"A thief, a liar, a devil": Jewishness and Criminality

Given our conversations about the ambiguity of the figure of the Jew in British culture, comment on how Dickens represents Fagin---both in physical terms and ethical terms. What kinds of criminality is he associated with? What kinds of threats does he represent? When thinking about this take into account the illustrations (these are the original illustrations for the 19th century text).

P.S. Sorry for leaving out a few pages at the end.

Conversion, Freedom, and British Tolerance

There's a lot to talk about in the Michael Ragussis excerpt on the often paradoxical logic that drives the 'culture of conversion' in late 18th and 19th century Britain. I wanted to try to link this text both to the other texts we've read on Jewishness (Gilman and Cheyette) and to larger questions about race and identity that we've been discussing.

1) How did you interpret the contradictory/various ways in which conversion was represented in British culture? How do we make sense of the way in which the Jew is at once represented as unconvertible (a 'permanent' type) and a kind of 'natural' Christian (whereby becoming a Christian is the perfection of the Jew)? Is this just a split between a racial and a religious reading of the Jew or something more complicated?

2) What did you make of Ragussis's discussion of gender---of the use of the Jewish woman as ripe for conversion but also a figure that must exit the novel (preferably by dying)?

3) Finally, what did you make of the link between British tolerance of difference and conversion? This gets at BIG questions we've been discussing about identity politics. What does it mean to tie citizenship (Britishness) to assimilation? Does thinking of this in terms of assimilation clarify the idea that in order to be a 'free' British person, a citizen of a tolerant country, one must convert?

Comment on any or all of these questions.

Badges? We don't need no stinking badges

Now that we've all finished The Spanish Gypsy (all of us right!), I'd like to continue our discussion about race and identity in Eliot's poem.

1) Given the ease with which Silva is brought in as a Gypsy brother (merely by taking an oath and wearing a badge), what do you make of the earlier claims of pure "blood" of the gypsy? Of course, related to this is what you make of the complete failure of this "conversion" and the terms of that failure. But, I'm curious how you read the take on race and identity in the poem as a whole. Does the poem embrace the 'essential' or 'permanent' or 'natural' character of racial categories? Does it critique this idea?

2) What do you make of the conflict between desire and race/family? Are there any individuals in this poem or is everyone somehow a site of the collective?

3) What do you think of the final stanza of the poem with the two figures looking at each other without being able to distinguish the individual from the darkness.

These are just a few of the topics I'd like to discuss

"The Many in the One"--Race, Nation, and Inidividuality in Eliot's "Spanish Gypsy"

For our first session on George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy, I'd like to look at a number of questions that all circle around the relationship between the individual and the racial type, the subject and his or her 'nation,' the individual present and collective the past. My title for the post is from p.38, where Juan is talking about Zarca (they Gypsy Chief): "As painters see the many in the one./ We have a Gypsy in Bedmar whose frame/ Nature compacted with such fine selection,/ 'T would yield a dozen types." In Fedalma's struggle and conflict, the poem plays out the human drama of being at once a person and a Type, a woman (with desires) and a 'national/racial' figure. This also represents a conflict between the biological/familial ("blood") and the affective---the realm of love and desire. How is this conflict represented? What are the terms of the debate?

A couple other things to think about:
1) What is the relationship between religion and race or "blood"?
3) (Related): What is the relationship between race and *choice*? That is, there is a lot of discussion of choosing to affiliate or not, as well as a lot of discussion of conversion (the Inquisition).
2) What is the relationship between the body and race--Is race made legible here?

Please feel free to address any of these.

'Funny, you don't look like a Gypsy'---Otherness and Choice in Verdi

Many of the issues that we've been circling around, especially the relationship between race and agency (or choice). So, I'd like you to think about a couple of questions/paradoxes in this drama:

1) What does it mean for Manrico to be at once a "gypsy" and Not a gypsy at all? How do you stage this?

2) What do you make of the fact that, even after he (kind of) finds out that he is not Azucena's son, both Manrico and his mother continue to use the tropes of *biological* maternal ties (i.e. "blood," "offspring")? Is this just a result of her effort to backtrack from her inadvertent admission? Or is it something more complicated?

3) What is the role of race in desire? Leonora only finds out he is a "Gypsy" (even at this point he doesn't know that he is) after they are already in love. Where does this play fit in as a drama of miscegenation?

There's a lot more to talk about, but this should get us started,
Dan

Encountering the Other and the place of Narrative

Our two excerpts---one from Austen's Emma (1815) and one from George Eliot's Mill on the Floss (1860)---both narrate an encounter with Gypsies who are on the margins of "safe" and "respectable" social space. I'd like for you to comment on a couple of related issues:

1) How do both of these texts define and navigate the boundaries (both spatial and metaphorical) between same and other, familiar and strange, white Englishmen and Gypsy?

2) What is the role of imagination and (especially) literature or fairy tales in how Austen's narrator (and Emma herself) describes the Gypsies, or in how Eliot's narrator (and Maggie) approaches the gypsies. What is the tone of these descriptions? Ironic? At whose expense?

3) What role does gender play in these encounters?

I'm looking forward to talking about it,
Dan

Race, Masquerade and the Law---Hoyland on the Gypsies

In reading Hoyland's Survey of the Gypsies, there are a number of claims made and laws discussed that may have surprised you.

1) What do you make of the various iterations of the same laws Hoyland notes regarding punishments not only for being a Gypsy but also for pretending to be a Gypsy?

2) What do you make of the evidence Hoyland rejects and that which he accepts on the issue of Origins? That is, what how do you feel about his claim that it's somehow 'clear' that the Gypsies are of Indian origin? What kind of proof does he offer?

You can comment on either or both of these as well as any other issues.

Race, Projection and Identity--British and Gypsies

The images of the Gypsy in Deborah Nord's essay emerges as a kind of ghostly figure---outside of history but acting *in* history; alien other yet a familiar part of the British landscape. What did you make of the paradoxes of "gypsiness" in Nord's reading? How did you respond to Nord's discussion of race as at once biological and cultural at the end of the essay? Does the term "race" lose or gain meaning when racial figures are so difficult to define?

Feel free to comment on this or any other aspect of the essay.
--Dan