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Literature, Music
and Cosmopolitanism
Culture As Migration
ROBERT FRASER
Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism
Robert Fraser
Literature, Music and

Cosmopolitanism
Culture as Migration
Robert Fraser
Open University
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-68479-6 ISBN 978-3-319-68480-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959345
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Fotosearch / Getty Images
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
IN EUROPE, AND FOR EUROPE
Contents
1 Culture as Migration 1
2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,

Post-nationality and the Fall and Rise of Europe 17
3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth 31
4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia

the Philosopher from Gibbon to Black Athena 51
5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British

Listeners in Italy 65
6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,

Ruskin and Religious Longing 79
7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,

the Popish Plot and the Politics of Latin 85
8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles

Kingsley, Governor Eyre and the Morant Bay Rising 97
vii
viii CONTENTS
9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson

and the Bengal Emergency of 1905–06 125
10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161
11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy

and Literature in India and Africa, 1930–1965 173
12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening

to Africa; Listening to György Ligeti Listening to Reich 185
13 A Cultural Cosmopolis 195
Acknowledgements 205
Index 207
...alas, alas, say now the King...
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus us’d? This is the strangers case;
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
rom the play The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act II, Scene iv, believed to
F
be by William Shakespeare, and in his own handwriting
British Library Harley Manuscript 7368
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia

(2nd ed., Basel, 1588), B.L.Ac.3838/45 34
Fig. 7.1 “Jehova, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes Mei”. Henry Purcell’s
fair copy holograph from B.L.Add.Ms, 30930, The Works of
Henry Purcell (Dom, 1680) 90
Fig. 10.1 John Constable, “Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s
Grounds”, 1823 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 162
Fig. 12.1 Ewe Nyayito Dance. Robert Fraser, West African Poetry:
A Critical History (Cambridge University Press, 1986),
11, reproducing Jones (1959), Volume Two, 32–33 188
Fig. 12.2 Ewe Agbaza Dance, Steve Reich, Writings on Music
1965–2000. Edited with an introduction by Paul Hillier
(Oxford University Press, 2002), 62 189
xi
CHAPTER 1
Culture as Migration
The theme of this book is a response to that of a far more famous one,
published in 1869 by the English poet, educator and visionary, Matthew
Arnold. Until comparatively recently Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy was
read by students of British society as among the most trenchant—certainly
the most influential—of those high-minded works of exhortation and
prophecy to which mid-to-late Victorian authors liked to treat their read-
ers. For much of the twentieth century it also fed into current social and
educational debate, influencing at a subliminal level generations of critics,
social commentators and teachers. Subtitled “An Essay in Political and
Social Criticism”, it portrays culture as a homogeneous and desirable qual-
ity. Culture for Arnold is “a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also
of the moral and social passion for doing good.”1 More straightforwardly,
in a later book, Literature and Dogma (1876), Arnold defined culture as
“the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in
the world”.2
“Mass culture”, “popular culture”, let alone “pop culture”, would have
been incomprehensible to Arnold. Indeed, though admirable in the
abstract, culture was not, he reluctantly conceded, very popular in
England. In reality the British people distrusted culture, since they associ-
ated it with intellectuality, which they hated in principle, and with what
Arnold called “curiosity”. Not merely did curiosity kill the cat; according
to Arnold it offended the average Briton’s sense of decency and moderation.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Fraser, Literature, Music and Cosmopolitanism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_1
2 ROBERT FRASER
“I have before now”, he wearily remarked in the first chapter of Culture

and Anarchy, “pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use
the word [curiosity] in a good sense as well as a bad sense. With us the
word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intel-
ligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner
when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain
notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.”
So culture had its enemies in Victorian England, typified for Arnold by
materialism, provinciality and middle-class self-satisfaction: everything, in
other words that in 1869 went along with British commercial and imperial
success. Forces such as these Arnold associated, paradoxically for his time,
with culture’s adversary and opposite: anarchy. Culture as such had little to
do with such homebred virtues or vices. The work ethic—or Hebraism—
owed little to the thought impulse or Hellenism. Despite this, with some and
intellectual effort, culture in Arnold’s sense of the word could be acquired by
an educated English person—by the whole country, did they but try. The
English of all classes, Arnold thought, could do with a lot more of it.
Despite—or more probably because of—its improving zeal, the twenty-
first-century reader is apt to find Arnold’s celebrated book stuffy and
smug. Anachronisms scream from every page. There is, for example, the
question of his self-identification with a group called “we”, denoting the
British alone. There is also his talk of “foreigners”, enviously though sus-
piciously viewed. What is more, Arnold seems to see “culture” as a quality
that can be detached from other aspects of a community. Schooled by
sociology, we are nowadays apprehensive of using the word in this strange,
if uplifting, sense. Arnold’s scenario, moreover, seems to us impossibly
value-laden. There is in him too much talk of moral improvement and of
“things in the mind”. Bodies, material artefacts, even money, seem to
enjoy no place in his picture at all.
Most glaringly, for citizens of the so-called multicultural society, there is
the fact that Arnold invariably uses “culture” as a singular noun. This is all
the odder because the Romans, from whom we derive the word, tended to
use it in the plural: culturae. It is tempting to think that Arnold saw culture
as a singular quality because he was only aware of one: that of the British or
English (in his book he uses the terms synonymously). Yet, as we have
already seen, this was very far from being his view. If anything, “culture” for
Arnold stemmed from overseas, though it might find a resting place in
Britain. One might perhaps broaden the accusation by claiming that the
“culture” he advocated was an exclusively European affair, that he saw
CULTURE AS MIGRATION 3
Europe as a homogeneous unit with local variations that included “us” and
the “foreigners” (that is, other Europeans), whilst sidelining other conti-
nents. Yet Arnold, like his headmaster father Thomas Arnold of Rugby, was
steeped in the literature and history of the Near East; so he would have had
a hard job fitting in even to this expanded stereotype. Arnold’s “culture” is
universal, cosmopolitan, elitist. Are there bridges from his ideas to our own?
The Meanings of Culture

So habituated have twenty-first-century people become to travel and com-
parative generalisations about different “cultures” that it is difficult to reg-
ister how recent the word is as used in our sense. In Roman times Cicero
talks of two kinds of culturae: “agri culturae”, cultivations of the fields,
and “animi culturae”, cultivations of the spirit or mind. Accordingly, until
the 1860s its use in most European languages was confined to agriculture,
religion and by extension to education. The first English use as applied to
crops in the general sense of “cultivating the soil” is 1420. As applied to
religious worship it is 1483, though the derivation is not from Latin cul-
turae but from cultus, a cult or sect. Its extension to scholarship and train-
ing is a feature of the Renaissance. In 1510 Sir Thomas More talks of the
need to apply ourselves “to the culture and profit” of our minds, a sense
not a thousand miles from Arnold’s. By 1550 the word appears with this
meaning in French. By 1626 the agricultural application has been extended
to imply the cultivation of particular crops, from which we get the special-
ised uses “arboriculture”, “floriculture”, “horticulture” and in France
“viniculture”. Two years later the word embraced the athletic improve-
ment of the human body. By 1796, at the height of Britain’s Agricultural
Revolution, it is connected with the rearing of livestock.
Unsurprisingly, the shift to our modern analytical sense occurs in
German. In 1860, with a little-known Zurich publisher, the Swiss histo-
rian Jacob Burckhardt issued his Kultur der Renaissance in Italien; it had
little impact at first, though it was later to transform scholarly thinking
about the Quattrocento. That Renaissance Italy possessed a culture unique
to itself, however, was a fresh insight. With it we approach the relativistic
notion of one social, political and social organisation as distinct from oth-
ers; for Burckhardt the Renaissance Italian state had been an unrepeatable
“work of art”. To speak of a “culture” in this sense is close to talking of a
“civilisation”; accordingly, when Burckhardt’s book was finally translated
into English in 1878, it was as The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
4 ROBERT FRASER
By 1867, two years before Arnold’s diatribe, the term “culture” was first
used in a related sense in English. Significantly, the context is a description
of that particular kind of cross-channel migration known as an “invasion”.
After the Battle of Hastings, wrote Freeman in his history of The Norman
Conquest, the Anglo-Saxons were confronted by “a language and a culture
which was wholly alien to them”.
From there it is but a short step to using the word in a scientific, quasi-
objective sense, first attributed to that grandad of modern anthropology,
Edward Burnett Tylor. Tylor was a wealthy Quaker denied a university
education because of his religious affiliation. Afflicted with tuberculosis,
he instead travelled to Mexico, where he became fascinated by the parallels
he could perceive between the customs, myths and rituals of the ordinary
people he encountered in his progress and those of the European peas-
antry. Gradually the notion of culture as something multiform and spread
out began to take shape in his mind. The result was a series of works trac-
ing the deep affinities between people and times, the most famous of
which, Primitive Culture of 1871, bore a title that seemingly engages
with, and challenges, the exclusivity implied by Arnold’s book, published
a mere two years before.
On the first page Tylor hazards a new definition. “Culture or civilisa-
tion taken in its wide ethnographic sense”, he opines, “is that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
Like Arnold, Tylor always used “culture” as a—frequently capitalised—
singular noun, synonymous with its sister substantive “civilization”. For
Tylor, unlike Arnold, however, both culture and civilisation were diffused
across the world, and across history. Each different society in different
ages possessed a character of its own; yet beneath these apparent differ-
ences, certain constants were apparent. There was thus both a variety and
a certain uniformity. Tylor goes on to dilate about this seeming paradox:
The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, so far as it

is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the
study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the unifor-
mity which so largely pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great mea-
sure, to the uniform action of uniform causes: while on the other hand its
various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each
the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping
the history of the future.3
The “laws of human thought” that Tylor identifies in this passage are
those of social evolution cross-pollinated from Darwin’s biological theo-
ries with the study of society by later Victorians such as Herbert Spencer.
For Tylor all societies had evolved, and were continually evolving, from
stage to stage. Because all societies were on the same evolutionary journey,
which they covered at different speeds, it was possible to compare them.
The result was a method of analysis called the “comparative method”, and
a science that came to be known as Social Anthropology, the first chair of
which in the University of Oxford Tylor came eventually to hold.
Yet Tylor says nothing about migration, for two very good reasons. The
first is that, like most of the first few generations of anthropologists, he was
interested in studying individual societies in situ so that he could observe
the interplay in each case between social arrangements and their environ-
ment. It was therefore in his interests that each society appeared to stay
still, just as a zoological specimen beneath the microscope ideally stays
still. The second was that he was anxious to argue that the similarities he
discerned between various societies in various places were the products of
separate but parallel development, rather than of influence. If it could be
proved that they had borrowed from one another, his argument was com-
promised, if not ruined.
By the mid-1870s, therefore, two contrasting senses of the term “cul-
ture” were available, both of which we have inherited: Arnold’s, which
stressed culture as an ideal that we might or might not attain; and Tylor’s,
according to which all people possess a culture, albeit of different kinds.
From Tylor’s comparative use of the singular noun, it was a fairly short
step to pluralising it. By the turn of the century, the practice was common-
place. The modern cosmopolitan man, declared The Spectator on 27 June
1891, is one who prides himself on “speaking all languages, knowing all
cultures, living amongst all races”.
The Crux of Cosmopolitanism

The notion of cosmopolitanism features prominently in our title and is
clearly going to be central to our discussion; again, it is a term whose
application has shifted across time. Quite recently it has featured in the
title of a stimulating book by the Ghanaian and British-born philosopher
(currently resident in New York), Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah is the
son of a marriage between an Ashanti noble, onetime Ghana nationalist
politician, with a British author and artist, daughter of a former Socialist
6 ROBERT FRASER
Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will be taking a closer look at his back-

ground in the conclusion to the present book, but wish to start by citing
what he has to say in his work Cosmopolitism (2010) on the complex ques-
tion of the meaning of culture. One of his chapters is headed “Whose
culture is it anyway?” and it begins by addressing the fraught issues of
“cultural patrimony” and “intellectual copyright”, both of which take
their cue from conceptions of local, or else personal, belonging. In 1874,
at the conclusion of the second British-Ashanti war, the state capital
Kumasi was burned to the ground on the orders of the British commander,
Garnet Wolseley, and the palace looted of its contents. A century later, in
Mali, thousands of intricate terracotta figures depicting humans and ani-
mals were unearthed about three kilometres from the modern city of
Djenné by an international team of archaeologists: in contravention of a
UNESCO resolution, they were sold to collectors and museums around
the world, which are reluctant to return them. Cultural nationalists have
urged that they be sent back. It does not need the better-known example
of the Elgin Marbles removed from the Parthenon in Athens between
1801 and 1805, and still in the British Museum in London, to underline
the issues raised by these episodes. In all such instances, the campaign of
retrieval is based on a feasible, if to Appiah questionable, proposition,
which he summarises thus: “It is that, in simplest terms, cultural property
be regarded as the property of its culture. If you belong to that culture,
such work is, in the suggestive shorthand, your cultural patrimony. If not,
not.”4
The case is comparatively straightforward when it comes to physical
objects, the fact of whose removal is simply ascertained, even if the rights
and wrongs of the matter, and the question of ownership, are more diffi-
cult to resolve. When it comes to the less tangible products of culture—
poems and pieces of music, for example—the relevant questions are far
harder to sort out. Most nineteenth- and some twentieth-century com-
mentators have assumed that English poetry and English music are the
expression of the English nation and its people: they breathe its soul, as it
were. In 1937 the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams published a book of
essays entitled National Music dedicated to this proposition. Yet nobody
for that reason would claim that the works of Edward Elgar should not be
performed in Germany (where, indeed, his early reputation was made).
And nobody in their right mind would assert that the symphonies of
Joseph Haydn should not be performed in England where, in old age, he
spent a couple of happy and productive years. To which nation does the
music of George Frideric Handel belong: to Germany, in whose principal-

ity of Hanover he was born; to Italy, where he learned his trade as an opera
composer between 1706 and 1712, and in whose language the libretti of
all his operas (but not his oratorios) are couched; or to Britain, where he
settled for the remaining forty-seven years of his life? Put like this, the
question reduces itself to absurdity. Few would dare raise the question as
to whether the mathematical discoveries of Srinivasa Ramanujan—born in
1887 in Tamil Nadu, whence in 1914 he moved to Cambridge where
some of his best work was achieved—constitute a legacy of India or of
England. At one level they belong to Ramanujan alone, and are part of his
legitimate intellectual property. At the highest and most realistic level,
they belong to humanity. Most fundamentally and triumphantly, they are
ground-breaking mathematics.
It is Appiah’s contention that all cultural masterpieces, be they sculp-
tural, architectural, scientific, literary or musical, belong to humanity in
this way. We owe it to one another to be curious about our various tradi-
tions, and such curiosity entails rights over them. This is part of what he
means by cosmopolitanism. Besides, people move constantly, and culture
and its outputs move with them. In support of this view Appiah quotes the
verdict of Salman Rushdie, whose instinct in writing fiction has always
been to stir the cultural melting pot. In 1988, the year in which his novel
The Satanic Verses was subjected to an Iranian fatwa, Rushdie declared
that this work “rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the
Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness
enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the
world, and I am determined to embrace it.”5 All of that is true though,
pace Rushdie, perhaps it is not so new.
“The Strangers’ Case”

Whatever way you look at it, notions of culture and cosmopolitanism are
ineluctably tied in with the fact of widespread international migration. It
for this very reason that the emergence over the last few decades of an
academic discourse stressing the centrality of migration to human cultural
formation has proved such a refreshing and revealing change. Increasingly,
culture has come to be viewed less as an expression of place than a product
of interaction and demographic shift. A recurrent difficulty, however, has
been to classify, and to distinguish between, various kinds of human mass
movement. If culture is notoriously difficult to pin down, migration and
8 ROBERT FRASER
its analogues are just as elusive. Fifty years ago, the travel writer Bruce
Chatwin proposed to his London publisher a grand work to be entitled
The Nomadic Alternative, universalising his own temperamental condition
of itchy feet. His proposal landed on the desk of the publisher’s reader,
Desmond Morris, author of the ethnographic-cum-zoological classic The
Naked Ape, who reported back in some puzzlement: “What is a nomad? It
gets a little confusing sometimes when I read his chapter headings.” For
Morris there was a fundamental difference between wandering away from
and back to a fixed base, on the one hand, and wandering from place to
place without a fixed base, on the other. He concluded, “As I said in The
Naked Ape, the moment man became a hunter he had to have somewhere
to come back to after the hunt was over. So a fixed base became natural for
the species and we lost our old ape-like nomadism.”6
In the half-century since then, the literature concerning human move-
ment has grown exponentially, but the task of classification has proved no
easier. Nomadism, exploration, asylum, adventure, tourism, crusading, all
constitute varieties of human movement between territories and, as several
recent commentators have observed, very often the motivations have
been— and remain—mixed. The United Nations reductively defines a
migrant as one who has stayed outside his or her country of origin for
more than twelve months,7 but such a description encompasses long-term
overseas military personnel, diplomats, students on extended gap years,
expatriates on long contracts, some international consultants and, histori-
cally, practically everyone (notably the pieds noirs of Algeria, or the sahibs
and memsahibs of the erstwhile British Raj) who once staffed the various
European empires. Useful as it is as a yardstick, the definition also begs the
very question of personal and social identity, since it assumes that all of us
possess a point of origin and ultimate belonging, which is far from univer-
sally true, even in the meanest bureaucratic or legal sense.
One matter is certain: the phenomenon is both exceedingly old and
pressingly new. The first humans were certainly nomads. In terms of our
history, in fact, it is movement that has constituted the rule, and settle-
ment and belonging that have been the exceptions. In his influential book
Migration: A World History, Michael H. Fisher traces the ramifying itiner-
aries of our ancestral wanderings from East Africa outwards towards
Eurasia, then by branching lines across to Australasia and the Americas,
aided by land bridges exposed during the last ice age and subsequently
engulfed. He further recounts tides of movement within the documented
past resulting from Alexander the Great’s predations, the Emperor
Constantine’s expansion of the Roman Empire and the proselytising

spread of Islam. The picture is then complicated by the slave trade, the
growth of European empires in Asia and Africa, and economic migration
since.8 In their strongly argued Exceptional People: How Migrants Shaped
Our World and Will Define Our Future, Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron
and Meera Balarajan have charted the impact of these historical perambu-
lations on the sending and receiving countries, on families, communities
and individuals. They conclude with a plea for migration to be viewed as a
normative aspect of human history, and the principal hope for an inte-
grated and prosperous global future: “So long as nationalism can legiti-
mately trump the more universal claims of international co-operation,
world development will be stalled. However, our national myths are grad-
ually deconstructed as historical revision lays bare the truth about the cen-
tral role of cross-cultural contact in the creation of new societies. When we
ask ourselves the perennial question ‘Who are we?’ answering exclusively
with nationalism is less and less convincing in the twenty-first century.”9
The controversies surrounding this topic over the last few years have had
a tendency to encourage writers on both sides of the debate to frame their
arguments in terms of undiluted absolutes. Opponents of migration habitu-
ally and drastically exaggerate its detrimental effects, and underplay its con-
siderable benefits. Correspondingly, in the face of such bald opposition,
those committed to defending and promoting migration have sometimes
portrayed it as an uncomplicated good that has invariably benefitted every-
body everywhere. A further effect has been to cause historians to project this
panacea both backwards and forwards, portraying the whole of human his-
tory in the process as one seething and ebullient panorama of restless motion
and interchange. In Fisher’s words, “We are all the descendants of migrants
and we virtually all migrate during the course of our lives. From the origin
of our Homo sapiens species about 200,000 BC until today, we have
expanded our range over the entire planet. We have emigrated to seek new
opportunities, often driven out by deteriorating social or physical environ-
ments. As the earth’s climate has changed and our societies have developed,
migration has enabled us to better our lives and those of our children.”10
This is both richly true, and richly untrue. What we observe in reality in
the human past is a rhythmic alternation. On the one hand, there have
been periods of vigorous population shift, such as the Völkerwandering or
migratio gentium of which German historians of late antiquity used to
speak when referring to alien incursions into the crumbling Roman
Empire.11 For historians such as Fisher, we are living through a second
10 ROBERT FRASER
such age, in which an equivalent scenario is being played out on a global

scale. On the other hand, there have always been comparatively static times
during which the cultural demography of individual territories has tended
to settle down. Were this not so, it would be impossible for any of us mean-
ingfully to speak of national or regional characteristics. Nor would any-
body ever experience homesickness, or indeed its opposite, wanderlust.
The rhythm is productive. There is a directive towards movement and
penetration; there is also a directive towards, and a need for, retention. In
order properly to convey and to share customs, attitudes, varieties of spiri-
tuality, art forms and idioms, every inward- or outward-bound community
needs to possess something to share in the first place. Languages fuse and
borrow from one another, but we can still properly speak of Bengali or
French, compile separate dictionaries of these tongues, and consider the
literatures couched in each, even if we subsequently compare them. The
short story form, for example, originated in Bengal and migrated to France.
In such circumstances, acquisition and consolidation become twin
aspects of an ongoing and fruitful process. Imaginatively viewed, a nation
may be conceived of both as an entity and as a conglomeration; a botanical
genus, but simultaneously hybrid. Both visions can be found in English
literature, for example in Shakespeare. As an epigraph to this book, I quote
a scene from the collaboratively authored play The Book of Sir Thomas
More, unpublished until 1832 but first drafted between 1601 and 1604
by, it is believed, Anthony Munday (1560–1633) and Henry Chettle, then
revised by a number of hands, almost certainly including Shakespeare’s.
Written at a time of escalating tension caused by the arrival of a wave of
Huguenots (French Protestants) in England, the drama takes as one of its
persistent themes hysterical xenophobia. In the scene from which the
quoted speech is taken, the manuscript of which survives in Shakespeare’s
hand, More is reprimanding a mob of London apprentices bent on burn-
ing to the ground the homes of some economic migrants recently arrived
from Lombardy. He asks them to imagine themselves as immigrants to
another country—“to France or Flanders/To any German province, Spain
or Portugal”—and to treat the arrivals with the sort of courtesy that they
would then request and require. The point is taken, and the crowd dis-
perse. We are all more or less natives (even if of more than one country),
and we are all potential migrants.
However, Shakespeare also realised, and drew on, a marked and settled
sense of national belonging. Twenty years previously, in evoking the roots
of the Wars of the Roses which, little more than a century before, had
precariously been resolved in the Tudor Settlement, he had written a piv-

otal scene in Richard the Second, and placed in the mouth of John of
Gaunt (whose mother, let it be said, hailed from Ghent) perhaps the clas-
sic expression of English patriotism:
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…12
It was during the time of the English Renaissance, and more especially
following the English Reformation with its repudiation of papal scope and
power, that the tension between territorial sovereignty and continental
affinities most dramatically played itself out in English life, and for this
very reason I have focused in on the period in three of the chapters that
follow. (I am not the first to imply historical parallels between the
Reformation and Brexit, and the putative cultural ramifications of both.13)
In the Renaissance period, English exceptionalism came to an end with
the union between the English and Scottish crowns in 1603.
A century later, England had been ruled over successively by Scottish
and Dutch monarchs. Such royal migration was not universally popular. In
1700 the Whig journalist and poetaster John Hutchin (1660–1707), who
had initially welcomed the arrival of King William III from Holland with
his English wife Mary as rescuing the country from popery, published a
polemic entitled The Foreigners attacking the regal interlopers. The novel-
ist Daniel Defoe read the poem (if such it was) “with a kind of rage”,
considering it to be a “vile abhor’d pamphlet, in very ill verse”. He
responded with a much better poem of his own, The True-Born Englishman:
A Satyr, questioning the very notion of essential Englishness. Who are we
English folk anyway if not the products of infiltration and miscegenation?
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
12 ROBERT FRASER
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.14
The English have continued to quarrel about their identity ever since.
“Whither Would You Go?”

In his informative and crisp International Migration: A Very Short
Introduction, Khalid Koser summarises the consequences of our age-old
patterns of migration thus: “Migration has been a critical and influential
feature of human history. It has supported the growth of the world econ-
omy, it has contributed to the evolution of states and societies and it has
enriched many cultures and civilisations.”15 It is with the third of these
consequences that the chapters comprising the present book are con-
cerned. In my conclusion I shall attempt to theorise it by drawing on the
related fields of philosophy and anthropology. In the meantime, I offer a
series of inter-related case studies exploring how migration has assisted
bodies of knowledge, schools of literature, art and music. The examples
are drawn from England, from mainland Europe, from Israel, Egypt, West
Africa, America, India and the Caribbean. In the light of recent events, I
return constantly to the matter of Britain, partly because it is best known
to me, and partly because Britain is a group of islands whose encircling sea
might be expected to have exempted it from some of the influences
described. Yet during the chequered course of the country’s history, no
portion of the earth’s surface has been more affected by the movement of
peoples, both inward and outward, than this “scepter’d isle”.
The object throughout is to assess three competing panaceas. The
first—long since discarded—is Arnold’s view that human culture repre-
sents a single refined entity at which all should aim. The second—call it
Burckhardt’s paradigm—is the version of cultural nationalism which has it
that intellectual formations are inevitably and primarily an expression of

the places that produced them. The third is the much more recent idea
that globalisation has now diluted this understanding in the interests of an
inclusive and heterogeneous norm. By harking back to the classical period,
and by negotiating freely between that and the more recent past and pres-
ent, I demonstrate the partiality of all these beliefs, the first two being a
preoccupation of the nineteenth century, the third of the twentieth and
twenty-first.
Concentrating for the most part on the complementary arts of litera-
ture and music, I attempt to show how the constant movement of peoples
and ideas over many centuries has nourished and sustained human culture
in a diversity of ways. There are certain constants to this process, tenden-
cies that have spearheaded cultural diffusion and its effects. One is nomad-
ism, a challenging aspect of demography that I examine through a case
study of the Roma people as they have wandered across Europe. The sec-
ond is language, the divagating and yet unifying effects of which I examine
by focusing on some uses of Europe’s traditional lingua franca, Latin,
then on English which—even as the English themselves seem bent on
“leaving Europe”—appears to have become Latin’s modern equivalent.
The third is empire, analysed here in a number of different contexts,
including colonial administration and education. A fourth is religion,
whose disseminating ideological effects are illustrated though four case
studies, three from the early modern period and one from the nineteenth
century. A fifth is travel and tourism, and the ways in which these are
reported and in which they have influenced artistic styles: this I illustrate
via a study of the diffusion of Italian music beyond Italy, and another of an
American and a Hungarian composer as they witness, and draw on, African
drumming. The last is scholarship, and the tendency of academics to
group themselves in communities transcending location and language,
which I examine under a number of different headings, including the ways
in which classical scholarship has shaped our sense both of interdepen-
dence and of belonging.
Along the way, I examine certain iconic migrating individuals: the fifth-
century Alexandrian mathematician and philosopher Hypatia; the Italian
Jewish-born Calvinist scholar Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580), whose
career straddled Italy, England and the Low Countries; the Apulia-born,
internationally feted castrato known as Farinelli (1705–1782); the
Hungarian-born composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811–1886);
and the singularly cosmopolitan, and variously talented, writer Violet
14 ROBERT FRASER
Paget (1856–1935) a.k.a. Vernon Lee, each of whom can be seen to have
epitomised the cultural plasticity of an age. I end by taking a closer look at
Appiah.
All of these factors have combined historically to undermine the cen-
tripetal effects of place. And all of them call into question notions of the
purism of cultures. The purpose of this volume is to contribute to this
ongoing debate about collective cultural identity by placing it in a broad
and variegated historical perspective that will, it is hoped, inform discus-
sion across disciplines and fertilise an area of discourse too often confined
to the contemporary scene.
In contemporary Europe these issues are very much alive, even more so
in the light of the ongoing refugee crisis provoked by events in Syria and
Iraq. As I researched this chapter, a boatload of thirty-five refugees came
to grief while attempting to reach the Greek island of Kalolimnos from
Turkey. In Britain, concern about our long history of migration is very
much to the fore, and informs our literature at every point. In Helen
Macdonald’s 2014 memoir H Is for Hawk, the narrator, who is recovering
from the death of her father by training Matilda, a goshawk, travels from
Cambridge to her parental home in Surrey. With her goes Matilda. They
come across a tract of open country haunted by a lone hare and a pack of
deer, inhabitants of what to the untrained eye appears to be a changeless
and indigenous rural idyll, “the terra incognita of our mythical English
past”. In this dream of apparent eternal authenticity they are joined by an
elderly couple out for a walk. “Doesn’t it give you hope?” the husband
enquires with reference to the landscape that surrounds and seemingly
enfolds them. “Hope?” she demurs. “Yes,” he persists, “Isn’t it a relief
that there are still things like that, a real bit of Old England still left,
despite all these immigrants coming in.”
The stability thus serenaded is an illusion, the countryside as Macdonald
invokes it the product of unceasing disturbance and transition. “Ten years
ago, there were turtle-doves on this land. Thirty years ago there were corn
buntings and enormous flocks of lapwings. Seventy years ago there were
red-backed shrikes, wrynecks and skype. Two hundred years ago, ravens
and black grouse. All of them are gone.” She concludes:
Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts,

films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people,
and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale.
The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change
too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what
lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine
what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten,
and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and
we wipe the hills of history.16
The chapters that comprise this book represent a minor exercise in the
restoration of scale, of history cleansed of sentiment. I would like to open
with a scenario set in that ancient theatre of conflict and migration: the
Middle East, as ancient in the tale it has to tell as is the Talmud.
Notes
1. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social
Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), 44–45.
2. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London: Smith, Elder, 1876),
xiii.
3. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Culture (London: John Murray,
1871), vol. i, 1.
4. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(London: Penguin, 2006), 118.
5. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991
(London: Granta, 1991), 394, quoted by Appiah, 112.
6. Quoted in Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin: A Biography (London:
Vintage, 1999), 219, citing Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s
Study of the Human Animal (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 22 and 36.
7. Cited in Khalid Koser, International Migration: A Very Short Introduction,
Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2014), 14.
8. Michael H. Fisher, Migration: A World History (Oxford University Press,
2014), passim.
9. Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan, Exceptional People:
How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future (London
and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 284. For an equivalent
vote of support for migration as a future paradigm for humanity, see Yuval
Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity (London: Harvil
Secker, 2014), 231. See also Theodore Zelkin, The Hidden Pleasures of
Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future
(London: MacLehose Press, Quercus, 2015), especially his intriguing sug-
gestion that, in future, each of us writes his or her own passport.
10. Fisher, xii.
16 ROBERT FRASER
11. For a summary and critique of this view, see Walter Goffart, Barbarian
Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006). On p. 14, Goffart sounds a warning note: “The
peoples of the north and east of the Roman frontier were no more ‘wan-
dering’ than the Celts or Greeks or Thracians. They were agrarian villagers
like the other sedentaries mentioned, and like them, and us, they moved
every now and then.”
12. The Life and Death of King Richard the Second (First Folio, 1626), page
28. Act Two, Scene One, ll 659–669.
13. Listen, for example, to the conductor David Hill in BBC Radio 3’s In
Tune, Friday, 19 August 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/
b07nmqgb
14. The True-Born Englishman (1700), in Satire, Fantasy and Writings on the
Supernatural by Daniel Defoe, vol. 1, The True-Born Englishman and Other
Poems, ed. W.R. Owens (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 94 (ll.
334–347).
15. Khalid, 2016, 9.
16. Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (London: Vintage, 2014), 265.
CHAPTER 2
Is There a Gibbon in the House?

Migration, Post-nationality and the Fall
and Rise of Europe
At the beginning of Linda Grant’s Orange Prize–winning novel When I

Lived in Modern Times, published on the crest of the millennium, Evelyn
Sert, a seventeen-year-old Jewish migrant from London, waits to disem-
bark at Haifa in the then British-mandated territory of Palestine. The
period is 1946, one year after the end of the Second World War, two
before the inception of the independent state of Israel, and the arrival in
Southampton, England of MV Empire Windrush bringing immigrants
from the West Indies. Evelyn is filled with a sense of an unprecedented
event, a tabula rasa on which her own embarkation will write an individ-
ual and generic story. “I was a daughter of the new Zion,” she recalls,
“and I felt the ship shudder as the gangplank crashed on the dock. I put
on my hat and white cotton gloves and, preparing my face, waited to go
ashore at the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.”1
Several kinds of perspective cross in this carefully worded paragraph.
Evelyn’s adventure is both private, and part of a politically propelled
movement. She is one highly individualistic young Jewish woman, and yet
she is also all Jewish women, a member of a great and diasporic race.
Evelyn’s arrival is an act of homecoming that recalls ancient and tragic
departures: to Babylon, to Latvia, to England. Appropriately, beneath her
tentative celebration there surges a recall of the biblical Lamentations of
Jeremiah with its cadences of mourning: “And from the daughter of Zion
all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts that find no
pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.”2 Against

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68480-2_2
18 ROBERT FRASER
this backdrop of displacement and peregrination, in a gesture that is

cosmetic and existential and political, Evelyn now “prepares” her face.
What face, we are moved to ask, confronting what dangers? Evelyn views
herself as an utterly modern, post-war person. Palestine is her opportunity,
where she will re-invent her destiny. Yet at the very moment when all links
with metropolitan and European culture seem deliberately to have been
severed, her testimony makes nodding acknowledgement of that master
text of Western deformation and reformation, Edward Gibbon’s History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Grant’s references to the Bible and Gibbon are not mere stylistic flour-
ishes. If Lamentations epitomises her sense of displacement, Gibbon
relates importantly to her reading of culture. Published between 1776—
the year of the American Declaration of Independence—and 1789—the
year of the American Constitution and the official end of the first, transat-
lantic British Empire, Gibbon’s History foreshadowed amongst other
things the growth, fall from grace and collapse of Britain’s second, Asian
and African, colonial enterprise. It is at the culmination of this process that
Evelyn awaits her uncertain future. Her conjuring with Gibbon’s title is
itself in a long tradition. For 220 years Decline and Fall has been inter-
preted in the light of society’s changing circumstances. It has been seen as
an apologia or elegy for empire, even a concerted attack on the imperial
ideal. It has been understood to applaud heroic virtue or bemoan human
futility, as a reactionary or as a revolutionary text. In the mid-Victorian
period it became a cautionary tale of empire. Even when unread, its
leather-bound six volumes graced every gentleman’s bookshelves. The
case of Archdeacon Julius Hare may be extreme. A Broad Churchman and
patron of the Christian socialists, he treated Decline and Fall as a second
Bible. To avoid rising from the dinner table when entertaining guests, he
trained his house spaniel to run backwards and forwards from the library
to check references to Gibbon’s footnotes. In the late Victorian high noon
of empire, Gibbon was taken for a jingoist. The young cavalry officer
Winston Churchill read him between polo matches in India, imbibing the
ignorant lesson that the Romans submitted to decline only because they
were not English.
In the twenty-first century we are far more likely to agree with Evelyn’s
distillation of this classic text: that empires, continents and nations are
artificial compounds moulded from shifting sands, from peoples, lan-
guages and faiths. Gibbon’s theme, after all, is how Rome—at once a polis
and an empire—was swept away by successive tides of peoples flooding
IS THERE A GIBBON IN THE HOUSE? MIGRATION, POST-NATIONALITY… 19
from Asia and Africa across central and southern Europe. It is no accident
that, as generations of his readers have attested, Gibbon’s narrative
recounts no substantial decline, and that the “fall” in his title is difficult to
locate, in either time or place. Instead he shows how, as a direct result of
successive migrations, displacements and appropriations, there gradually
arose that cluster of interests he lauds in his third book as the “One Great
Republic” of Europe. Before we turn to address late twentieth-century
migrations and their consequences, it is as well therefore to recognise that
in the Age of Enlightenment, even as the foundations of the modern
world were being laid, there existed this sense of migration as the metal
out of which societies are forged. As Gibbon very well knew, and as
seventeen-year-old Evelyn Sert obscurely suspects, empires are forever fall-
ing to make room for something unexpected. What is more, it is those
very factors that sometimes look as if they are about to undermine the
empires, nations or cultures that habitually build them up.
There is an additional twist, of course, since Evelyn in the passage
quoted is also ironically contrasting herself with that Gibbonian and clas-
sical figure: the barbarian at the gates. She is able to question this tradi-
tional trope since as a woman she is relatively powerless, and because her
purpose is personal discovery, not conquest. Her shifted perspective
uncovers what is one essential division between ancient and modern per-
ceptions of migration: the distinction between an invader and a refugee.
Compare two acts of migration at different historical periods but at a
common physical crossing point: the narrow stretch of sea between North
Africa and Spain. The ancients knew this place as the Pillars of Hercules—
the furthest point of the settled world—on the southern shore of which
were supposed to lie the Gardens of the Hesperides with their golden
apples. We know it, more prosaically, as the Straits of Gibraltar. This is
how, in his fifty-first chapter, Gibbon leads up to the invasion of Spain by
the Arabs in AD 709, across the straits to the coast of Andalusia:
In the progress of conquest from the north and south, the Goths and the
Saracens encountered each other on the confines of Europe and Africa. In
the opinion of the latter, the difference in religion is a reasonable ground of
enmity and warfare. As early as the time of Othman their piratical squadrons
had ravaged the coast of Andalusia, nor had they forgotten the relief of
Carthage by the Gothic succours. In that age, as well as in the present, the
kings of Spain were possessed of the fortress of Ceuta; one of the columns
of Hercules, which is divided by a narrow strait from the opposite pillar or
point of Europe.3
20 ROBERT FRASER
The questionable aspects of this passage lie on its surface. All meaning-
ful historical movement is seen as operating from north to south. Religious
intolerance is viewed as the prerogative of the Muslims, and this by a
Christian sceptic who a few chapters later will tell us about the Crusades.
Arab exploration along the southern coast of Spain is interpreted as the
work of “piratical squadrons”. These barbs are all the more piercing for
Gibbon’s belatedly expressed recognition that the Spain created by this
and other conquests was—and is—culturally part Arab.
Consider now a fragment from the modern fiction of migration. In his
short story “Once in the Garden of Plenty”, the contemporary Sudanese
writer Jamal Mahjoub describes how Majid, an unemployed labourer from
North Africa, buys his way to a dream by escaping in an open boat towards
the Spanish coast. The boat overturns, and Majid struggles up a beach in
Andalusia. He falls among a fellow group of migrant workers without
papers living thirty to a shack at the mercy of their Spanish employer. All
of these people, he notices, seem haunted by melancholy. At nightfall, he
approaches one of the older labourers and asks him why this is so. The
man answers that, like the others, he will soon learn how to be sad:
Majid shifted his weight on the cardboard matting. “But they made it. They
made the crossing. They are free. They are working. They are here.”
“Four hundred years ago we ruled all of these lands, from Granada to the
gates of Vienna. Now we come here as fugitives begging for a few crumbs.”
“I know nothing about all that. All I want is a chance to make a decent
living.”
“You have a wife and child, right? You are blessed. But you are also a fool
if you think anything is given away for nothing. You want to feed your family
then you have to take what you want. In this world, no one, not even the
birds are given something for nothing.”4
Majhoub’s title ironically refers us to the myth of the Hesperides, whose

paradisal garden he displaces before pointing us to its non-existence.
Majid’s reference to migrant birds, meanwhile, points us in another direc-
tion: to a categorical uncertainty hovering over the vocabulary of migra-
tion. When is a migrant an immigrant, and when is he or she a visitor? Are
economic migrants authentic immigrants or birds of passage? Ought we to
think of migrant workers as swallows, seasonally returning to a different
nesting? What is the exact status of the refugee? When is infiltration inves-
tigation, and when is it conquest? When may settlers consider themselves
settled? At what point can landowners from a different clime legitimately
be treated as interlopers? To what extent does mass migration redefine the

host culture? What are personal roots? After how long does a homeland
cease to be a homeland?
These questions haunt the world from the Middle East to Ireland, from
Serbia to Zimbabwe, Paris, the Greek islands, Dover and London. And yet
I would claim they are but sub-compartments of deeper and broader
issues: What is a people? What is a nation? What is a culture?
These primary questions are germane to all of our purposes because
during the colonial period there existed an effective, and sometimes crush-
ing, collusion between the available answers. A culture was widely held to
be embedded within a nation whose ethnic foundations were themselves
clear and unambiguous. This was a time-bound triple equation, but it was
very widespread during the nineteenth century, lasting well into the twen-
tieth, and surviving into the twenty-first in the rhetoric of both right- and
left-wing politics. So pervasive have been its suppositions as to form the
ideological bedrock running beneath the varieties of imperialism, and the
nationalist movements that opposed and supplanted them. A mere sixty
years ago, Sir Antony Eden, Conservative Prime Minister during the Suez
crisis in 1956, and Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader whose nationalisa-
tion of the Suez Canal he so much resented, may have been bitterly
opposed to one another, and indeed may have had little in common. Yet
on this particular score they would surely have agreed: in the one case, that
there existed an English people with its own language, traditions and cul-
ture embodied in the English nation; and, in the other, that there was such
an entity as the Egyptian people with its language, traditions and culture,
effectively enshrined within the country known as Egypt. To this extent
the ideological profile of national resistance movements constitutes the
mirror image of what it opposes. Attention in each case is focused on what
one might call the mirage of essentialism, the Platonic idea or essence of
the nation. The hotter the political climate, the sharper the mirage. In
places where national groupings are even now forming out of the ruins of
crumbling empires, the mirage still retains its allure. Yesterday it was
Kosovo, today it is Syria or—to return to the beginnings of this chapter—
the running sore of Israel or Palestine. The theoretical position outlined
above may be obscure and contingent on circumstances, but in the time
you take to read this paragraph, a child somewhere will die defending it.
These are broad historical observations, but it is well worth re-iterating
them because they have a deep effect upon—and are in turn fed by—the
production and reception of literary texts. Imperialistic nations bring into
22 ROBERT FRASER
being an imperialistic literature while interpreting their canon of existing

texts imperialistically. Resistance movements then struggle against imperi-
alism to replace it with new nations. These in turn manufacture texts of
self-justification while viewing their heritage of folklore as a coherent and
supportive tradition.
In 1854, at the height of the Crimean War, the novelist, social activist
and priest Charles Kingsley produced a historical romance called Westward
Ho! It described the resistance of the English of Elizabeth I’s reign to the
Catholic powers of their own day, and culminated in a stirring description
of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.5 So effective was it in stimu-
lating patriotic and militaristic sentiment amongst the Victorian reading
public that it became a surprise bestseller, on whose financial success the
flourishing publishing house of Macmillan was largely founded. In 1968,
shortly after Kenyan independence, a postgraduate student at the
University of Leeds called Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o wrote a novel called A
Grain of Wheat.6 In graphic and moving detail, it narrated the course of
the Mau Mau movement, whose resistance to British imperialism during
the 1950s had helped bring the Kenyan nation into being. Very different
in style and bearing, these books are both masterpieces, though I would
say qualitatively—and from most other points of view—Ngũgı ̃’s has the
edge. They also draw their strength from congruent sources. Westward
Ho! is a book about Englishness, which it portrays as a property worth
defending. A Grain of Wheat concerns what it means to be Kenyan, the
importance of bolstering that allegiance against all comers, whether from
without or within. Despite the considerable merits of each book, neither
has much room for insights that might complicate its conception of the
nation’s essence and will. Migration, and the resulting heterogeneity, plays
little part in these works. A people is a people is a people.
To prove how politically driven culture becomes under such pressures,
take a look at the evolution of English literature. There is a widespread
impression to the effect that the British had a longstanding literature, a
stable and teachable canon, that they then exported during the centuries
of imperialism to condition and influence subject populations. The history
of the subject as investigated by scholars such as Robert Crawford, Chris
Baldick, Terry Eagleton, Gerald Graff and Franklin Court, however, pres-
ents a somewhat more complicated picture, in the light of which it might
be truer to state that the English evolved the idea of English literature in
a colonial context, and then imported it. The first chair of “Rhetoric” as it
was then known was created in St Andrews in 1720, mid-way between the
two Jacobite risings; from Scotland it rapidly spread to colonial America

and then to India. At the time of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, English lit-
erature was not a subject commonly taught in England. It began to be
taken seriously because in 1835 Lord Macaulay, historian and administra-
tor, had prescribed it for Indians. It was examined in no British university
until well on in the century, though from the 1890s it was a compulsory
element in the qualifying examination for the Indian civil service. English
was adopted as a degree course in most colleges in the empire at their
foundation; in England it caught on slowly. The University of Ghana
appointed its first lecturer in English in the late 1940s. Trinity College
Cambridge did not elect a fellow to teach it until 1956, 120 years after one
of the college’s favourite sons—Macaulay—had passed it for Indian con-
sumption. The University of Oxford did not create a chair in the subject
until 1904, Cambridge until 1911.
When the scrutiny of English literature entrenched itself as an academic
discipline in the early twentieth century, it was frequently presented as a
fleshing out of a perceived core of national identity, one worthy of presen-
tation to foreigners. It is no coincidence that the English folklorist move-
ment headed by figures such as Cecil Sharp coincided in time with the age
of jingoism. At much the same period, Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose
compositions draw extensively on folk melodies, could entitle a prose
exposition of his methods National Music. Under such pressures texts,
both literary and musical, came to be read as parables of—even manifestos
for—the nation. The Bible—that anthology of ancient migrations—was
used to keep people in their place. Chaucer, whose most famous poem
recounts a journey, became a poet of fixed point, a terminus post quem.
Shakespeare with his European imagination and affinities became “the
Bard”. Milton with his wide-ranging and international learning was the
English poet par excellence.
The resulting regionality of interpretation extended even to classical
works. Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, are poems of
physical and spiritual journeying. In the period in question they were fre-
quently refashioned as national myths. The Aeneid, of course, is both
these things, but the emphasis on the latter produced results that were
sometimes inappropriate, and on occasion far more serious. The most
notorious instance of such biased reading occurred in the city of
Birmingham in 1968 when Enoch Powell, Tory Shadow Defence
Secretary, classical scholar and sometime brigadier in the British army in
India, cited Virgil during an inflammatory speech on immigration. “I
24 ROBERT FRASER
seem”, he declared, “like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foam-
ing with much blood.” The supposed source of this allusion was a passage
in Aeneid Book Six. Turn to that passage and you will find, as Powell
himself later unapologetically admitted, no Roman, no river and no car-
nage. Instead you will discover a passage in which the Sybil of Cumae, a
Greek prophetess, welcomes Aeneas—a Trojan prince—to Italy. Journey
on, she exhorts him, settle in Latium and there you will found a great city
with the tribute of your foreign blood. The co-opting of Virgil’s meaning
for ideological ends meant less to Powell’s victims than the insult offered
by the speech to their migrant presence. The point I wish to make is that
Powell’s appropriation of a text and the resulting panic were integrally
related. A partisan reading of literature chimed balefully with a partisan
reading of culture. It is an object lesson for those who condemn literary
criticism as a marginal subject when the misprision of a passage in ancient
epic causes havoc on the streets.
It is with such instances in mind that one urges the theoretical and
practical consequences of the literature of migration. Migration is one of
the main facts of the modern, as it was of the ancient, world. Possibly we
migrate more than we ever did: the significant fact for our present pur-
poses is that we have learned to view ancient and modern migrations dif-
ferently, as sources of continuing enhancement rather than as the crude
materials out of which the fortress of nationhood comes to be built. The
accession of this fresh insight into human affairs is the latest and arguably
the most promising phase in a long process of de-colonisation that has
enabled us to see all human culture in a different light. It affects the litera-
ture that we write, more and more of which addresses this phenomenon
more or less directly. It also liberates our constrained perceptions of the
literature of the past. Moreover, it prompts us to interrogate the identities
of nations and continents, whose capacity for endless self-invention it
highlights. In the process it cannot but enrich of our sense of who we are,
and our consequent attitude to others.
The process, however, has been a gradual one. In the year 1948 was
published in London a classic of migration: All About H. Hatterr by a
young Bengali writer, G.V. Desani. It fell stillborn from the press in an
England still recovering from the patriotic efforts of the Second World
War. In the year 1969 it was revived and won for Desani a brief celebrity.
Two writers, both in a sense migrants, played a significant role in this new
climate of reception. The first was a polyglot Irishman, born in Manchester:
Anthony Burgess, who wrote an introduction for the new edition. The
second was a young writer from Bombay living in London: Salman

Rushdie, who read the book with eagerness.
Burgess’s introduction has much to tell us about the atmosphere of
resistance which Desani’s novel had faced on its first publication, and the
insights which had made it newly acceptable to liberal members of his own
generation. Typically he bases his essay on the analysis of a French word:
métèque. This is not a term commonly employed in contemporary English,
but it had recently been used by the British critic F.W. Bateson—Oxford’s
answer to F.R. Leavis—to describe foreign residents in Britain who had
contributed something to the country’s culture: people, I suppose, like
Joseph Conrad. As Burgess himself was aware, the term had relevant ori-
gins in metoikos, the Greek for “migration”, applied by Athenians to aliens
who enjoyed no civil rights but who were permitted to stay within the city
boundaries provided they paid a special tax, the metoikion. Bateson himself
had defined a métèque as a “writer with a non-English linguistic, racial or
political background” who, ignorant of “the finer rules of English idiom
or grammar” was led to “attempt effects of style, sometimes successfully,
that an English writer would feel to be a perverse defiance of the genius of
the language”. If Bateson was describing a British syndrome why, one
might well ask, had he used a French word? The reason is evident from the
Petit Robert dictionary, which defines métèque as “wop” or “wog”. Having
made his point about Bateson’s covert racism, Burgess springs to the
attack:
Most of us would say that the “finer rules” are essentially the property of
non-creative pundits who, at a higher level, compile manuals of usage and,
at the lower, scold children for constructing verbless sentences. As for “the
genius of the language”, it is doubtful if English has a tutelary spirit or an
immanent form. It is plastic, and indeed as ready to yield to the métèque as
to Mr Bateson.7
Burgess’s philippic was, of course, as illuminating of the period in ques-

tion as Bateson’s coy diatribe. Most of us are products of a particular decade:
Bateson’s had been the 1930s that had also produced Powell; Burgess’s was
the 1950s that had given us in France Albert Camus’s L’Etranger and Aimé
Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and, in England, Colin Wilson’s
The Outsider, as well as the Beatniks and the Teddy Boys, originals of the
“Droogs” in A Clockwork Orange. Burgess’s discourse, in other words, is
one of insiders and outsiders, and the advantages and positive pain of being
26 ROBERT FRASER
one of the latter. It was a binary vision, powerful and liberating at the time.
It is not this, however, that inspired Rushdie, who perceived in Desani’s
work something quite different: the possibility of a culture and a mode of
writing lying neither “inside” nor “outside”, but in a creative space in
between. The possibility, too, of a use of English that in Rushdie’s own
work would take it way beyond Burgess’s plasticity to a molten grace elud-
ing any notion of belonging.
Roll forward twenty years, to 1992. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The
English Patient is about the damage done by nations, and what to do
about it. Set in a war-devastated Italy, it centres on a disfigured patient
who is not English at all, and whose sense of meaning is gleaned from a
systematic re-reading of books that are important to him. One of these is
Kipling’s Kim; the patient persuades Hana, his Canadian nurse, to read it
to him. He tells her to take the book slowly and not to jump to conclu-
sions. There is beauty beyond its imperialistic politics, if only she will
listen.
Far more important to the patient, however, is an ancient copy of
Herodotus’s Histories, which he uses as a kind of commonplace book,
pasting into it snippets and extracts from elsewhere that have caught his
fancy. Unusually, Ondaatje specifies the edition and translation used, a
matter of evident concern to the patient himself, who has compared the
available versions and talks to Hana about the advantages of this one. His
care seems excessive until one recognises an important fact which, like so
much in this evasive novel, is never spelled out. At the period when the
book is set, students of Herodotus who took this classical author at all
seriously would have turned not to any of the translations on offer, but to
its most celebrated source for exegesis: the A Lexicon to Herodotus pub-
lished in 1938 by Enoch Powell. In 1944, by common consent, Powell—
who had resigned his Chair in Classics in order to fight in the war—was
the leading international authority on the Histories. Had the patient
waited another ten years he could have read Powell’s own translation,
rendered, as its Preface carefully explains, into the antique prose style of
the King James Bible in order to give it an air of resonant, archaic
Englishness. Throughout, it is couched in that peculiar, rolling rhetoric
that fifteen years later would feature in Powell’s racist speech in
Birmingham.
And what of the patient’s own attachment to Herodotus? This is how
he explains it to Hana:
I see him…as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to
oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything
without suspicion, piercing together a mirage. “This history of mine,”
Herodotus says, “has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to
the main argument.” What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep
of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how peo-
ple fall in love.8
For the patient, as for Ondaatje, Herodotus is a nomad. He travels

between civilisations; he barters insights, he charts failings, he records vio-
lence. He is a man of no allegiance. Herodotus with his boundless curios-
ity into customs and beliefs offers a view of the world that confounds the
late war, opening up a new—because an unaccountably old—way of
seeing.
The English Patient is a story about the re-invention of Europe written
at two removes: by a Sri Lankan writer who had taken his abode in Canada.
Its lesson is that the old Europe of boundaries, rivalries and divisions has
to die for a new one to be born, a continent fit for the crowd of inspired
nomads who people the novel. Its enemy is patriotism, an emotion that
nonetheless it struggles to understand. Dissolving old loyalties, it points us
towards a serendipity of revelation dependent on travelling, a state of
affairs well known to hitchhikers.
As Ondaatje reminds us, people migrate, and so do texts, including his
own. In the process they break down barriers between cultures, historical
periods and intellectual disciplines. Migrant texts interrogate loyalties and
fixed perceptions. Effective subversive agents, they refuse to show their
passports. With postcolonial perspicacity, they read one another.
Furthermore, they alter and enrich our sense of place.
London, for example, has never looked the same since Samuel Selvon’s
affectionate but trenchant portrait, The Lonely Londoners of 1956. To see
the city through the eyes of its protagonist Moses is to glimpse possibilities
undreamed of in the metropolitan fiction of the time. Selvon transforms
the city, partly by his use of Trinidadian creole, and partly by his evocation
of an underclass whose very presence interrogates a confident urban cul-
ture, reflecting back to it an image which it was at first reluctant to recog-
nise, but which is now seen as an inalienable aspect of its changing identity.
Selvon’s book is, of course, a study of the difficult cultural relations in the
Notting Hill of the 1950s, but it is also a profound—and at times hilari-
ously funny—love song to London, a hymn to its hybrid essence. The
28 ROBERT FRASER
London of the 1980s found in Ben Okri’s stories is a place in which the
contingent, the neglected and the apparently squalid have become sources
of aesthetic delight, in which the vagrant becomes a seer, a watcher at the
city gates.9 Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in the same year as Linda
Grant’s novel, possesses something of this same ambivalent quality. It also
depicts a town in which a new version of childhood makes its appearance,
where memories of shuffling leaves on November afternoons become a
possession shared by those whose birth right harks back to Jamaica or
Bangladesh. Take all of these Londons, add to them Dickens’s London,
Defoe’s London and Blake’s London, and you have a setting where the
locale of Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography extends to embrace
humankind, without for a moment ceasing to be itself.
Or take that supposed heartland of English ethnic identity: the deep
countryside. Perhaps the most moving portrait of rural England written in
the closing years of the twentieth century was V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma
of Arrival of 1987, set near Salisbury.10 Its migrant protagonist subjects
Wiltshire to a scrutiny the more incisive for stemming from one who at
first admits his bafflement. As the story progresses he learns to interpret
the country through its minutest signs: tiny changes in the landscape, the
slow change of the seasons, inflections of voice and attitude, inhibitions,
secrets. He reads Wiltshire like a palimpsest, layer upon layer. He perceives
the feudal order behind the modern face, the deference or contempt
beneath everyday conversations. This is a picture that mirrors something
of the protagonist’s own reticence and discretion. Like The Lonely
Londoners, The Enigma of Arrival is a searching account of a difficult place
that manages also to be an idyll. It is also a panorama of rural life at odds
with the acrimonious nostalgia of Roger Scruton: a view larger, more
responsive and—for all its alertness to parallels with Trinidad—truer to the
actual, rather than the supposed, qualities of Englishness.
The ultimate effect of such texts is to collapse the damaging binaries
that sustain ideologies of confrontation: immigrant and emigrant, home
and abroad, self and other, town and country, ancient and modern, main-
stream and fringe. To embrace migrancy, moreover, is to signal an end of
that long procession of stereotypes by means of which cultures protect
their self-image against the single or collective challenge of the other:
nomad, barbarian, conqueror, métèque, refugee, foreigner, asylum seeker.
As all of us know, and the instances already cited suggest, all acts of migra-
tion are far more complicated than any such list of arrivants would sug-
gest. To embrace migrancy as a positive force, furthermore, is to propose
a way out of the apparently endless reactive cycle described by Gibbon

through which empires break down to give rise to new nationalisms, which
then re-group to form different amalgamations that in turn dissolve in
violence. So that the Roman Empire fragments to give rise to the Byzantine
and Holy Roman Empires, which themselves dissolve in rancour. So that
the Hapsburg Empire collapses, involving the whole of Europe in war,
only to form new balkanised states which then cohere into the Warsaw
Pact, this in turn breaking down into the chaos and extremity observable
in parts of Eastern Europe to this day. So that the United Kingdom recasts
itself in the light of re-born national groupings, and everywhere the
Romany is regarded as unwanted. If only we could learn to see the migrant
not as the enemy, but as the creator and generator of culture.
Lastly because of the authenticity of its historical perspective, the litera-
ture and critique of migrancy help us to read all texts and all cultures in a
different way. As a result the present looks different, but so does the past
and its literature. Virgil is no longer the champion of heroic nationalism,
but a lyrical essence informing the work of, say, Christopher Okigbo, the
great African poet, whose proclaimed master he was, and of Ben Okri,
who learned Latin in order to read the Eclogues and whose novel Songs of
Enchantment bears an epigraph from the Georgics. In Ondaatje’s work,
Herodotus is released from the bookshelves and becomes a window onto
migrant or convergent cultures. Gibbon shakes off his neo-classical dust,
providing a clue to the future: to cultural death and renewal. Shakespeare’s
The Tempest becomes a universal allegory of power, and a recurrent ingre-
dient in the literature of the West Indies, rather than the possession of an
insular and repressive people.
Viewed through such a lens, perhaps all culture is migrant culture. The
fact that we can start to see it like that owes much to the authors or musi-
cians we will be looking at in the following ten chapters. With their assis-
tance, we all become migrant people by virtue of being readers or listeners.
For truly regarded, all reading or listening—like all writing—is a kind of
travelling.
Notes
1. Linda Grant, When I Lived in Modern Times (London: Granta, 2000), 4.
2. Lamentations 1:6.
3. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
[1776–1788] (London: 1820), vol. 9, 468.
30 ROBERT FRASER
4. “Once in a Garden of Plenty”, in Wasafiri 31 (Spring 2000), 7–8.

5. Charles Kingsley, Westwood Ho! Or the Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas
Leigh (London: Macmillan, 1854).
6. Ngũgı ̃ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1968).
7. G.V. Desani, All About H. Hatterr with an introduction by Anthony
Burgess (London: Penguin, 1969), 7.
8. Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (London: Bloomsbury, 1992), 126.
9. See especially Ben Okri, Incidents at the Shrine (London: Heinemann,
1986), Stars of the Late Curfew (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988) and
Songs of Enchantment (London: Jonathon Cape, 1993).
10. V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Viking, 1987).
CHAPTER 3
Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads

and Myth
The Hungarian-born composer and pianist Franz Liszt was fascinated by

Gypsies. In his eyes—part admiring, part contemptuous—they appeared
to belong nowhere. More than that, they seemed not to possess, or even
to need, any sense of belonging. “The Laplander, or the native of Samoa,”
he wrote in his book Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie of 1859,
“equally with the hunters of the Alps or the Pyrenees, the Cossacks of the
Steppes equally with the sailor of Britany, languish and decay if an attempt
is made to transport them to scenes other than those in which they have
been brought up.”
But with the Gipsies, all this is not so. All notions of country, property and
social institutions are specially repudiated by them. They form no local
habit, deny the attraction of childhood reminiscence, desire no conquest
and, having no past, frankly challenge the future. The entire earth is their
country, the ground is their own, while every climate pleases them in which
they can wander freely and move without restraint. The tribe, formed and
collected by chance though it may be, is their family; a tent, though a mere
covering extended from tree to tree, their sufficient habitation, and any
object of present momentary enjoyment their undisputed property.1
Naturally, for Liszt, the prime “object of momentary enjoyment” was

music. In 1853 he had imitated what he took to be the Gypsy or Bohemian
style in nineteen “Hungarian rhapsodies” for solo piano, following what

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2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,

3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth 31

4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia

5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British

6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,

7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,

8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles

9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson

10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161

11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy

12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening

Fig. 3.1 “Queen Europa” from Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia

© The Author(s) 2018 1

“I have before now”, he wearily remarked in the first chapter of Culture

The Meanings of Culture

The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, so far as it

The Crux of Cosmopolitanism

Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will be taking a closer look at his back-

music of George Frideric Handel belong: to Germany, in whose principal-

“The Strangers’ Case”

Constantine’s expansion of the Roman Empire and the proselytising

such age, in which an equivalent scenario is being played out on a global

precariously been resolved in the Tudor Settlement, he had written a piv-

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

“Whither Would You Go?”

that intellectual formations are inevitably and primarily an expression of

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts,

Is There a Gibbon in the House?

At the beginning of Linda Grant’s Orange Prize–winning novel When I

© The Author(s) 2018 17

this backdrop of displacement and peregrination, in a gesture that is

Majhoub’s title ironically refers us to the myth of the Hesperides, whose

be treated as interlopers? To what extent does mass migration redefine the

being an imperialistic literature while interpreting their canon of existing

two Jacobite risings; from Scotland it rapidly spread to colonial America

second was a young writer from Bombay living in London: Salman

Burgess’s philippic was, of course, as illuminating of the period in ques-

For the patient, as for Ondaatje, Herodotus is a nomad. He travels

2 Is There a Gibbon in the House? Migration,

3 Roma and Roaming: Borders, Nomads and Myth 31

4 Of Sirens, Science and Oyster Shells: Hypatia

5 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (1) British

6 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (2) Milton,

7 Cultural Migration as Protestant Nostalgia: (3) Purcell,

8 Migrant Consciences in the Age of Empire: Charles

9 Beyond the National Stereotype: Benedict Anderson

10 Migrating Stories: How Textbooks Fired a Canon 161

11 Towards a New World Order: Literacy, Democracy

12 World Music: Listening to Steve Reich Listening