| In order to contribute to the understanding of the deep history of racialized thought, this dissertation studies the way people in late medieval England imagined themselves in global space. In post-Conquest Middle English historiography, imperial romances, and maps of the world, new forms of nationalism grew up via a particular treatment of the relationship between human bodies and landscape. Because these texts and maps investigated nationalist ideas in the theater of global space, that relationship represents an influential late medieval theory of ethnicity. Englishness was defined in contrast to the farthest eastern zones of medieval geography. Indeed, that late medieval theory of ethnicity, because it was developed through stories about the martial explorer-kings King Arthur and Alexander the Great, was always already being discussed in register of imperialism. Indian and English space, therefore, have existed in a dialectic of Other and Self for far longer than traditionally understood. Embedded in the landscape poetics of these poems and maps lie the irreducible paradoxes which characterize Orientalist inscriptions of identity into modernity. Indeed, this dissertation shows how these paradoxes persist in the nineteenth century to shape the idea of the Anglo-Indian relationship and, ultimately, the Aryanist theory of culture. This reading of the way the English have imagined themselves constitutes an ethnosymbolic approach to the study of nations and nationalism. The methodology of the longue duree reveals complex relations of the past, present, and future and the place of ethnies and nations within them, avoiding a retrospective nationalism while doing justice to the widespread presence and significance of collective cultural identities in premodern epochs. |
