Bazaars, cannibals, and sepoys: Sensationalism and empire in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States

This dissertation looks at metropolitan appropriations of sensationalized images of colonial danger and allure. In the introduction to the dissertation, I show that sensationalism, with its lurid images and graphic descriptions of bodies, crime, and violence, was a popularly used device to construct spectacles of colonial otherness. This othering function of sensationalism, I argue, is also evident in several bourgeois constructions of working class people, women, and non-whites. Each of the chapters that follow demonstrates how such sensationalized images of colonial threat and attraction were used by, often disenfranchised, residents of Britain and the United States to understand and critique local issues and conflicts. I locate these metropolitan appropriations of colonial images as "metropolitan mimicries," in an inversion of Homi Bhabha's famous theorization of "colonial mimicry," which he explains formed a key survival tactic of oppressed colonial natives. By mimicking (copying but with a difference) Western signs, the colonized were able to recuperate some spaces of critique and subversion. In the case of the metropolitan mimicries that I discuss, however, the critique is not of the colonial other but of metropolitan formations and institutions.;I first examine how women and bazaars were connected in the Western imaginary. Both were associated with allure as well as danger in sensationalized narratives written both in the colonies as well as in the West. I show how British and American female activists, in the 1830s and 1840s, exploited these very stereotypical associations of bazaars for their own activism against metropolitan evils such as slavery and the Corn Laws. Next, I look at how Thomas Peckett Prest, in The String of Pearls: The Barber of Fleet Street (1846), appropriates the classed and raced discourse of cannibalism to critique the savageries of London. Finally, I explore how various U.S. writers, ranging from popular authors of sensational tales to abolitionists, recycle the sensationalized images of the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 to describe and interrogate a range of issues, including the U.S. Civil War, the institution of slavery, the threat of class or racial insurrection in the United States, and the relationship between the United States and Britain. In order to demonstrate these colonial contaminations of the nineteenth century metropole, I draw upon a range of texts, prominent among which are a number of unstudied and archival sources such as the U.S. literature around the Sepoy revolt of 1857, Thomas Peckett Prest's novel The String of Pearls: The Barber of Fleet Street (1846), Harriet Martineau's Dawn Island (1846), and Maria Lydia Child's "Jan and Zaida" (1856).