Hybridizing Past, Present, and Future
Hybridizing Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on the ‘Sexology’ of R. F. Burton
This piece analyses the genealogical and discursive hybridity of the approaches to sexual knowledge taken in the ‘sexological’ work of the traveller/scholar Sir Richard Burton (1821–90). It focuses on the erotic, ethnographic, and exotic features of his presentation of sexuality in The book of one thousand nights and a night (1885–8), locating it within his general involvement with such discourses, within histories of homoerotic subcultures and ‘obscene’ publication, and within histories of science, empire, and ethnography. It argues that Burton’s treatment of sexuality combined powerful tropes established over two centuries of orientalist practice with mid-nineteenth-century cultural concerns, and with emerging innovative trends of the 1880s. Close reading of the text suggests that its many-sided and inconsistent approaches to sexual matters express unresolved negotiations between long-standing sexualized conventions of exoticism, contemporary raced, classed, and gendered cultural practices, and new ‘scientific’ or ‘modern’ thinking.
Keywords: sexuality, hybridity, orientalism, race, obscenity, The Arabian Nights, Sir Richard Burton
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