,” 632).

12. Partha Mitter argues that without the notion of the Aryan thesis and its geographical coordinates in Asia, it would not have been possible to generate the idea of Africa as an absolute other to imperial Europe. It was this myth, he argues, that “provided ammunition for the racial classification of mankind” (“Greece, India, and Race among the Victorians,” 57).

13. In the internal hierarchies produced by the fertilization of indigenous prejudices with colonial thought, aboriginals, for instance, understood as “jungle-dwellers,” were aligned with “all that was deemed wild, uncivilized and uncouth” (Arnold, “Race, Place, and Bodily Difference,” 266). Arnold explains: “Because the British sense of national superiority had become so marked by the eighteen-thirties, it was possible to deploy a language and typology of race not so much to police a racial frontier between Britons and others as to differentiate among Indians themselves . . . on the basis of their appearance as if at some eternal beauty contest” (263). In a rich comment on the diversity of Indian colonial experiences, Dipesh Chakrabarty justifiably argues for a variable schedule of colonization in the Indian experience: “There were spaces in our lives—so-called classical music would be a case in point—where we could use European institutional forms, syllabi, etc. (Bhatkhande [lawyer and musician who committed the tenets of classical Indian music to text and initiated a modernized system of musical education] would be a case in point) to our advantage without feeling deeply colonized. Aboriginal societies were just pulverized and sometimes wiped out. I do not think we—again, I mean the middle classes—suffered anything like that” (in Ghosh, “Reflections,” 159).

14. Elsewhere, Rushdie exposes the limits of both the liberal narrative and that of Marxism when transported into a racially charged colonial context. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, educated Communist Camoens learns the racial limits of Marxism when he invites “a genuine, card-carrying member of the Special Lenin Troupe” to visit what he hopes will be “the Troupe’s new Cochin Branch” (30). The comrade, however, is outraged by the audacity of the Red spirit in black bodies: “These persons have blackness of skin and their features are not his,” he complains through a translator (30). Liberal ideology or communism, what Ghosh calls the +R, the fact of race, points to the wrongness of the body that attempts to enact ostensibly humanist programs that claim to transcend social and racial hierarchies.

15. Indian historiography has not been as silent on the subject of race as Ghosh implies. In Racism, Struggle for Equality, Nemai Sadhan Bose studies the “dominant racial element” of various colonial legal acts and agitations against them (xvii). Bose bluntly equates civilizational and racial prejudice: “The European who viewed the Indians with hatred, contempt, dislike and distrust and boasted of his inherent all-round superiority in justification of his political domination was as much a racist as one who, while abandoning the concept of genetic superiority, was obsessed with the idea of the absolute superiority of his own culture, civilization, education, morality, and ways of life” (xv).

Bose speaks of segregation and virtual apartheid between colonizer and colonized in the cities, and suggests, moreover, that both ruler and ruled perceived the other as different: “To an Indian living in the nineteenth century the Europeans appeared, without a shadow of doubt, as belonging to a distinct and different race” (xiii). During colonialism, several thinkers drew attention to colonial racism. Kshirod Chandra Sen, follower of reformist Keshab Chandra Sen, admonishes his readership to recall the racial divide between ruler and ruled: “Intellectual eminence, learning and wealth possessed by individuals belonging to a subject race can not compensate for general national degradation expressed in submission to foreign domination. A Hindu Peer, a Hindu Councillor or a Hindu Chief Justice—they are very admirable persons taken as individuals,—but does their high position affect their nationality, their positions as members of a subject race?” (The Gita and the Castes, 13–14). However, what V. S. Naipaul describes in India: A Wounded Civilization as a peculiar Indian “gift for cultural synthesis” could explain in part why it sometimes seems that “the racial sense is alien to Indians,” permitting us to forget that Gandhi, “until middle age . . . was literally a racial leader, fighting racial battles; and it was as a racial leader that he returned to India” (112, 141, 143).

16. According to some sources, the chi chi accent referred to “the sing-song, almost Welsh accent of the ‘Anglo-Indian’ community at large” (quoted in Buettner, “Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races,” 285).

17. The offensive “chee chee,” often used for Anglo-Indian girls, does not survive in American argot today but features suggestively in the following advertisement copy for the MGM adaptation of John Masters’s novel Bhowani Junction starring Ava Gardner and Stewart Granger in Life magazine’s June 11, 1956, issue: “A Land—and three lovers—of violent contrasts! Turbulent India is mirrored in the stormy love affairs of a ‘chee chee’ beauty with an Indian, a white man, and a half-caste” (115). Colonial texts frequently alluded to the beauty of Eurasian women while commenting on their verbal deficiencies and “tchi-tchi tongue”: “The Eurasian girl is often pretty and graceful; and, if the solution of India in her veins be weak, there is an unconventionality and naïveté sometimes which undoubtedly has a charm; and which, my dear friend, J.H⸺, of the 110th Clodhoppers (Lord Cardwell’s Own Clodhoppers) never could resist: ‘What though upon her lips there hung the accents of the tchi-tchi tongue’” (Aberigh-Mackay, Twenty-One Days in India, 121–22).

18. Many years later, in a hip-hop inspired dancing number designed for the nation’s gilded clubbers in Disney’s 2014 remake of a popular Hindi film Khoobsurat [Beautiful], the allegedly feminist heroine dares someone to take her on; the world rests, she says, at the tip of her Jimmy Choo shoes. In the song’s catchy refrain, abhi toh party shuru hui hai; in other words, and in more ways than one, as the English translation suggests, “the party’s only just begun.”

19. The legacy of English and liberal education manifests diversely in India today. New York Times writer Manu Joseph observes: “Hindi films are now written in English—the instructions in the screenplays are in English, and even the Hindi dialogue is transcribed in the Latin alphabet. Mumbai’s film stars, like most educated Indians, find it easier to read Hindi if it is written this way. Almost all advertising billboards in India are in English. There is not a single well-paying job in the country that does not require a good understanding of the language. Higher education here is conducted entirely in English.” “What is indisputable is that in India today,” Joseph writes, “English has the force and quality of a national language.” True to Indian form, there is a Goddess of English in Northern India, dedicated to the advancement of the untouchable population: “Modelled on the American Statue of Liberty, she is pictured against a map of India, wearing a sari and an English straw hat, standing on a computer and holding aloft a giant pink pen.” Chandra Bhan Prasad, the entrepreneurial untouchable who proposed and built the temple in which she is housed, recommends the following ritual offering for couples during their wedding ceremony: signing the letters A, B, C, and D on a piece of a paper. “That would be a promise they make that they will teach their children English,” he is reported to have said. He also plans to adopt an Islamic tradition and fix a loudspeaker in the temple from which a recorded voice would chant the English alphabet, from A to Z, every day at five o’clock in the morning (Joseph, “India Faces a Linguistic Truth”). On October 25, Prasad and other devotees allegedly gather to celebrate the birthday of Macaulay, the man who is considered the architect of English language and literature education in India. One hundred seventy-eight years later, after the proclamation of the famous minute, Prasad preaches a version of Macaulay’s dream. Celebrations include a hymn of praise to the new deity: “Oh Devi Ma, please let us learn English! Even the dogs understand English” (Masani, “English or Hinglish”). In response to a national fever for learning English, schools with indifferent instructional quality have mushroomed all over India.

20. In an early draft of Midnight’s Children, Rushdie considered “From Monkey to Rhesus” as an alternative title to chapter 16 (Draft, 16.218). In the draft as in the final published version, he refers to “rhesus, which is also a type of monkey” (Draft, 16.221). The connections between race, blood, civilization, and those between apes, aping, and native mimicry are more than explicit in several such references.

21. Saleem displays precocious understanding of a similar rage in Mr. Emil Zagallo, his teacher, who “claimed to be Peruvian, and was fond of calling us jungle-Indians, bead-lovers” (Midnight’s Children, 275). Saleem volunteers this assessment of the teacher who cruelly uses him for a human geography lesson: “We called him Pagal-Zagal, crazy Zagallo, because for all his talk of llamas and conquistadores and the Pacific Ocean we knew, with the absolute certainty of rumour, that he’d been born in a Mazagaon tenement and his Goanese mother had been abandoned by a decamped shipping agent; so he was not only an ‘Anglo’ but probably a bastard as well. Knowing this, we understood why Zagallo affected his Latin accent, and also why he was always in a fury, why he beat his fists against the stone walls of the classroom; but the knowledge didn’t stop us being afraid” (275).

22. The chemically tactile impact of smell violates the regime of tact that requires distance and alienation. Horkheimer and Adorno explain that the civilized individual indulges in the pleasure of smell only in the guise of mocking it, in the form of a joke, for instance, in “a wretched parody of fulfillment” that evades the prohibition of forbidden impulse by identifying with the authority that forbids it: “Anyone who sniffs out ‘bad’ smells in order to extirpate them may imitate to his heart’s content the snuffling which takes its unrationalized pleasure in the smell itself” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 151).

23. Kant isolates smell for its capacity to invade us willy-nilly: “Smell is, so to speak, taste at a distance, and other people are forced to share a scent whether they want to or not. Hence, by interfering with individual freedom, smell is less sociable than taste; when confronted with many dishes and bottles, one can choose that which suits his pleasure without forcing others to participate in that pleasure. Filth seems to awaken nausea less through what is repulsive to eye and tongue than through the stench associated with it. Internal penetration (into the lungs) through smell is even more intimate than through the absorptive vessels of mouth or gullet” (Anthropology, 45). In “Determination of the concept of a Human Race,” Kant makes a link between innate and purposive design and the significance of smell in the “negro”: “it was a very wisely designed device of Nature so to constitute their skin that the blood, as it cannot dispose of enough phlogiston through the lungs, can dephlogisticate itself through the skin much better than it can in our case” (quoted in Greene, “Some Early Speculations,” 38). Bernard Cohn’s notes on European views of Indian sweat and skin suggest a similarity with the notion of phlogiston: “The Indian’s skin and the whole process of perspiring are different from that of the Europeans. Indian skins ‘secrete a very different kind of fluid being more of an oily and tenacious nature than the sweat of the European’” (Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 156). Kant’s emphasis on this wise arrangement of nature, the notion that smell is purposive in a particular group is an early example of the connection between aesthetics and racial distinctions. Also remarkable in this writing is the quasi-biologistic idea of innate and determinate purpose in terms analogous to his arguments about indeterminate purposiveness as a feature of beauty in art and nature in the foundational text of aesthetic theory, Critique of Judgment (1790), a book initially announced under the title Critique of Moral Taste. Kant’s disquisition on teleological judgment in the text grounds his critical project in a commitment to purposiveness or teleology as the link between aesthetics and biology. As Hannah Arendt points out, moreover, the counterpoint to beauty in this foundational text on aesthetics is not ugliness but “that which excites disgust” (The Life of the Mind, 2). Kant’s disgust-taboo imbues his otherwise neutral observation about biological functions such as sweating with aesthetic and moral judgment.

24. See Alison Blunt’s discussion of the sexualization of Anglo-Indian women in Domicile and Diaspora, especially 156–57. In Amina’s estimation, Mary’s sister—like her husband’s other female employees—represents the national “stereotype of the Anglo-Indian tnyas (half-breed)—Westernized and common at the same time,” in the words of Partha Chatterjee (The Nation and Its Fragments, 132). Amina’s outburst indicts the whole tribe: “‘Those Anglos with their funny names, Fernanda and Alonso and all, and surnames, my God! Sulaca and Colaco and I don’t know what. . . . Cheap type females. I call them all his Coca-Cola girls—that’s what they all sounded like’” (Midnight’s Children, 155). As Partha Chatterjee notes, the Westernized and lower-class half-breed was “the most extreme object of contempt for the nationalist” (The Nation and Its Fragments, 132). Moreover, Nirad Chaudhuri writes that “Hindus who are on the sensual quest” are apt “to look upon all Eurasian girls, irrespective of their conduct, as fair prey” based on the assumption that “in the British days it was the women of this class who mostly supplied prostitutes for the White Man in India” (The Continent of Circe, 264, 260). Historically, a combination of “educational and occupational handicaps” effectively confined Anglo-Indian women to a predictable range of usually underpaid jobs where they would be exposed to male advances (Gist and Wright, Marginality and Identity, 58). Skirt-wearing Anglo-Indian women, seen as available bodies, were stereotyped in an India accustomed to its traditional women working within the home rather than in the world beyond, and remaining covered and thus socially shielded from unwanted advances. The Helens, Julies, Monas, and Rosies of early Bollywood cinema occupy the cultural space of promiscuous women in their roles as cabaret queens, dancers, and gangsters’ molls, sometimes redeemed by a golden heart but seldom by rehabilitation into the fabric of the national imagination.

25. Earlier in the narrative, bragging about his nasal competence, Saleem tells us that “long before the American commentator Herbert Feldman came to Karachi to deplore the existence of a dozen aerated waters in a city which had only three suppliers of bottled milk, I could sit blindfolded and tell Pakola from Hoffman’s Mission, Citra Cola from Fanta. Feldman saw these drinks as a manifestation of capitalist imperialism; I, sniffing out which was Canada Dry and which 7-Up, unerringly separating Pepsi from Coke, was more interested in passing their subtle olfactory test” (Midnight’s Children, 379). Rushdie’s comment on the “Coca-Colonization of the planet” joins imperialism with capitalist intrusion into the native marketplace, but read alongside Saleem’s acute sensitivity to the array of carbonated drinks on offer in colonial South Asia also implicates their ingestion with a recalibration of the sensorium (The Satanic Verses, 406).

26. Malasana, the name of this yoga pose, is one that many non-Westerners and modern Indians are unable to perform because they are no longer habituated to sitting on their haunches.

27. While in animals, “squat urination and defecation probably have scent-marking as well as eliminative functions,” several researchers note their benefits for humans (Lopez, Of Wolves and Men, 49). Progressive medicine cites lower incidences of hemorrhoids among squatters. Medical biologist Sikirov contends: “The only natural defecation posture for a human being is squatting. The alignment of the recto-anal angle associated with squatting permits smooth bowel elimination. This prevents excessive straining with the potential for resultant damage to the recto-anal region and, possibly, to the colon and other organs” (“Primary Constipation,” 71).

1. In In Search of a Homeland, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt describes the failed attempt of the Anglo-Indian community to create a homeland within India in McCluskiegunge, a town in the state of Jharkhand. A mere handful of the community remains in McCluskiegunge, most having migrated to England and other countries, but this dream of a homeland within the nation offers an intriguing study of internal diaspora. Geographer Alison Blunt summarizes the attitudes of the community in the following words: “Although Anglo-Indians were ‘country-born’ and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life even as they were largely excluded from it. In many ways, Anglo-Indians imagined themselves as part of an imperial diaspora in British India” (Domicile and Diaspora, 2).

2. Over time, moreover, the love of leavened bread has grown exponentially in South Asia, along with the number of artisanal bakeries, requiring us to reckon with new forms of alimentary conversion.

3. Several pieces of official communication disclose a disinclination to absorb Anglo-Indian migrants into the “home” country, unless they were of substantial means. A July 21, 1947, dispatch from L. A. C. Fry to C. A. Gault, counsellor to the general secretary, the European Association, Calcutta, indicated a disinclination to invite emigration from Anglo-Indians: “Applications from Anglo-Indians for special facilities to remove themselves to the United Kingdom are not to be encouraged or accepted,” in part because the association “will not sponsor any emigration scheme.” Moreover, emigration by British subjects is to be “dissuade(d) . . . unless they have good prospects of being able to support themselves there and realize fully the climatic and other austerities which they would have to face” (Fry to Gault, letter). A cypher telegram on the subject of “Repatriation of Europeans,” from the U.K. high commissioner in New Delhi, India, to the Cabinet Office, August 12, 1947, discloses the government’s position in the voice of its representative: “I do not however intend (vide paragraph 1 of your telegram No. 485 of 25th July 1947) to mention Anglo-Indians in this communiqué as to do so would encourage them to seek repatriation which would be contrary to provisions of paragraph 2 (d) of your dispatch No. 13 dated 22nd May 1947” (U.K. high commissioner). The telegram goes on to clarify that “Any Anglo Indians who do travel under their own resources will be included in ship by ship forecasts,” while bemoaning the “difficulties in obtaining all this information particularly in making accurate differentiation between Europeans and Anglo Indians, as latter so often claim without justification to be pure British Europeans” (2). At the same time, another secret cypher telegram dispatched by O. T. P. from the Cabinet Office to the U.K. high commissioner in New Delhi, India, on July 24, 1947, underlined the problem of resources thus: “His Majesty’s Govt wish . . . to make it clear that there is no barrier to the emigration to this country of domiciled [this word crossed out in pencil] Europeans and Anglo Indians who can pay their own way” (Cabinet Office).

4. In Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, Stoler argues for a better understanding of how “the making of race has figured in placing sexuality at the center of imperial politics” (141). Stoler (in “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers”), Kenneth Ballhatchet (in Race, Sex, and Class), and others expose miscegenation and the fear of “sexual affronts” as the very engine of empire in the Asian theater of colonialism.

5. Bradley Shope explains that Portuguese Goans and Anglo-Indians were “especially involved” in Western music performance culture to satisfy British and American “nostalgia for live performance of the foxtrot, the tango, the waltz, the rumba, big-band music, and Dixieland.” Shope claims, “For these two groups, it served to assert their identities as distinct from other South Asians and highlighted that their taste for music reached beyond the geographical boundaries of India” (“Anglo-Indian Identity, Knowledge, and Power,” 167).

6. Rejecting Malayalam-speaking mixed-race individuals of Portuguese extraction in Kerala, prominent Anglo-Indian leader Frank Anthony insisted on the community as a “homogenous racial–cum–linguistic–cum–cultural entity” (quoted in Younger, Anglo-Indians, 23). In his 1974 definition, W. T. Roy insists that the Anglo-Indian “is a member of a group possessing a distinctive subculture whose characteristics are that all of its members are Christians of one denomination or another, speak English, wear European clothes on almost all occasions, have substantially European dietary habits (but are addicted to the fairly lavish use of Indian spices), are occupationally engaged in a restricted number of trades and professions, and are by and large endogamous” (“Hostages to Fortune,” 56). Using similar criteria and deploying an intriguing comparison with the Indian caste system, Mark Naidis claims that “Anglo-Indians came to resemble an exterior caste, if one defines such a group by rules of endogamy, craft exclusiveness and commensality” (quoted in Younger, Anglo-Indians, 42).

7. As one Anglo-Indian reported: “I was born an Anglo-Indian and my heritage from my far removed Indian forbear was the olive hue of my skin; but there my Indian heritage ceased, for I was taught the language of the Englishman, his manners, his tastes, his traditions, his history and religion . . . the history of England was taught to me as the history of my country” (“Anglo-Indian”). With regard to the community’s adherence to English, it is interesting to note that a new wave of migration out of India began in the 1960s after attempts to impose regional languages in Anglo-Indian schools in India.

8. On the eve of the partition and independence of British India, the Glasgow Herald carried the following story under the headline “Anglo-Indian Exodus,” August 2, 1947: “Hundreds of Anglo-Indian families are leaving India shortly to settle in Britain and Australia. The exodus starts on Sunday, when the first batch of 630—the majority from Bengal, Madras, and the Central Provinces—leaves Bombay on board the Australian ship Manoora, for Sydney. Over 4,000 Anglo-Indians have so far registered for passage to Australia. The sailings to Britain will begin with the departure of the Franconia in the second week of August and the Strathmore in the following week.”

9. Speaking of those other Indians, the narrator confides: “We’re not the only ones. They want to go too. You read their matrimonial columns, American Green Card Holder preferred, only doctor or engineer settled in U.S.A., Canada, Australia” (The Trotter-Nama, 574). Sealy underscores desires for the West and a Western lifestyle shared by the two groups.

10. Younger writes: “Many Anglo Indians who migrated integrated well into their new countries and preferred to forget their Indian connection and mixed blood. This often motivated them into cutting all ties with parents and family who still remained here [India] and so pretending they were of pure white blood”; “some Anglo Indians mentioned they met Anglo Indians in the streets and . . . feigned unfamiliarity” (Anglo-Indians, 94, 50).

11. Australian policies regarding the admission of persons of mixed race required the individual to demonstrate “by appearance, education, upbringing, outlook, mode of dress and way of living, that he is capable of ready integration into the Australian community” (“Policy for Admission”).

12. Anglo-Indians frequently comment on the coming extinction of the community’s racial and cultural distinctiveness as they dissolve into larger national, cultural, genetic, and racial groups that dominate in the countries of their residence. “Today we watch the rapid demise of the Anglo-Indians as we know them to be,” notes Patricia Brown, writer of a chatty book titled Anglo-Indian Food and Customs. “Future generations will be assimilated into other cultures, and during the next century they will no doubt be totally absorbed by the global melting pot. Finally, to be swept away, without a trace, by the tide of time,” she notes poetically (10–11).

13. During its early years, the East India Company had encouraged Anglo-Indian “unions by granting five rupees per month for each child born to British soldiers” (Gist and Wright, Marginality and Identity, 10). Anglo-Indian historian Herbert A. Stark comments on the advantages of these alliances for the company: “The children grew up in attachment to, and in dependence upon, the nation of their fathers. Their mothers having been cast out by their Indian relatives, the children formed the beginnings of a new race standing in detachment from the people of the soil, and separated from them by speech, religion, dress, customs and habits—by those fundamentals which go to constitute nationality” (Hostages to India, 30).

14. Colonial writer George Aberigh-Mackay notes the heterogeneity of the Anglo-Indian population, which he refers to as Eurasian: “There is no proper classification of the mixed race in India as there is in America. The convenient term quadroon, for instance, instead of ‘four annas in the rupee,’ is quite unknown; the consequence is that every one—from Anna Maria de Souza, the ‘Portuguese’ cook, a nobleman on whose cheek the best shoe-blacking would leave a white mark, to pretty Miss Fitzalan Courtney, of the Bombay Fencibles, who is as white as an Italian princess—is called an ‘Eurasian’” (Twenty-One Days in India, 124).

15. Neurological research in acoustic arousal links sound and responses of pleasure or irritation depending on early training in both music and language. Colonial travel literature is rife with references to native music as the annoying sound of difference. See Mill, The History of British India. Synaptic pruning in the process of learning arguably plays a role in developing an appreciation for a given range of intonations, whether in music or language. See Douglas Brown, “Cognitive Pruning.”

16. The idea of the encephalization quotient (EQ)—relative brain size defined as the ratio between actual brain mass and predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size—hypothesized to be a rough estimate of the intelligence of the animal, long dominated studies of human evolution. Current research suggests “brain evolution was not merely a matter of enlargement, but involved changes at all levels of organization that have been examined. These include the cellular and laminar organization of cortical areas; the higher order organization of the cortex, as reflected in the expansion of association cortex (in absolute terms, as well as relative to primary areas); the distribution of long-distance cortical connections; and hemispheric asymmetry” (Preuss, “The Human Brain,” 1). Preuss questions what really happens when the brain enlarges. Recent discoveries concerning the Cetacean brain and bird intelligence decrease confidence in the usefulness of brain size as an indicator of intelligence, but belief persists in the theory that greater ratios of brain to body mass may increase the amount of brain mass available for more complex cognitive tasks and for distinctively human specialization. Cruder predecessors of this science had equated brain size and the encephalization quotient with intelligence.

17. In his discussion of racialized sexuality as a product of “stereotypic, symbolizing, and condensing discursivity,” Abdul JanMohamed suggests that “it is the hystericized, oversexualized body of the black male that is used by the discourse of racialized sexuality to reinforce the hysterical boundaries between the two racialized communities” (“Sexuality,” 105–6). The “open secret” of the white master’s desire for the female sexual slave, on the other hand, is characterized by a “peculiar silence” (104, 94). This silence and Foucault’s “bracketing of the circuit of power at the macro and micro ends,” JanMohamed complains, prevent “the development of the kind of confessional and ‘scientific’ discursivity central to the deployment of sexuality as Foucault defines it” (97, 104).

1. Rosemary Jann points to the “narrative manipulation necessary to guarantee his [Holmes’s] positivistic triumphs,” citing several critics who expose the rigging of the facts such that they can only point to the inevitable conclusion Holmes arrives at (“Sherlock Holmes Codes,” 685).

2. Barnes suggests, with support from biographical accounts, that it was in the aftermath of the death of Doyle’s first wife that the famous detective came upon a file of cuttings from a scandal sheet, The Umpire, with a letter signed “George Edalji,” “a name that means absolutely nothing to him” (Arthur and George, 254).

3. In her reading of the story in Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue, Yumna Siddiqi suggests that “imperial territories are irrevocably alien and ungovernable,” and likens Miss Warrender both to Virender in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and to “the figure of the indigent returned colonial” that “recurs in Doyle’s fiction” (41). Siddiqi locates the story’s anxieties in the recalcitrance and resistance of the colony to education and the empire’s production of cultural and economic misfits. Siddiqi proposes that “the nexus between anthropology and the rationality of government” is a theme in this and other stories by Doyle, Collins, and Kipling (49). Miss Warrender could be a fictional counterpart, Siddiqi suggests, for the historical figures of servant Indians in England or a colonial returnee, as she develops an intricate argument about governmentality and corruption by empire.

4. Like Holmes, the narrator of the story, Hugh Lawrence, has lodgings on Baker Street, while his friend John H. Thurston shares Watson’s first name and initial along with a tendency to admire beautiful women and to miss the point by a wide margin. Thurston’s interest in chemistry would later be transferred to Holmes and Lawrence’s in medicine to Watson. Haining points out other parallels: “Lawrence, like Holmes, makes a practice of studying people to discern their characters, is good at cross-examination, and is quite indifferent to the charms of women. He is also strong, brave and resourceful and prefers to solve the mysterious goings-on in the household himself rather than call in the police” (The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 35). Owen Dudley Edwards says: “It is amusing to see how Doyle was switching attributes between his Holmes-type and Watson-type. . . . Thurston is largely required to bring Lawrence in, to provide the link with the mysterious household and be in mortal danger as its legatee, and to supply background briefing” (The Quest for Sherlock Holmes, 120). These and other parallels, Haining argues, make the otherwise little-known story a “legitimate precursor to . . . [A Study in Scarlet] . . . qualifying it for a place in the [Holmes] canon” (The Final Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 35). For reasons not fully known, Doyle never allowed the story to be reprinted (Fleissner, A Rose by Another Name, 49).

5. Jann suggests that the detective routinely relied on physiognomic information, incorporating it into his deductive method in many of his stories: “The myth of rationality that Doyle constructs in the Holmes stories relies heavily on the posited but seldom tested validity of indexical codes of body and behavior that allow Holmes infallibly to deduce character and predict actions from gesture and appearance” (“Sherlock Holmes Codes,” 686). Holmes, however, does not seem to employ physiognomic and phrenological evidence consistently. In The Sign of Four, he declares: “A client to me is a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor” (31).

6. In their investigation of the concept of enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno explain the role of primitivism in the casting of self and other in the following terms: “The cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, permanently linking horror to holiness . . . mana, the moving spirit, is not a projection but the echo of the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people. The split between animate and inanimate, the assigning of demons and deities to certain specific places, arises from this preanimism. Even the division of subject and object is prefigured in it” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10–11).

7. In Kipling’s “Beyond the Pale,” described by Kingsley Amis as “one of the most terrible stories in the language” (Rudyard Kipling and His World, 48), we see a matter-of-fact reference to ungovernable impulses among Orientals: “Much that is written about ‘Oriental passion and impulsiveness,’” writes Kipling, “is exaggerated and compiled at second-hand, but a little of it is true; and when an Englishman finds that little, it is quite as startling as any passion in his own proper life” (Plain Tales, 176). The story is intended as a warning to a would-be suitor of an Oriental beauty, announcing its purpose quite clearly in a prefatory note: Kipling writes, “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black” (171). The very next sentence announces the foregone conclusion: “This is the story of a man who willfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent every-day society, and paid for it heavily. . . . He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again” (171).

8. George recalls the catechism vividly, chapter and verse, “Galatians, chapter five—they begin with Adultery, Fornication, Uncleanness and Lasciviousness” (Arthur and George, 82): “Christianity,” Horkheimer and Adorno argue, “declared the flesh to be the root of all evil” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 231).

9. According to Risinger, Horace “married Ann Gertrude Magee, an Ulster woman, in Hereford in 1910. Adopting her name, he moved as Horace Edward Magee to Belfast, and later to Dublin, where he lived in the prosperous suburb of Blackrock. After changing his name he broke completely with his family. He died in a Dublin nursing home in 1953” (“Boxes in Boxes,” 89n520). Other sources clarify that he returned for his father’s and aunt’s funerals, but his alienation from the family began when he offered to cooperate in the legal proceedings and suggested that George may have written some of the scurrilous letters associated with the case. His mother and aunt subsequently wrote him out of their wills. See Roger Oldfield’s Outrage.

10. Reading his autobiography some years after the distinguished writer chose to insert himself into the case of the Great Wyrley Outrages, George comes across these sentences about his father and his family: “Perhaps some Catholic-minded patron wished to demonstrate the universality of the Anglican Church. The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a coloured clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude, unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation” (Arthur and George, 414). George resents the description of him as “half-caste,” for “Was there not a better way of putting it? Perhaps his father, who believed that the world’s future depended upon the harmonious commingling of the races, could have come up with a better expression” (414). George not only resents the freighted term “half-caste,” but also the distinguished writer’s disinterest in George’s elaborate account of his father’s conversion. The denial of George’s account and the use of vocabulary associated with a far less enlightened attitude toward race suggest that the writer, so ardent a believer in justice for the hapless barrister, was nonetheless reproducing the sort of prejudice that informs his depiction of empire’s others in his fictions, despite his knowledge of objective facts about George and his family.

11. Classen claims that “the ‘male’ senses of sight and hearing were classified as ‘distance’ senses and the ‘female’ senses of smell, taste, and touch were characterized as ‘proximity’ senses” (The Color of Angels, 66). Friedrich Schiller explains that nature furnishes man “with two senses which lead him to knowledge of the real world through semblance alone. In the case of the eye and the ear, she herself has driven importunate matter back from the organs of sense, and the object, with which in the case of our more animal senses we have direct contact, is set at a distance from us” (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 195). The alliance of vision, distance, and perspective with superior aesthetic capacity follows: “What we actually see with the eye is something different from the sensation we receive; for the mind leaps out across light to objects. The object of touch is a force to which we are subjected; the object of eye and ear a form that we engender. As long as man is still a savage he enjoys by means of these tactile senses alone, and at this stage the senses of semblance are merely the servants of these. . . . Once he does begin to enjoy through the eye, and seeing acquires for him a value of its own, he is already aesthetically free and the play-drive has started to develop” (195). Elias argues that in place of smell, “we see one of the interconnections through which a different sense organ, the eye, has taken on a very specific significance in civilized society. In a similar way to the ear, and perhaps even more so, it has become a mediator of pleasure, precisely because the direct satisfaction of the desire for pleasure has been hemmed in by a multitude of barriers and prohibitions” (The Civilizing Process, 17). Herzfeld explains that while Aristotle “considered sight to be the most highly developed of the senses,” “the gradual European abandonment of smell and increasing emphasis on vision is directly linked to the technologies of literacy and to the expansion of social relations beyond the face-to-face” (Anthropology, 244).

12. Robert Young argues that Englishness should be understood as a “heterogenous, conflictual composite of contrary elements” that are internally riven (Colonial Desire, 3).

13. Doyle offers his own version of “the White Man’s Burden” in “A Hymn of Empire, Coronation Year, 1911”: “God guard our Indian brothers, / The Children of the Sun / Guide us and walk beside us / Until Thy will be done. / To all be equal measure / Whate’er his blood or birth” (Songs of the Road, 66).

14. Although several Parsis participated in the struggle for Indian freedom, Parsi Anglophilia was a recognized phenomenon. Writers Bapsi Sidhwa and Salman Rushdie both comment on it in their novels. In Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet, the role of resident Anglophile is filled by Ormus Cama’s father, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, a secularized Parsi: “Brace up! Do yourselves justice!” he declaims, “The British are watching” (28). Sir Darius’s dreams are English dreams: “Whenever he dreamed, he dreamed of England: England as a pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill above a silver winding river, with a spreading parterre of brilliant green lawns edged by ancient oaks and elms, and the classic geometry of flower beds orchestrated by unseen master gardeners into a four-seasons symphony of colour” (86).

15. British physician Hector Gavin said that the air in poor homes in England was “so saturated with putrescent exhalations, that to breathe it was to inhale a dangerous, perhaps fatal, poison” (Sanitary Ramblings, 69). A major campaign to promote bathing and cleanliness in the nineteenth century in England, resisted stoutly by the poor, would have either sensitized the overseas English nose even more keenly to bad odors in India and other colonies or activated animus against unfamiliar smells on the grounds that they were unfamiliar, and therefore bad; arguably, it may have taught them to relegate native smells to the class of odors the English abroad had learned to associate with the poor, uncultivated masses in their own homeland. Orwell reveals “the real secret of class distinctions in the West. . . . It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering. . . . The words were: The lower classes smell” (The Road to Wigan Pier, 129).

16. Biologists are less likely to credit human exceptionalism on the traditional grounds used by philosophers. If ribosomatic structure and molecular/cellular form were the criteria, they claim, we would have more in common with mice and yeast than with apes: “Humans are a lot like yeast. . . . Humans also are a lot like fruit flies, mice, and other animals and organisms that have eukaryotic . . . cells” (Goldstein and Schneider, Stem Cells for Dummies, 12). At the cellular level, the authors claim, “nature uses many of the same blueprints and mechanisms” (12). In “Microbes ‘R’ Us,” biologist Olivia Judson writes: “On a cell-by-cell basis, then, you are only 10 percent human. For the rest, you are microbial.”

17. At the law firm, George is persecuted precisely on this point by his fellow workers Greenway and Stentson, who want to know “where do you really come from. . . . Have you got a girl, George?” (Arthur and George, 70). When he makes up a “Dora Charlesworth,” a Dora worthy of a Charles in what might be an unwitting invocation of Dickens’s world and the place of women in it, George is asked, “Is she a darkie?” (71). When he responds, “She’s English, just like me,” they taunt him: “Just like you, George, Just like you? . . . I bet she’s a Bechuana girl” (71).

1. Balibar’s exploration of contemporary forms of “racism without races” prompts a reevaluation of the dispersal of racism into displaced forms (“Is There a Neo-Racism?,” 21). I submit that this evaluation should include an understanding of the logic of dominative and instrumental rationality, so illuminatingly elaborated in Frankfurt school critical theory, and the emplacement of this discussion in the larger context of the civilizing process in Europe and beyond with due attention to its repressive bio-logic.

2. In Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, Timothy Burke explores the nexus between colonialism and global capitalism by analyzing the growth of advertising and changing patterns of consumption, especially of cosmetic products, in modern Zimbabwe, in part through a social history of hygiene.

3. As Tim Armstrong points out, modernity offers a conception of the body as lack, to be remedied, and compensated “as a part of capitalism’s fantasy of the complete body: in the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery . . . all prosthetic in the sense that they promise the perfection of the body” (Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 3).

4. Žižek exposes “the universality of capitalism,” which is no longer “a name for a civilization, for a specific cultural-symbolic world,” but rather “the name for a truly neutral economico-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others.” The problem with capitalism, Žižek avers, “is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations.” Although it may not “inscribe itself into the totality of their lifeworlds in the same way, it generates the same formal set of social relations” with “the same profit-oriented matrix” (quoting himself in “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” 673).

5. Mahatma Gandhi’s reference to the “raw kaffir” in South Africa is discussed briefly in the first chapter of this book. James Mill’s verdict on Indian art and its people as rudely formed can be found in his 1817 six-volume History of British India. In this work, James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, countered positive evaluations of Indian civilization by Western scholars such as Sir William Jones on the grounds of their having been misinformed and inadequately critical. In an aggressive deployment of the hierarchy of the senses to discount evidence of civilizational excellence even where others had found beauty, the text repeatedly refers to Hindus and Hindu art and architecture as rude and barbaric.

6. The dream of a return to national culture is a bootless quest in the struggle for liberation, Fanon argues, since the native intellectual finds that what he wishes to stamp “with a hallmark [of the] national . . . is strangely reminiscent of exoticism” (The Wretched of the Earth, 223). And yet, “the withering away of the reality of the nation and the death pangs of national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependence,” which is why, he insists, “it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations” (238). At the same time that he recognizes that art forms infused with “the will to liberty” can generate a “new movement” which could give “rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions . . . [developing] the imagination,” as in the rejuvenation and reconstitution of epic storytelling in Algeria in the early 1950s, the “fundamental tasks” pressing on the nation, he insists, require not “proclamation[s] concerning culture,” but “the liberation of the national territory” and “a continual struggle against colonialism in its new forms” (The Wretched of the Earth, 240–41, 235). Fanon implies that it is the task of liberating the nation and its peoples from all forms of exploitation that produces a worthwhile form of culture.

7. Malabou’s 2008 iteration of plasticity in What Should We Do with Our Brain? addresses neuroplasticity and cognitive science in an attempt to explore “the possibility of saying no to afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile” (79). For Malabou, brain plasticity involves “not only the creation of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model” (6). The “agency of disobedience” is an enticing prospect, arguably compromised, I suggest, by seductive models of Capitalist personhood and affective histories of the manipulation of feelings of inferiority.

8. Modernity undoubtedly brings advances in medicine, connectivity, and the possibility of positive collective action, but the countervailing forces of domination proliferate at an even greater pace. Lifesaving and enhancing technologies are continually produced, but enmeshed in profit-centered industries that limit their potential, while the imponderable cost of environmental destruction on individual lives, human and nonhuman, grows exponentially.

9. Derrida points out that Nazi pseudozoophilia and Hitler’s dogged vegetarianism only serve to reveal the tension between the impulse to stroke one animal and victimize another in whom the animal is perceived (Paper Machine, 180).