The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State

2 ‘‘Rather a Geographical Expression Than a Country’’

2 ‘‘Rather a Geographical Expression Than a Country’’ State Fantasy and the Production of Victorian Afghanistan If the frontiers of India are insufficiently delineated, those of Afghanistan are a thousand times more vague. —W. P. Andrew, Our Scientific Frontier (1880)1 In the previous chapter, I argued that Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm charted the psychic vicissitudes undergone by colonial subjects as the logic of biopower began to overtake that of sovereignty. In this chapter, I reverse the direction of my analysis. Instead of examining representations produced in the outlying areas of the empire that reflect back upon its center, I examine the center’s representations of Afghanistan. In what follows, I propose that these representations were profoundly shaped by British anxiety about the emergence of the fantasy of the state as a heroic actor. I also contend that they contributed to the material and symbolic making of modern Afghanistan.  To say that Afghanistan presents a hermeneutical problem for the West is perhaps to say the obvious. It certainly appears self-evident to the narrator of G. A. Henty’s For Name and Fame, or Through Afghan Passes (1886), a popular adventure novel for boys set during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–81). To account for the lack of patriotism on the part of Yossouf, the young Afghan attendant of William, the novel’s British protagonist, the narrator patiently explains to his readers, ‘‘It must be remembered that Afghanistan has for centuries been rather a geographical expression than a country’’ (231).2 Henty’s metaphor efficiently accomplishes several functions at once: It casts the country in a perpetual condition of prenationhood that keeps its meaning as well as its frontiers open and malleable. It also serves to explain why Afghans, like Yossouf, lack national or any 45 46 State Fantasy and Victorian Afghanistan other collective feeling, as well as individual sovereignty. These deficiencies render Afghans labile, untrustworthy, and inferior. In other words, the obvious is precisely the site of the ideological and we can view the narrator’s use of abstract metaphors and a self-assured tone as a strategy for containing the potentially destabilizing perplexity inherent in British perceptions of Afghanistan . In this chapter, I frame Afghanistan’s symbolic and territorial vagueness in late-nineteenth-century British discourse less as an empirical question of geography, foreign policy, or central intelligence than as an ideological opportunity. Afghanistan arguably appeared protean and unclear, a ‘‘geographical expression’’ rather than a country, throughout the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, those qualities served speci fically to defend against the conflicting feelings aroused by shifts in state power and its disturbing implications for the fate of liberal individuality. Afghanistan rarely appears, if at all, in literary criticism, cultural studies, or historical accounts of the Victorian period or of the British Empire. For example, it is altogether absent from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, – (1987) and David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (2001), two key works on nineteenth-century Western imperialism . When Afghanistan does appear, for example, in Edward Said’s classic Culture and Imperialism (1993), Patrick Brantlinger’s important Rule of Darkness (1988), and the ambitious, multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (1999), edited by Andrew Porter, it does so merely as a footnote, marginal to the kinds of stories unfolding in relation to India, South Africa, or the Caribbean. Why this scarcity of reference? In part, we can assume that it has something to do with the fact that Afghanistan was not officially colonized. Ania Loomba, for one, makes a significant material distinction between colonialism and imperialism. Modern Western European colonialism refers not only to the conquest and control of other countries’ lands and peoples, but also to the restructuring of the subjugated territories’ economies, ‘‘drawing them into a complex relationship with [the conqueror’s] own, so that there was a flow of human and natural resources between colonized and colonial countries’’ (Loomba 3). More generally, Loomba writes, imperialism is ‘‘the process which leads to domination and control’’ and which subsumes colonialism: Imperialism can exist without colonialism, but colonialism cannot exist without imperialism (6–7). Recent studies of the British Empire tend to focus primarily on colonies, their imbricated economies within the empire, and the dialectical formation of the self and other that marks colonial discourse. They thus overlook what [3.145.183.137] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 09:10 GMT...