This virtual research seminar is co-hosted by the North American Network in Aging Studies (NANAS) and the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Aging.
Title: Orientalizing Older Age
Summary: “I grieve to say my hair grows very badly,” Benjamin Disraeli complained in a letter to Sara Austen in 1830, “and I think more grey, which … occasions me more anguish than even the prospect of death.” Afflicted with a nervous illness in his early twenties, Disraeli’s premature aging seemed to mark his arrival at the final stage of life at the age of 26. As Disraeli grieved his hair, he also saved money for a tour of the Mediterranean and Near East. Between May 1830 and October 1831, he loosely followed Byron’s travels through Spain, Malta, Greece, Constantinople, Palestine, and Egypt. Imbued with both insecurity about premature senescence and hope of bodily rejuvenation, Disraeli’s travels shaped his relation to the East for the rest of his life. Disraeli’s Orientalization of older age was representative of a larger Victorian contradiction regarding the East, which situated the region at a more primitive rung of social, economic, and racial development while simultaneously imagining it as too far advanced, past its prime, and lacking the vitality of European nations. “In the Orient one suddenly confronted unimaginable antiquity,” Edward Said writes, “the very possibility of development, transformation, human movement in the deepest sense of the word — is denied the Orient and the Oriental.” Orientalizing discourse shared an affinity with ageist stereotypes that situated older bodies as a social burden incapable of change. Moreover, stereotypes about Oriental stasis and decline tended to gain a senile inflection that alloyed the celebration of Western benevolence (such as Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”) with the enervating prospect of Occidental decrepitude and decay.
Speaker Biography: Jacob Jewusiak is a Senior Lecturer in Victorian literature and age studies at Newcastle University. His first book, ”Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf”, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. His second book, ”Aging Earth: Senescent Environmentalism for Dystopian Futures”, was published for the Cambridge Elements series in the Environmental Humanities in 2023. He has guest edited special issues on literary age studies for the journals ”19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century” and ”Poetics Today”. He is currently working on a third book project, titled “The Aging of Empire: Colonizing Care from Young England to Young India”.
Please register here for the seminar.
