Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880–1930 by Andrew C. Long (review)

Andrew C. Long’s monograph, Reading Arabia: British Orientalism in the Age of Mass Publication, 1880–1930, is an attempt to reaffirm Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism (1978) by reading the texts and contexts of several British orientalist writers, some known and some less well known. His focus on the centrality of class, desire, and the market in the construction of “the fantasy of the Orient” is intended to help scholars make clearer sense of “the archive of British orientalism” (214). Long does this by emphasizing the themes of “fantasy and pleasure, pain and of course sexuality” in the texts that he investigates which he sees as problematically absent from Said’s work (30). Long’s work, however, remains very much indebted to Said whom he refers to as “the master” (28). The theoretical underpinning of Orientalism guides Reading Arabia, which argues that ways of knowing the East will always rely on orientalist thinking.

Both literary and historical in its approach, Long’s investigation revives the old debates about orientalism that scholars continue to grapple with in one form or another as an always-present agent of cultural hegemony. “Orientalism is pervasive in the culture and everyday life of modern Britain,” he ultimately concludes (195). A long introduction situates orientalism as part of the rise of mass culture at the turn of the century that seeps into the British unconscious. Five thematic chapters follow the introduction and offer case studies of orientalists who crafted narratives about the East for consumption in the colonial metropole. The focus here is on male writers who traveled to and wrote about the Arab-Muslim world. Chapters on the much-studied figures of Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence bookend explorations of lesser-known orientalists including Robert Cunninghame Graham and Marmaduke Pickthall. Why Long chose to focus on these particular writers and not others in creating his archive of orientalist writers is not made entirely clear. The limited treatment of women orientalist writers narrows the book’s scope, particularly in regard to the study of sexuality. In the end, Long concludes that “perhaps this book is really about masculinity” (203).

Chapter 1, “The Two Tangents of British Orientalists,” examines the attempts by prominent orientalists to claim authority over “the Orient” in the 1880s. Here the focus is on Burton and Charles Doughty, who produce competing visions that ultimately offer a fantasy of the Orient which remains a part of Britain’s (and by implication, the West’s) understanding of race and religion in the modern Middle East. This legacy was secured in part through the creation of a mass readership for orientalist writing in this period. The texts studied by Long may not all have been bestsellers, but they played a part in the commodification of orientalist discourse in “the British cultural imaginary” (1). Long also aspires to make larger claims about the steady popularity of orientalist texts that represent a break with past discourse about the East at the turn of the century. In chapter 2, “Khartoum Nightmare,” he writes that the war in the Sudan produced “a massive burst of popular literature” that “continued unabated even when the war concluded fourteen years later,” a claim that deserved further consideration in terms of the number of texts produced, where they were published, and the themes discussed (76).

Each of the chapters could be read independently as a case study of an individual orientalist writer. The two middle chapters will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the work of lesser-known British orientalists. Chapter 3, “A Refusal and a Traversal,” and chapter 4, “Orientalism from Within and Without,” examine the careers of Graham and Pickthall, respectively. According to Long, these widely published writers played an important role in reproducing cultural knowledge embedded in the orientalist fantasy. The careers of these men demonstrate how even those who wanted to break with orientalist...