Chapter 11 - Metropolitan Thresholds

Summary

11. Daniel O’Quinn’s ‘Metropolitan Thresholds: Abu Talib, Juliette Récamier, and Touristic Worldmaking’ presents the ‘accidental tourist’ Abu Talib as one who – even as he was the object of others’ attention – sought to resist being absorbed into a celebratory idea of the imperial metropolis as a world city that subsumed multitudes. O’Quinn considers the critical dialogue between Abu Talib’s Masir-i-Talibi (later translated as Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan) and works such as Richard Phillips’s Modern London (1804), and it also discusses an episode where, at a masquerade hosted by Mrs Orby Hunter, the ‘Persian Prince’ encountered among others a non-elite Briton passing as a ‘Hindoo Rajah’ and the French socialite Juliette Récamier. For O’Quinn, Abu Talib manipulated the fantasies which others imposed upon him, and rather than offer a reflection of British imperial power instead provided a longue durée perspective on its transience: O’Quinn’s conclusion regarding Abu Talib’s ‘latitude to both bear witness to the metropole and displace its claim to centrality’ provides a fitting end to this volume.