051130kennedy John Cole: Good afternoon. I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress (Library) and we're pleased to have you here. We've been accused of doing anything to get a big audience for some of our noontime talks. For those of you who don't know, the Library's other buildings have been temporarily evacuated and we're pleased to welcome refugees from the Adams and the Jefferson Buildings for this special "Books and Beyond" talk. This is a series that was created by the Center for the Book, which has the task - the center has the task - a wonderful task of using the Library of Congress's resources and name to help stimulate public interest in books and their reading. We do so in a variety of ways. One is through a network of state centers for the book, which by and large celebrate authors and local and state literary heritage. Another national effort of ours is the National Book Festival. It's not all ours, but the Center for the Book does play a key role in, particularly in organizing the author programming for the National Book Festival and the Pavilion of the States, and I can announce that next year the National Book Festival will be on the Mall on Sept. 30. But one of our favorite ways of promoting books and reading is through presentations such as the one you will hear from Professor Kennedy today. These are book talks that are about interesting topics that are based in large part, but not entirely, on the Library of Congress's collection, or if not the Library's collections, other library collections. Because one of our purposes in these talks is to demonstrate how the collections of institutions, especially at the Library of Congress, come alive through books and through research and through that crucial interrelationship between researchers and authors. Please go to our website to see cybercasts of more than 50 Center for the Book presentations since 2002, and to get a copy of our schedule of the rest of the talks scheduled for this year, and if you would like a paper copy, you can pick one up as you go out. There's one on the table at the book sale table. I'm a mystery fan, and of course I'm an avid reader of bibliomysteries. Earlier this year, as soon as it came out in paperback, I grabbed and read a book some of you may know about. It's by John Dunning. It's his latest book. It's called "The Bookman's Promise." A rare copy of Sir Richard Burton's description of his pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca plays a central role in this bibliomystery, as does Sir Richard himself during a secret journey to the American South in the early years of the Civil War. Thus, when presented with the opportunity to host a new book [sic] -- a talk about a new book about Sir Richard Burton, I grabbed it. I would like to thank the Library's Humanities and Social Sciences Division, HSS, for it's co-sponsorship of today's presentation. HSS provides reference services in the Library's Main, Local History and Genealogy, and Microform Reading Rooms. It also sponsors its own set of programs about the arts, the humanities and the social sciences. I will leave it to our speaker to present a picture of his subject Sir Richard Burton, who was born in 1821 and, when he died in 1890, he had become one of Victorian Britain's most intriguing figures. A soldier, explorer, ethnographer, linguist, poet, travel writer and a translator of "The Arabian Rights" [sic] "The Arabian Nights" [laughs] and "The Kama Sutra," among other things. I will, however, tell you something about what others have thought about our speaker's book, "The Highly Civilized Man, "a book which is now for sale and for which we will have a signing when the program is over. "Library Journal" called it "scholarly and eminently readable" and "Publisher's Weekly" liked it too, giving their critique a contemporary slant, "Kennedy succeeds in re-establishing Burton as a relevant figure for a 21st century world, grappling with issues of ethnic, cultural and sexual diversity." Best of all though, is this blurb from the back of the book from Philippa Levine of the University of Southern California, "Fresh, lively and entertaining, Dane Kennedy's newest testament of Sir Richard Burton punctures the tired stereotypes that have long dogged Burton's scholarship. Kennedy reads Burton within a series of key Victorian debates on science, sex, religion, race and empire yet holds onto his subject's remarkable individuality. Eminently readable, satisfyingly erudite, and always faired as judgment, this is the biography that Burton deserves." Dane Kennedy is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at the George Washington University where he has been for the last six years. Prior to coming to GW, he was a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He also is the author of "Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939," published in 1987 by Duke University Press and "The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj." I think I have that wrong - "On the British Raj" [sic]. I think, published by the University of California Press in 1996. I am pleased to present Professor Dane Kennedy. [applause] Dane Kennedy: This is terrific to have such a nice audience here, even if you it did require me to sort of call in [laughs], never mind [laughs]. [laughter] [laughter] First, let me thank the Center for the Book and the division of Humanities and Social Sciences for sponsoring this event and particularly to John and to Anne Boni for making all of the arrangements. Also, a special thanks to my wife, Martha Kennedy, for her role in making all of this possible. It's a real honor for me to be able to speak at the Library of Congress which is one of the utmost treasures that we have in the United States. Every time I walk into this building or these sets of buildings, when you can get into the Jefferson Building, it sends a shiver down my spine. It's just a wonderful institution and the resources here are absolutely fabulous. I hope that I don't have to clear up any misconceptions on the part of this audience. This is not the Richard Burton who married Elizabeth Taylor twice, nor even once. This Richard Burton was unquestionably one of the most protean figures of the 19th century. He was this really rare mixture of an adventurer and a scholar, an intellectual, who traveled probably more widely than almost any person of his age, who was immensely learned, wide-ranging in his readings and his knowledge of languages. And who was invariably profoundly controversial in his own society. He's best known for a series of events and activities that he undertook, and I'll just mention these briefly. First of all, a journey that he made to Mecca and Medina in 1853 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim from the borderland of Sindh in Western India. Secondly, an expedition that he undertook a few years later into the highlands of East Africa in search of the lake region, and ultimately in hopes of finding the source of the White Nile, which was the kind of Holy Grail of British exploration in the mid 19th century. And then also as John mentioned, for several translations that he undertook near the end of his life. His translation of "The Kama Sutra," which I'm sure you are all familiar with at least in some general way, as well as several other erotic texts that had Arabic and Indian origin. These were works that he had to publish anonymously because he could have been prosecuted for obscenity, in fact, if it had been known that he was responsible for them and if anyone had attempted to sell them openly. Perhaps even more remarkable was his translation of the "Tales of the Arabian Nights." A 16-volume translation, portions of which - edited versions of which - are still in print in the present day. This actually proved to be equally controversial since the tales were seen basically as children's fairy tales by a British reading public in the 19th century. He produced an unexpurgated translation with a lot of esoteric footnotes that spoke about sexual practices and the like, and turned it again into a work that many of his contemporaries regarded as, in effect, a form of pornography. Burton had plenty, plenty of other noteworthy accomplishments as well, and I'll try to mention some of them in the next 20 minutes or so. But I want to say I didn't actually write this book simply to give praise to a famous man. There are plenty of biographies that have done just this. What really interested me about Burton and what really, in a sense, served I guess is the genesis or the impetus for the book - was what it seemed to me the way in which he tells us I think something about ourselves. Or more particularly, how we've come to make sense of the world that we live in, that we inhabited, that exists around us. It seems to me that we are constantly framing ourselves in terms - in a context in which we sort of identify ourselves in terms of difference with others, differentiating who we are from others. We talk of, you know, racial differences. We talk of cultural differences. We talk of religious differences, sexual differences, [and] various other kinds of differences. And these categories of difference inform so much of the way in which we look at the world. I mean it informs discussions about multiculturalism. It informs debates about clashes of civilization. It informs a whole array of concerns and issues. And Burton I think remains a figure of relevance in some sense today because he really helped, I think, to shape some of those categories. He really spent his entire career contending with the world that was increasingly opening up as a result of British trade and empire, a world of immense variety. The effort that was needed to come to grips with that variety, to make some kind of sense of it, to sort it out, to interpret it, to understand it, was something that he was engaged in as directly, probably as anyone in the course of the 19th century. And the way in which he and certainly some of his contemporaries were attempting to do this, to sort of define who he was, who we were, in relation to who they were. Set out some of the categories that I think we still contend with, whether we agree with them or not, they sort of frame our terms of reference for understanding the world. So, his life -- as I try to argue in the book -- his life really can be seen as a series of debates about difference, about linguistic difference, about ethnic difference, about cultural difference, about religious difference, about sexual difference, and the like. And what I try to do in the course of the book. It is a biography that traces his life in a chronological fashion, but it's also one that tries to do so in terms of this effort on his part to make sense of this immensely varied world that he was coming into contact with. I have this photograph showing here because I think it gives us some insight into Burton's character. It also helps to explain the title of the book. And I want to just spend a few minutes saying something about it. This was a photograph that was taken probably in 1854, the year after Burton had made his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. And it really is a stunning, startling photograph in a variety of ways. If you think about the way in which Victorian photographic portraiture conventionally was carried out, this couldn't be more different. Most Victorian photographs would have placed the subject in a studio with some kind of painted backdrop with some set of props. And the individual being photographed would have been dressed in his or her Sunday best, something, some kind of dress that indicated the person's position. The point of the photograph was not just to portray the individual, but to place the individual in some kind of clear context: a social context, a class context, a context of occupation, or what have you. Look at this photograph, and none of that exists. Here's a photograph in which there is no backdrop. There are no props. One has no idea what Burton is wearing. He's draped in the obscure folds of this blanket. There is nothing in this photograph to tell you anything about his position in society, his identity, his place, anything of that sort. Moreover, it's I think psychologically a very disconcerting photograph. He's staring obviously directly at the viewer. He looks perhaps ill, fevered, certainly not terribly happy, maybe angry. But, it's not a welcoming look. It's a look that I think sort of creates some sense of distance. Now, the disturbing character of that photograph is reinforced by a caption that Burton in fact wrote at the bottom of this copy of the photograph. And that caption was, "The Highly Civilized Man." Well, first of all I think it is in part a commentary on him or a kind of ironic comment on his representation of himself to the world, to the viewer. And we should keep in mind this is obviously a very self-consciously designed pose, right? This is not what his contemporaries would have considered to be a highly civilized man. None of the accouterments of civilization are there. But in addition to what it says perhaps about him or what he thinks contemporaries might view him as, it really is a larger commentary I think on his views of civilization, on what it means to be civilized. And in particular his unease, his distance from the claims that were so often made by his contemporaries, that British society and Christian values were superior to all others, that they offered a kind of universalist model of civilization that could be exported, that should be exported, and should be introduced to other people. Burton in this sense, it seems to me, really is a relativist. Now, I don't want to suggest that he's a relativist in quite the same way that we understand that today. That is, I don't think that he's someone that we could regard as a sort of modern multiculturalist who is tolerant of all traditions. He was in fact in many ways a deeply intolerant man who was a bit of a misanthrope, who had a variety of rather ugly prejudices, as I will try to suggest shortly. But what he did have was a almost inexhaustible curiosity about other societies and their cultures, their beliefs, their practices, and a determination not to judge those societies by some sort of absolute moral standard that derived from his own society. That resistance to make those kinds of absolute moral judgments was, I think, sort of foundational to Burton's view of himself, his relationship to the rest of the world and, in effect, what he contributed to this debate on difference. How did he get this way? Part of it has to do with his upbringing certainly. He was the son of a British Army officer who shortly after Burton's birth had been placed on half pay basically forced out of the service for political reasons and had taken his family to the continent to live. So Burton grew up in primarily in France and in Italy. He did make one brief return. His family made a brief return to Britain where he was enrolled in a prep school, but that didn't last very long, and for the rest of his youth he was really taught by individual tutors. Moreover, his family moved with extraordinary frequency. So, he grew up, in effect, as a bit of a gypsy as well as an expatriate in societies that obviously spoke different languages. And so that, I think, is the second factor that's important here. Through his youth, he was introduced to French and Italian and a variety of dialects that were certainly much more prevalent then than they are today. And I suspect that that sort of laid the grounding for his remarkable facility for learning languages. That became apparent a bit later in his life. Another factor that certainly played an important role in shaping his character and his subsequent career was the fact that after he was sent by his father to Oxford, which he absolutely despised and he managed to engineer - he managed to engineer his expulsion within less than a year, his father was left with the problem, what to do with this guy. And he got a commission in the British East India Company Army. That was an army that operated in India. And so, he was sent off in the early 1840s to Western India to what is now a part of Pakistan, Sindh. And there his facility with languages certainly became much more evident. The company desperately needed officers who could learn local languages and acquire some kind of knowledge about the societies that they had come to control. He showed that facility. He went through a whole series of language exams very, very quickly. And he began to serve in effect as a kind of colonial ethnographer wandering through Sindh gathering as much information as he could about the local population. It gave him the kinds of skills, ethnographic skills and ease in entering into other societies that was really quite uncommon. So the result of all of this was that over the course of his career he continued to be something of a gypsy who traveled with extraordinary ease through a wide array of lands, not just Western India, but Arabia, North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, South America, North America, even Iceland. He also wrote voluminously about his travels, several dozen books of accounts of his travels and these were remarkably detailed, informed accounts of the lands and peoples that he came into contact with. It certainly was a reflection of his ethnographic experience and his linguistic skills. I should say, by the way, that it was said that he knew something like 26 different languages. He also turned those skills into translations. He translated works from Portuguese, from Arabic, from Sanskrit and so on. And it placed him in a rather ambivalent relationship to British society itself. Burton rather consciously and deliberately sought to be a kind of controversialist who took great pleasure in provoking many of his contemporaries in stating outrageous opinions. But he didn't do so for its own sake. He did so, I think, because of a genuine sense of unease with many aspects of his own society. But this, this facility for causing this trouble, intellectual trouble if you will, was perhaps most readily evident, or is most readily evident, in retrospect. It was hardly evident at all at the time for reasons I'll explain, in one of his least known works. This is a book called, "Stone Talk," which was published in 1865, a book that almost as soon as it was published disappeared from the scene in part because of the role of his wife. But, it's a very curious - oh, and I should say, there are very few copies of this book available. One of the few is right here in the Library of Congress. So, any of you who are interested can go take a look at it in the Rare Books room. This is a squib as Burton called it, or a satire, that's written entirely in verse about 120 odd pages long. And the premise of the work is this: There is a main character, Dr. Polyglott, who is in some sense clearly modeled after Burton himself, who is staggering home one night after an evening of carousing in London. He is wondering down Fleet Street, and he collapses in a drunken stupor on the street where he finds himself face-to-face with a talking paving stone, which is the reincarnated spirit of an ancient Brahman. And the book or poem is a dialogue between Dr. Polyglott and this Brahman-inhabited stone. Hence, "Stone Talk." It's an absurd premise, but in some ways it's a clever one. And what becomes clear very soon is that the stone dominates the conversation. The stone is the most sort of active, perceptive participant in this debate. And the stone really expresses the views of Burton himself. So what sort of views? It ranges all over the map. It starts out by making a case for the scientific view of the origins of the universe; a claim for evolution, which, at that point, was still obviously highly controversial; a dismissal of Christian dogma; also a remarkable seven or eight pages in which he engages in a ferocious attack on British Imperial expansion and the destruction that it has caused to various peoples who were the objects or the victims of it. Now I should say that Burton himself is in some sense an imperialist. He's a representative, an agent of the British Empire abroad. But that doesn't prevent him from really regarding much of what the British Empire is as morally reprehensible. It also goes on to make various comments criticizing various aspects of British domestic society, the treatment of working class women and sexual abuse. You name it. It goes all over the map. Now, it was controversial enough in Burton's mind that he in fact published it under a pseudonym, Frank Baker. Even so, when his wife discovered its publication, she didn't know about it until after it was published. She was distressed because he had just been appointed a British consul and she feared that he might lose his job. She consulted with one of his friends and they decided the best thing to do was to buy up all the remaining copies and destroy them, which is what she proceeded to do. That's why there are so few copies of this book still available. This is just one example of the way in which he sort of presented himself as a controversialist, certainly. But what I want to do now in the next few minutes is to point to some of the particular areas where Burton's views of difference seem to me particularly interesting, certainly sometimes disturbing, but invariably challenging. One has to do with religion. Burton was fascinated by religion as, of course, were most Victorians in one way or another. But he was particularly fascinated by the array of religious beliefs and traditions that he encountered in his travels around the world. He felt a particular affection for Islam, which he was introduced to in India and in the journey to Mecca and Medina. There really is some question at certain points. Was he simply disguising himself as a Muslim or was he in fact a Muslim who was claiming to the British that he wasn't a Muslim? He played both sides of that issue for a period of time. And I think one can say that he, without question, he was much more sympathetic to Islam that he was to Christianity through much of his career. But he also sort of gave a great deal of attention and interest to, to Hinduism, to Buddhism, to, to Judaism. In his travels through West Africa, despite his, as we will see, some antagonistic things to say about Africans. He generally gave respectful notice - surprisingly respectful notice - to traditional African animistic beliefs, which were generally dismissed merely as superstition by most of his contemporaries. Also, during his travels across the United States - and I should say John, by the way, that mystery novel is very clever in a sense that there is this gap in his travels in America that we don't know anything about. And it's precisely that, that unknown period that, that Dunning focuses on. Burton arrives in the United States, actually, originally Canada. Then we know he makes a stagecoach journey from St. Joseph to San Francisco. We don't know how he got to St. Joseph. We don't know anything in that previous part of his journey. But, in that journey from St. Joseph to San Francisco, he spends a great deal of time at the new settlement of Salt Lake City where he was immensely interested in Mormonism. In part because it was engaging in a kind of occidentalization, if we can use that term, of polygamy which most Europeans, most Westerners, identified exclusively with Islam and, and foreign, foreign faiths. Of course, that was one of the sources of intense controversy surrounding Mormonism. But Mormonism interested him. Later in his life he was very interested in spiritualism as well. But the sense of appreciation for all of these different religious faiths and traditions was really rooted in a kind of, of historical appreciation of the way in which they provided a sense of order, identity, coherence, cohesion, for a particular group of people. In other words, his understanding of, and appreciation of all of these religious traditions was very historically grounded and very specific. He was simply unwilling, unable to accept anyone, any of them, as offering any kind of sort of universalist claims to faith. And in fact he was, certainly by the end of his life, and I think probably through most of his life, effectively, an agnostic. This is a position that he gave very eloquent expression to in a late sort of long poem called "The Kasidah" that was published in the 1880, which basically is a poem talking about how one can live one's life with no hope that there is going to be an afterlife. So his views on religion were invariably, I think, shaped by a kind of relativist distance and a real appreciation for what each of these religious traditions offered to the people who were their adherence. Now, race: Race was then, as now, an intensely controversial issue and Burton was about as controversial in addressing it as anyone could be. Like many people who came out of the British Orientalist tradition in India, he actually sort of felt that Europeans and Indians shared a common racial origin. It was rooted in Indo-European language, and the like. And that feeling of affinity of connection was reinforced by his ability to engage in disguise and enter into these societies with a good deal of ease. And that, that's an important dimension I think, to his understanding of race that really sort of has some disturbing consequences when he goes to Africa. Because once he starts traveling in black Africa, that possibility for gaining entry into an indigenous society through disguise simply isn't possible. He actually tries it during his journey to the interior of Somalia. He starts off dressed up, you know, in a disguise and pretty quickly it becomes apparent that this isn't going to work. He finally says, you know, oh, well, and sort of disposes with it and he goes to the place that he is seeking dressed as an English officer. One of the consequences of this, but certainly other factors as well, is that in his, in his analysis of black Africans, physical characteristics came to be especially important -- the color of the skin, the shape of the face, the texture of the hair. All of these were factors that assumed a new importance in his understanding of race and the result of this was that he became in the mid-19th century, one of the most vocal and ferocious advocates of a new scientific racism. He was in fact a polygenist. That is someone who argued that black Africans derived from distinct and separate origins from whites. His stance was also shaped certainly by what he saw as the disturbing effects of Christian missionary endeavors in West Africa. The people -- the Africans -- who he was most repulsed by were those who had converted to Christianity and adopted Western practices, Western dress, all of the rest of it. The ones he was most sympathetic to and really sort of engaged with in the fullest level, were those who had had the least contact with the West and who had maintained, as far as possible, traditional practices and beliefs. The result of all of this is that in a curious way he manages, I think, to sort of mix racism and relativism. I don't want to, by any stretch of the imagination, sort of deny or mitigate the racism that he expressed. But one way to understand it is that racists, I think, insist that blacks need to be kept in their place. Relativists argue that blacks' culture has a kind of merit of its own. Both positions in a sense oppose those who insist that Africans should embrace Western values, Christianity, monogamy, these sorts of things. Both positions in effect object to those kinds of universalists claims. And much of -- there is this very peculiar dichotomy in Burton's writings about Africa and Africans, on the one hand, some of the most ferocious racist statements one can find, on the other hand, an exceptionally sophisticated and sensitive appreciation of traditional African culture. It's an uneasy oscillation that Burton clearly never resolved. Finally, let me talk about sexuality, which was another area where Burton was engaged in trying to sort of deal with the issue of difference. Burton's unwillingness to insist on any single code of conduct extended to sexuality as well. Sex fascinated Burton. He tried to study it wherever he went; obviously practiced it as well in various ways. He was immensely frustrated by Victorian moral codes that prevented a frank discussion of sexuality. He was one of the founders of the Anthropological Society in the 1860s and its first vice president. And one of the reasons he played such a central role in the founding of that organization was he thought that this would be an opportunity to create an institution where one could talk frankly about the varieties of sexual practices and beliefs and moral codes that existed in different parts of the world. He called it, "My refuge of destitute truth." Towards the end of his life, obviously this interest resulted in a whole series of translations: "The Kama Sutra," "The Perfumed Garden" and the like. And perhaps most controversial, led to a long essay at the end of the tenth volume of his translation "The Arabian Nights," about a 50-page scholarly discourse on homosexual love. This was clearly one of, if perhaps not the first extended full frank treatment of the subject in the English language, and it set the stage for some interesting changes to come. So, his position on sexuality was again a kind of frank embrace of sexual difference, if you will, much like his interest in difference in a variety of other ways. All right, enough of boring you. I hope at least, I hope I've managed to persuade you that there's a lot more to Burton than simply the heroic explorer, adventurer who is portrayed in most of the biographies of the man. Burton, I think, is a highly provocative and interesting figure whose very serious engagement with the world and with an effort to understand the variety of differences by which most people live their lives, something that we can debate, we can engage with, we can find in many ways relevant to our own lives and world. Okay. Thank you very much. [applause] [end of transcript] ?? ?? ?? ?? 10 10