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The epilogue ponders how the media reorientations that vexed Central and South Asian travelers to pre-1857 Britain sedimented over time, exposing an impotency latent in the discursive power formation now known as orientalism. The classic case study is James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, which I interpret as satires against the English dandies and damsels who adopted Persian dress and demeanor to display social exclusivity rather than against Iranians like Abul Hassan Khan: the Persian ambassador whom Morier hosted in England in 1809–1810 and 1819. The ambassador’s queering in the English news circuit prompted Morier, a social climber anxious to claim masculine gentility, to project Londoners’ transculturation in Qajar fashions onto an Iran wallowing in Regency effeminacy – the Anglo-Persian dandy whose uncertain sexual orientation recoils on the British empire’s homosocial gentlemen.
The parade of sexualized personae that features in this chapter's title carries a history. Libertines, rakes, and dandies are figures that occur in a sequence that begins in the sixteenth century and effectively comes to an end by the twentieth century, although it is a sequence marked by overlaps and ambiguities. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship, the chapter traces passages from the libertine through the rake and dandy, concentrating on each in turn. It focuses on metropolitan England, where, arguably, the libertine, the rake, and the dandy came most vividly to life. Libertinage has a long and complex history that reaches back into antiquity. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the category was mainly applied to a kind of writing that already held a firm place in manuscript culture. Rake is more concretely bound to particular sites and institutions than the libertine, and especially to a particular moment in the court's recent past.
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