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Disorientalism
Minority and Visuality in Imperial London Nicholas Mirzoeff

1. “How far is it from this to this?” Washington Post, 22 January 1882. Wilde’s aesthetic pose on his tour of
America was ridiculed as a lower stage of evolution by the Washington Post in this drawing that turned him
into a clothed version of the so-called Wild Man of Borneo, a figure of the “missing link” between humans
and apes.

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What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.
—Oscar Wilde ([1889] 1935:530)
This London ghetto of ours [...] is a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface an inner world of
dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient where they were woven.
—Israel Zangwill (1892)
Within the Sotadic zone [the Orient], the Vice is popular and endemic, held at worst to be a mere pecadillo.
—Richard F. Burton (1885:207)
The Orient is a stage.
—Edward Said (1978:63)
What good actor today is not—a Jew? The Jew as a born “man of letters,” as the true master of the European
press, also exercises his power by virtue of his histrionic gifts; for the “man of letters” is essentially an actor: He
plays the “expert,” the “specialist.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1974:361)
The vocation of the theatre is, in my eyes, the basest misery of this abject world, and passive sodomy is, I believe,
slightly less infamous.
—Léon Bloy (1887; in Barish 1981:321)

Reading Oscar Wilde is always surprising. His transhistorical analogy between the Jews and the
Irish created an affiliation between the two categories of minority to catch the attention of sympa-
thetic readers. It was made possible according to the logic of what Wilde’s mentor Walter Pater
called “‘imaginative reason,’ that complex faculty for which every thought and feeling is twin-born
with its sensible analogue or symbol” (1980:109). But it also set in motion another series of analo-
gies, linking theatricality, deviance, and same-sex desire: in a word, Orientalism. Each link in this
chain of associations referred, directly or indirectly, to the ideologies of high imperialism. The
double to Orientalism’s taxonomy of pathology was a form of dream-work, to use Sigmund Freud’s
contemporary term, that forged connections by displacement and analogy within the imperial me-
tropolis. In this dream city, a modality of what the Situationists would later call psychogeography,
Jews, the colonized, and the subjects and objects of same-sex desire were affiliated—if you knew
how to look for such connections.
Such dream-work should be understood in Walter Benjamin’s sense of producing a collective fu-
ture (1999a), rather than Freud’s regression to an individual past. Nonetheless, it deployed (inverse)
strategies of displacement, fetishism, and symbolism in the manner now known as Freudian. As in-
verse dream-work, its mode of production was to apply pressure to the verbal until it became an
Orientalized image, conveying such effects as dazzle, blur, or decoration. Rather than pursue the
political emancipation debated and often denied by imperial elites, these minorities sought what
Deleuze and Guattari called, in their classic essay on minor literature, not “liberty but escape”
(1986:10). Here I intertwine this conception of minority with its historical experience and what
Benjamin called the “weak messianism” that is implied within it. Wilde’s epigram was, then, part of
a displaced, disjunctured, and disavowed Orientalism that created what Homi Bhabha has called a
“process of affiliation [...] based on the solidarity of the partial collectivity” (2004:348) by means of

Nicholas Mirzoeff is Professor of Art and Art Professions at New York University, where he is also Affiliate
Faculty in Performance Studies. His work has centered on the theorization of visual culture as a field of study in
books including Silent Poetry: Deafness, Sign and Visual Culture in Modern France (Princeton, 1995) and
An Introduction to Visual Culture (Routledge, 1999). His most recent book is Watching Babylon: The War in
Iraq and Global Visual Culture (Routledge, 2005). This essay is part of a long-term project under the working
title Visual Rights: Minority and Modernity. In 2005 he was Canterbury Visiting Professor at the University
of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

TDR: The Drama Review 50:2 (T190) Summer 2006. © 2006

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53
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its imaginative analogies and symbols. In this essay, I therefore call this affiliation “disorientalism,”
a disidentification with Orientalism that inverted its categories of serial pathology into minoritarian
collectivity. In keeping with the sense of Orientalism as lived performance, disoriental affiliations
were enacted in a series of improvisations that interlinked art, craft, theatre, and everyday life—a
collective work produced by the performer and the audience, whose positions were constantly in
motion.

Minority and Visuality

Disorientalism was produced in the interface between two central 19th-century practices, namely
minority and visuality. Minority was a legal status in which a minor could not be a legal subject.
When Kant famously defined Enlightening as “Man’s quitting the nonage occasioned by himself,”
he was referring to a voluntary step out of psychic minority ([1784] 1979:250). He thus added an
ethical and moral dimension to minority. For those confined to legal minority, such as the enslaved,
women, children, Jews, the insane, and others, emancipation (the legal state resulting from leaving
nonage) became a double hurdle. The psychic dimension of self-imposed minority might be over-
come while the legal barrier remained, or vice versa. At the end of a century of imperfect emancipa-
tion that began with the French Revolution, the minors of the imperial state experimented with the
refusal of emancipation on the terms offered by the majority. This inversion of emancipation as mi-
nority was an active self-positioning for those on the boundaries of identity, suggested in terms like
the minor poet, the minor arts, or bohemia. As a singular mode of being, identity was the problem,
not the solution, for the minor in imperial cities. By this I mean that the desire to create discrete tax-
onomic categories of people that would become in effect their species, as Foucault has put it, was
that engendered by disciplinary power rather than by resistance. Against that taxonomy, minority
attempted to become unclassifiable, as if anticipating Judith Butler’s claim that “perhaps only by
risking the incoherence of identity is connection possible” (1997:149). For these disparate and unre-
solvable minor characters, incoherence became a mode of cultural production. As a mode of dis-
identification, it was not precisely a resistance. Rather, as José Muñoz puts it, “disidentification is a
strategy that works on and against dominant ideology [...,] a strategy that tries to transform a cul-
tural logic from within” (1999:11). Incoherence was a strategy of excess, in which symbol, paradox,
and pun pushed the indexical language of taxonomy to the visualized point of failure, which was pre-
cisely the place of connection.
This strategy was typical of those known to themselves and others as “minor poets,” like John
Gray, the model for Wilde’s Dorian Gray, or Amy Levy, a Jewish writer promoted by Wilde (Beck-
mann 2000). Together these “minors” produced an (inverted) Hero—that is to say, Oscar Wilde—
whose dazzling presence distracted attention from them. This artistic strategy was accompanied by
an excess of personal presentation in dress, expenditures, conspicuous idleness, and manners, as well
as an intense attention to the material support of text such as font, book bindings, and illustrations.
This performative practice of minoritarian subjectivity will in turn call into question the assumption
that minority can only be expressed in modernist forms of minimalist language (Deleuze and Guat-
tari 1986:16–17). Here minority produced a mode of visuality, if visuality is taken to be the interface
between the visual, the verbal, and power conveyed in the insistent theatrical metaphors of Oriental-
ism. Disorientalism produced the dream, the Hero, and visuality itself as interstitial performative
media, located between the verbal and the visual. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, this minority was
not akin to the minimalism of Kafka but its other, a visual display of “symbolism, of oneirism, of eso-
teric sense, of a hidden signifier” (1986:19). While Deleuze and Guattari felt that this approach was
bound to lead to “symbolic reterritorialization,” such as Zionism, it might also be seen as tending
toward Benjamin’s sense that “the past can only be seized as an image which flashes up at the instant
it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin 1940). To recognize the image is not, how-
Nicholas Mirzoeff

ever, to name it. It remains incoherent, deterritorialized, and collective.

Visuality was a term of the period, coined by the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. In his 1840
lectures On the Hero, Carlyle evoked Dante’s heroism in creating The Divine Comedy: “every com-
partment of it is worked out, with intense earnestness, into truth, into clear visuality” that became a

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“painting” ([1841] 1993:79). Carlyle claimed that “Dante’s painting was not graphic only, brief, true,
and of a vividness as of fire in dark night” (80). In visuality all is clear and evident, impeded by
“French Revolutions, [and] Jewish Revelations” (Fielding [1837] 1989:ix). Visuality was perceived by
the Hero, a mystical antimodern Great Man theory of history. Based on his Romantic version of
Norse myth, Carlyle’s hero was:

the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens,
which has enlightened the darkness of the world: and this not as a kindled lamp only, but
rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of
native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness; in whose radiance all souls feel that
it is well with them. ([1841]1993:2–3)

Minor visuality inverted this formula so that it produced a visible incoherence, dazzle, or decora-
tion—in short that which is beyond words. Inversion was, of course, the polite term for homosexu-
ality in Victorian Britain, which disorientalism used to connote its queerness. By queer I mean
something less specific than the “sodomy” persistently attributed to Orientals of all types, but rather
a mode of sexualized identity that refused to conform to the new taxonomies of race and sex created
by imperial culture. Inverted visuality nonetheless generated its own Hero, embodied in Oscar
Wilde, who was as much produced by minority as he produced it. While colonial masculinity sought
to produce what Lord Cromer, governor of Egypt, described as “the undemonstrative, shy English-
man, with his social exclusiveness and insular habits” (in Said 1978:211), minor masculinity was
strikingly different. As the Jewish writer Ada Leverson later described the issue: “Where, in those
days, was the strong silent man? Nowhere! Something weaker and more loquacious was required;
and all these exuberant modes were certainly inaugurated by the poet-wit-dramatist Oscar Wilde”
(in Wyndham 1964:106). The Hero produces the Minor and vice versa in a dazzling spectacle that
eluded detection by its very mobility and aesthetic effect. Note the way that Leverson displaced her-
self as a minor woman from this alternance, a problem that minor visuality struggled to resolve.

African/Irish/Jewish
As noted above, Wilde began this oscillating chain of affiliation by drawing a metaphorical parallel
between the Irish and the Jews. The analogy was an unusual one, for Wilde placed the Irish in the
position of comparison to Jewish exile most often held by Africans in diaspora. It was also a signifi-
cant shift from his earlier efforts to claim a privileged place for the Irish among white Europeans.
On his 1882 tour to America, Wilde at first claimed to be a member of “a race once the most aristo-
cratic in Europe,” the Irish (in Lewis and Smith 1935:225). Yet his evident effeminacy undermined
his claim to aristocratic whiteness. Even supporters like Anna, Comtesse de Brémont noted “his
feminine soul, a suffering prisoner in the wrong brain-house,” a textbook definition of the “invert,”
while the Boston minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson dismissed his performances as “unmanly
manhood” (in Burns 1996:94–95). Consequently the Washington Post invited its readers of 22 January
1882 to consider “How Far Is It from This to This?” captioning two drawings: one of the legendary
Wild Man of Borneo, the other of Wilde holding a sunflower. This pseudo-Darwinian fear of so-
called reverse evolution was collapsed into a composite visual symbol the next week by Harper’s
Weekly as a monkey admiring a sunflower (Blanchard 1998:33). Wilde’s aestheticism was perceived
as an inverted effeminacy that was figured as racial degeneration. In Rochester, students hired a la-
borer to parody Wilde as a blackface minstrel, as if to suggest that his whiteness was forfeited by
his effeminacy, a parallel suggested by the Irish version of minstrelsy that emerged during the Civil
War. This racialized ambivalence persisted throughout his career, as in Pellegrini’s 1884 caricature
of him as The Ape and an 1893 Punch cartoon depicting the “Christy Minstrels of No Importance”
at the time of A Woman of No Importance (O’Toole 1998:80). Wilde at first reacted by aligning him-
self with American racism. He visited Jefferson Davis, the former leader of the Confederate States,
Disorientalism

and compared the struggles of the Irish for independence within the British Empire to that of the
Confederacy, seeing them both as a desire for “autonomy against empire” (in Lewis and Smith
1935:366). On the 1882 tour, race, class, gender, and sexuality circulated in the imperial framework

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to the disadvantage of the minor. This pose of white aristocracy would resurface from time to time
in the Wilde circle as anti-Semitism, even though many of Wilde’s associates were Jewish.
So it is striking that by 1889, Wilde had not only implicitly adopted the point of comparison
between the Irish and Africans but also extended it to Jews. This point was available to both the
scholarly reader and the minoritarian subject. A learned person might be aware of such analogies
between the Africans and the Jews as that drawn by the formerly enslaved 18th-century writer
Olaudah Equiano:

I cannot forbear suggesting what has long struck me very forcibly, namely, the strong analogy
which even by this sketch, imperfect as it is, appears to prevail in the manners and customs of
my countrymen and those of the Jews before they reached the Land of Promise. ([1789]
1999:50)

Equiano gave this similarity of minority culture precedence over minor physical differences, such as
skin color, arguing that the Spanish and Portuguese had grown darker as a result of their colonial
practice in warm climates (and, a later reader might add, miscegenation). In popular culture, this
equivalence had generated the imperial myth of the “black Jew,” who certainly existed in plantation
colonies such as Jamaica or the Southern states of the United States but was not likely to be seen in
Europe. But in Edouard Birck’s 1862 painting The Cloth Merchant (Berlin: The Jewish Museum), the
merchant in question was a “black Jew.” In the racialized codes of the period, the merchant is repre-
sented with dark skin and tightly curled black hair but with a recognizably “Jewish” nose (Gilman
1991). So it was unlikely that the African connotation of Wilde’s epigram would have been missed.
It came in an essay intended to show that it was in America that the Irish had learned “what in-
domitable forces nationality possesses.” British colonists in America had compared both the indige-
nous peoples and enslaved Africans to the Irish in a circuit of primitivism, but in the struggle to
abolish slavery a certain parallel was drawn between the sufferings of the enslaved and the colonized
Irish, as Hazel Carby has shown (2001). On his American tour, Wilde had employed an African
American valet named W.M. Traquair whom he made perform as a minstrel for his visitors, even
though he also unsuccessfully challenged segregation on the Pullman cars in Georgia (Lewis and
Smith 1935:373). By 1889, he had in effect reversed his analogy between Ireland and America from
the Confederacy to the Union. By situating Ireland in transatlantic context, Wilde cast it as a mod-
ern problem, avoiding the Celtic nostalgia of his mother and W.B. Yeats for Irish legend. Further, by
developing the idea of Ireland within the context of American secular republicanism, he also con-
tributed to its solution (Wilde 1908:183).
In making this hinted connection between Africans and the Irish, Wilde had explicitly con-
nected them to the Jews. In a period of rising anti-Semitism, this was not an obvious choice. Michael
Ragussis has shown that the Victorians used the term “perversion” to refer to a person converted to
a religion the “wrong” way, whether Jewish or Catholic (1995:286) in addition to its sexualized
meanings. From the point of view of evangelical Protestantism, Jews, Irish Catholics, and gay men
were all “perverts.” This connection was later medicalized by Sigmund Freud in his analysis of the
Wolf Man, when he insisted that his patient’s skepticism concerning Christianity caused his anal
fixation (Edelman 1994:178). For Wilde to draw a parallel between himself and Jews was to make a
coded reference to his queer sexuality. The Orient was the (imaginary) place where Jews and queers
were imbricated in the Western imagination. As Joseph Boone has shown, the “Orient” was a place
where same-sex desire was presumed to be, in the words of explorer Richard F. Burton, “popular and
endemic, held to be at worst a mere pecadillo” (in Boone 2001:47). At the same time, this reputation
led Western sexual dissidents to travel to places like North Africa, figured inexactly as the “Orient,”
in pursuit of such sexual encounters. Among them were Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, who ran
into André Gide while in Morocco. Burton further theorized that Jews who had contact with the
Nicholas Mirzoeff

Orient were contaminated as sodomites, while their Northern Ashkenazi cousins were not:
The Ashkenazim [...] have brought from Northern climates a manliness of bearing, a stout-
ness of spirit, and a physical hardiness strongly contrasting with the cowardly and effeminate,

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the despised and despicable Sephardim. [...] The Ashkenazim of the Holy Land are in a word
“men” and the Sephardim are not. (1898:55)

While being of the “North” protected the Askenazim from being considered queer, Britain’s Jewish
community had been mostly Sephardi since the readmission of the Jews by Oliver Cromwell. Burton
darkly suggested that the English nobility had been “contaminated” with Jewish—hence Sephardi
and queer—blood (1898:21). Writing while Wilde was in prison, Burton’s fear of the Jewish-queer
threat to English nobility was embodied in the Douglas family. The eldest son had committed sui-
cide, widely rumored (not least by his father the Marquis of Queensbury) to have been the conse-
quence of an affair with the Jewish politician Lord Rosebery, while Alfred’s involvement in Wilde’s
fall was notorious.
This nexus of aristocracy and “perverse” Orientalism was mediated into disorientalism via Ben-
jamin Disraeli, a Jewish convert and Tory Prime Minister. Wilde read Disraeli’s complete works on
his tour of America and, for his friend and illustrator Charles Ricketts, he could best be explained
by comparison with Disraeli: “Disraeli, you will realize, continued the Brummel tradition which
belonged to the eighteenth century” (Ricketts 1932:27). George “Beau” Brummel (1778–1840),
the Georgian dandy, was famous for his intense attention to the minute detail of fashion. Ricketts
thereby imagined a certain genealogy of dandy Englishness for the not quite emancipated (that is to
say, minor) Jewish and queer subject from the 18th century to the then present, in which the Anglo-
Irish queer and the converted Jew were the proper dandies. When Wilde reviewed Disraeli’s pub-
lished letters in 1885, he might have been previewing his own performance that was yet to come:
“Lord Beaconsfield played a brilliant comedy to a ‘pit full of kings’ and was immensely pleased at his
own performance” (in Weintraub 1992:22). By using the term “performance,” Wilde was displacing
a theatrical metaphor to refer to Disraeli’s self-presentation as a politician and a dandy. This perfor-
mance was one that required the skills of improvisation, not dramaturgy (McDiarmid 2001). It was
also a comedy, referring to the music hall performances so vaunted by Bohemian dandies and antici-
pating Wilde’s own turn to theatrical comedy. The theatre referred to here is by implication the Ori-
ent, which Said provocatively described as a stage. As a (converted) Sephardi Jew, Disraeli was an
“Oriental,” even as his avidly pro-imperial politics drew Britain further into the practice of Oriental-
ism. In a disoriented reprise performance of Disraeli playing Brummel, Wilde in turn maintained
his unknowability by the very intensity of his visibility (Fryer 2000). This theatricality was intensely
disorienting, just as the Orient itself sustained inherently disparate ideas in a “separate and unchal-
lenged coherence” (Said 1978:205). As Lord Henry Wotton says to Dorian Gray: “Suddenly we find
that we are no longer the actors but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch our-
selves and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us” (Wilde [1890] 2000a:90). The disorienta-
tion of the instability of theatrical spectatorship set the question of identity to one side as the visual
spectacle became overwhelmingly compelling. As David Savran has argued, theatrical spectatorship
is far more ambivalent and complicated than the distanced spectatorship of cinema or art, creating
“a destabilized position in which identification is almost indistinguishable from desire” (2002:163).
This incoherent (dis)identification was the grounds on which theatre was seen as perverse, both in
the sense of Jewish and homosexual, in the 19th century and beyond. Indeed, Christian Metz iden-
tified the actor and spectator as “an authentically perverse couple” as recently as 1982 (in Savran
2002:164).
When Wilde performed his reprise of Disraeli to an ironically named “pit full of kings,” his spec-
tators attained elite status only within the vertiginous spectacle that was thereby mutually created.
For far from being the elite of British society, those who made Wilde a celebrity were the minors of
imperial culture, who were often located on the borders of other, more specific modes of identity.
Wilde’s confidante, the writer Ada Leverson, was descended on her mother’s side from Sephardi
Jews, Spanish marranos, associates of Spinoza, and the first landowner in Jamaica to emancipate his
Disorientalism

enslaved (Burkhart 1973:18). Charles Ricketts was part of a family of Anglo-Jamaican plantation
owners, who had returned to Britain after emancipation because their estates were no longer prof-
itable (Delaney 1990:6). Ricketts and his partner Charles Shannon were introduced by the minor

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poet John Gray to Lucien Pissarro,1 son of the Dutch Caribbean Jew and Impressionist painter
Camille Pissarro (Mirzoeff 2000). Lucien had come to London with a letter of introduction to Gray
from the French anarchist Felix Fénéon. Gray himself was a self-educated working-class man, who
grew up in the East End of London and was a metal turner’s apprentice as a teenager (McCormack
1991:10–20). Both Pissarros knew the painter William Rothenstein, who had two German-Jewish
parents. However, after their move to Britain, his father converted to Christianity, while his mother
remained an observant Jew. Wilde visited him in his Paris studio in 1891 and Rothenstein returned
the favor by seeking out Wilde in Berneval after his release from prison. He intriguingly wrote of
Wilde that “I had met no one who made me so aware of the possibilities latent in myself” (1931:87).
His first public exhibition in Paris was facilitated by Camille Pissarro, where he showed a pastel of
Oscar Wilde (1931:100–01). Rothenstein in turn introduced Ricketts and Shannon to “Michael
Field,” the pseudonym under which Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper published their writings.
The two (Gentile) women were a couple as well as aunt and niece. Ricketts later designed several of
“Field’s” books in close collaboration with the authors. When Field wrote a play about Sabatai Zevai
(the 17th-century Levantine Jewish mystic and self-proclaimed Messiah, who was forcibly con-
verted to Islam in Istanbul by the Ottomans), Ricketts made them an extravagant ring representing
the one received by Zevai on his conversion, now known as the Sabatai Ring (Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge, 1904). In the last number of the Decadent journal, The Dial (1897), published while
Wilde was in prison, Field wrote on “The Fate of the Crossways” in his rather ornate style: “Ye Fates
of the Wheel of Necessity, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropa, ye are as nothing as compared with the
Fate of the Crossways, Hecate, who wanders with the dead” (1897:11). Field expressed in classicized
form the power and uncanniness of the relentless spectral “coincidences” of minority lived experi-
ence in the dream-city of the 1890s.

The Disoriental Dream-city

Disorientalism was staged in the “Oriental” zones of the imperial city in an interaction with the
London music hall and variety theatre, and imperial culture. It was enacted as a modality by which
minor subjects interacted with, and were constituted by, the imperial metropolis itself. The work of
this identity formation was a dream-work, taking place on a stage described by the queer Jewish
novelist Amy Levy in 1888 as “a dream city that melted and faded in the sunset” (Levy [1888]
2001:146). In Israel Zangwill’s 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto, the London Jewish ghetto in the
East End was represented as Oriental: “a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface
an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the Orient” (Zangwill 1892:n.p.).
As an Orientalist dreamworld, the minor dream-city did not denote the collective social spaces of
London that Benjamin identified as the “dream houses of the collective: arcades, winter gardens,
panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations” (1999a:405). Rather it consisted of
its minor others, whose boundaries were far less precise than those of class, which split London in
two (Walkowitz 1992). In the work of Wilde and his circle, official London was represented as the
“grey” or “monstrous” city, stifling creativity and art. The minor city was a network composed of
certain streets, more or less notorious, such as Piccadilly, which was the haunt of rent boys and
Holywell Street, the location of pornographers of all kinds (Nead 2000:189–203). It was not by
chance that Wilde asked his readers to “stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely
Japanese effect there you will not see it anywhere” (Wilde [1891] 1997:316; see also Nunokawa
2003:51ff ). What was presented as an exercise in formal aesthetics could also be understood as a
flânerie of Oriental “deviance.” Such disorientalized streets linked the ( Jewish) ghetto, Limehouse
opium dens, and sailors’ bars of the East End with the music hall, the museum (as a place of roman-
tic liaison), houses of assignation (political or sexual), prisons, and so on. Theatres, such as the Jew-
ish theatre visited by Dorian Gray with fatal results, were the hinge between the minor city and its
Nicholas Mirzoeff

dominant other, the imperial metropolis. In a lecture on “The Modern Actor,” given and published
in 1892, John Gray held that the music hall was the locus of what was properly theatrical, namely for

1. John Gray to Lucien Pissarro: “Nous allons ensemble voir Ricketts et Shannon” (Gray 1890).

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the “outcast and unclassed person,” who is the actor, to produce “ENTERTAINMENT,” and
thereby “create something out of nothing.” Opposing the “horror and disgust” that the music hall
inspired in the respectable, Gray held that “the Variety stage of today is the embryo of a great the-
atre, a theatre that will evolve in ways at which we can only guess” ([1892] 1992:30–37). That disgust
stemmed from a sense that the music hall was a place of promiscuity both in the sense of sexual
assignation and in the mixing of classes, Wilde’s greatest scandal. Gray’s modernist affirmation of
the music hall, performed at the Actor’s Club alongside Wilde, created a physical location for the
comic performance of disorientalism, the reprise of Disraeli’s comedy.
As befits its association with Disraeli, the counterpoint to disoriental performance was imperial
culture. Musing on the way that the Place du Maroc in Belleville became a “monument to colonial
imperialism,” Benjamin noted that “what is decisive here is not the association but the interpenetra-
tion of images” (1999a:518). It is, then, the interpenetration of images within the framework of Ori-
entalism that sustains the dream-city of minority. Its necessary but dangerous limitation was a
certain ambivalence in its relationship to the Oriental and Orientalism. The danger of disidentifying
with Orientalism was to identify with the Orientalist, the Western expert on the Orient, who, in
some senses, was the only person qualified to fully experience the Orient. John Gray, for example,
once wrote to his sister that, although he was white in appearance, he was black on the inside
(1992:xxvi). In Gray’s 1894 short story, “The Advantages of Civilization,” Dr. Zaccheus Bishop, a
Fijian chief turned Christian convert, turns the tables on a patronizing group of missionaries by
demonstrating his superior knowledge of classical sculpture in the British Museum. Gray compli-
cated the matter by centering the debate on the Cyrene Apollo, a colossal nude statue of the god
rendered as a slender, androgynous youth. The figure’s pronounced hips, feminine face, and long
hair render its gender close to undecidable, were it not for the visibly male genitalia, revealed by an
unfolding drapery. For all his learning, Dr. Bishop ends up revealing the latent perversion of the
Oriental. While Gray’s private letter acknowledged this latency within himself, it was not part of his
public work until his bizarre 1932 story Park, which envisaged the Scottish explorer Mungo Park re-
turning to a future in which Britain is peopled by Latin-speaking Africans. Park dreams that he is
also African and muses: “That is a strange thing, he thought; to dream a fact I did not know awake. I
am black” (1992:192). These public and private accounts map out the play of Wilde’s association of
Celts with Africans in the frame of Orientalism that continues today.
Amy Levy found a similar Oriental interior within British Jews but for her it was a point of
disidentification:

Conservative in politics; conservative in religion; the Jew is no less conservative as regards his
social life; and while he is in most cases outwardly conforming to the usages of Western civili-
sation, he is in fact more Oriental at heart than a casual observer might infer.
For Levy, it followed that “Jewish men and women of any width of culture are driven to find their
friends of the other sex in the Gentile” ([1886] 1993:525–26). Her point of identification was with
the urban minor poet. In her first published essay, she praised the recently deceased James Thom-
son, a Scottish poet, as an exemplary minor poet: “a poor Scotchman, of humble origin, of straight-
ened means, of every social disadvantage” ([1883] 1993:501–09). Thomson’s poem The City of
Dreadful Night seemed to her to express “a certain phase of modern feeling.” Just as Baudelaire had
claimed the minor artist Constantin Guys as the representative painter of modern life in Paris, so
Levy used Thomson as the vehicle to represent what she called the “grey pain” of the “vast unruined
streets” of imperial London. This poem was to her “a picture distinct, real in itself, real in the force
of its symbolic meaning,” visualized (1993:501–09) and symbolic terms that affiliate her with Wilde,
who published her work in Woman’s World and reviewed her novels with admiration. Her final short
story before her suicide contained the inventory of a London intellectual:
Disorientalism

My room is full of blue-books, pamphlets and philosophical treatises. Sesame and Lilies and
Clifford’s Essays are hob-nobbing on the table; the Bitter Cry of Outcast London and a report of
the Democratic Federation stand together on the shelf. This is an age of independence and

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side-saddles; but how often is woman doomed to ride pillion on a man’s hobby-horse! ([1890]
1993:494).

From John Ruskin to William Morris, Levy was aware of the public sphere of London’s imagined
community, only to realize that as a ( Jewish, queer) woman she was inevitably excluded from that
community. Unable to take a place in the Jewish community or the Gentile majority, she concluded,
in her story and her own life: “Better be unfit and perish, than survive at such a cost” (1993:494).
For all its sense of possible escape, minority was a place of doubled difficulty for women in imperial
culture.

Minor Dream-work
The play of latent and manifest Orientalism, to use Said’s terms (1978:201–25), in the cultural work
of disorientalism was enacted as dream-work, using many of the same figures that Freud was arriv-
ing at in Vienna during the same period, but in inverted form. In his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
argued that the dream was regressive because “an idea is turned back into the sensory image from
which it was originally derived” (1900:693). Freud devised a model for the psychic apparatus
whereby ideas and perceptions were processed while the subject was conscious—a process that was
then reversed in dreams. He argued that this reversal was a regression to the archaic state of human-
ity, meaning that the dream had to be controlled by the conscious mind for modern civilization to
function. By contrast, minor dream-work expressed itself as a fluid system whereby words were
pushed beyond coherence into images, or images were accumulated to the extent that they failed to
signify. Far from being seen as regressive, this mobility was taken to be the epitome of modernity. In
Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dream, the 19th century produced a dialectical tension between the
ever more reflective individual consciousness and the collective consciousness in deeper and deeper
sleep (Buck-Morss 2000:67–69). This collective sleep produced dreams: “Fashion, like architecture,
inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective”
(Benjamin 1999a:393). Minority produced, as we have seen, a dream-city within the collective but
rather than being regressive it was “an experiment in the technique of awakening” (388). Fashion
and the lived environment were among the grounds on which this experiment was conducted. For
Benjamin, film was the medium that could best exploit the tensions that had accumulated in the 19th
century. For Wilde, writing within the period, the advantage of text over image was that it could best
convey a sense of movement, whether physical or psychic. Such movement was, and has sometimes
remained, incoherent other than as collective dream-work.
For example, disorientalism put into play an inverse fetishism that refused the meaning of what
was visible. For if classic fetishism is precisely to “imagine that they see something where there is
nothing,” namely the phallic woman, Wilde’s performance invoked an inverse fetishistic belief that
what so obviously seemed to be there was not. This inverse fetishism wanted to continue to believe
in the phallic (straight) man, even as it delighted in the queer spectacle. Inverse fetishism made
Wilde in a certain sense invisible. More precisely, his performance refused what the voguers in Jen-
nie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning (1991) called a “read,” that is to say, a critique or iden-
tification. For example, Wilde took to wearing a green carnation in his buttonhole, a deliberately
artificial accessory that was widely adopted by his circle to general mystification elsewhere. Max
Nordau noted in his hostile text Degeneration (1892) that Wilde’s “strange costume excites disap-
proval instead of approbation” but could not quite say why (in Sinfield 1994:96).2 When Salomé of-
fered to give the Syrian guard “a little green flower” if he would bring her Iokanaan, one part of the
audience saw it as a cue to see Salomé as, in effect, a cross-dressed man. While the green carnation
was simply a code, it became hard even to see Oscar Wilde through the code. While his queerness
was obvious on the 1882 tour of America, in his moment of celebrity between 1890 and 1895 he
Nicholas Mirzoeff

eluded taxonomy. Take something as simple as his hands. Irene Vanbrugh, who played Gwendolen

2. The carnation was “outed” by Robert Hichens in his parodic novel The Green Carnation (1894), which helped the
uninitiated decipher Wilde’s pose. It was later cited during the trials of 1895.

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in The Importance of Being Earnest noted, “his eloquent, finely shaped hands” but Vincent O’Sullivan
called them “ugly,” while Lillie Langtry found their “pointed fingers and perfectly shaped filbert
nails indicative of his artistic disposition” (in Schmidgall 1994:3–4). William Rothenstein seemed
almost repulsed as he recalled: “His hands were fat and useless looking, and the more conspicuous
from a large scarab ring that he wore” (1931:86). The French writer Henri de Regnier remembered
them the same way but drew a different conclusion: “The hands seemed to be beautiful: they were
rather fleshy and plump, and one of them was ornamented with a ring in which a beetle of green
stone was set.” Jean Joseph-Renaud, author of a perceptive memoir on Wilde, similarly noted his
“graceful hands” (Sherard 1906:289, 343) but the poet Richard Le Gallienne remembered Wilde’s
“soft and plushy” hands (1926:183). In a Punch satire, Wilde was described as having “long, willowy
hands,” whereas his intimate friend Ada Leverson admired his “small pointed hands” (in Wyndham
1964:114). The observation of such minute detail was the mainstay of the 19th-century detective
method that has subsequently been adopted by historians of the period. The green ring, the mani-
cured nails, and the very flesh of his body became undecidable, rather than objective evidence flick-
ering in and out of view.
At the same time, it was finally the body that was desired that could not be named. Disorientalism
sought to distract attention from that same-sex body for its subjects as well as outsiders by means of
a displacement of view. In De Profundis, Wilde’s prison memoir, he observed that: “Modern life is
complex and relative [...] To render the first we require atmosphere with its subtlety of nuances, of
suggestion, of strange perspectives: as for the second we require background” ([1895] 2000b:723).
The passage is a close paraphrase of Walter Pater’s musings on painting in his essay on Winckel-
mann, with the key addition of “strange perspective.” The strange perspective, then, was a displaced
viewpoint that depicts those complex and relative phenomena that exceed the means of standard
one-point perspective, such as the representation of nonlinear time and space. Like an anamorpho-
sis, strange perspective rendered the affiliations of disorientalism hard to see unless you could iden-
tify the displaced viewpoint. By the same token, the Wilde network clearly felt that time was
displaced in the early 1890s, creating an interstitial moment of escape, which quickly disappeared
into an archaeological past. In her essay “1894” published in February 1895, Ada Leverson nostalgi-
cally wrote: “I myself have often felt that it would have been nice to live in 1894. [...] I used to know
a boy whose mother was actually present at the ‘first night’ of Charley’s Aunt, and became enamoured
of Mr. Penley. By such links is one age joined to another!” (in Speedie 1993:69). Leverson’s sense of
living in a networked present constituted by rupture was echoed by Max Beerbohm in a letter to her:
“I feel so old. Even my writings in the Yellow Book are rather early ’95” (1895). Written either side
of Wilde’s arrest, these remarks express the sense that “the time is out of joint,” the invisible yet pal-
pable mark of the spectre (Derrida 1994).
Strange perspective ran in and out of everyday life, art, crafts, sexual and cultural politics, creat-
ing a series of links and traces that could be pursued by those curious enough to do so, to deploy a
Wildean term. These displacements are the links that constituted the network of the minor city.
Take the color yellow. When Wilde visited Ricketts and Shannon in their Chelsea house, he re-
marked on the yellow painted walls. At this time, Wilde’s own study was also painted yellow (Gere
2000:103), an echo both of Walter Pater’s Oxford study and Whistler’s famous yellow room. Wilde
had on the wall a “drawing by Simeon Solomon of Eros,” the Greek god of love that was a coded
sign of homosexuality (Ricketts 1932:33–34). Solomon was a Jewish member of the Pre-Raphaelite
brotherhood who was convicted of indecency for propositioning an undercover policeman. When
Ricketts designed a stage set for Salomé, he colored the Jews yellow (Ricketts 1932:53). Aubrey
Beardsley called his aesthetic journal The Yellow Book, which, although it was dubbed “the Oscar
Wilde of periodicals” by The Critic, Wilde dismissed as “not being yellow at all” ([16 April 1894]
2000b:588). Basil Hallward sent Dorian Gray a fateful yellow book and rumor incorrectly asserted
that Wilde himself was carrying a yellow book at the time of his arrest. Yellow cut the sense of inte-
Disorientalism

rior design and style of the Aesthetic Movement away from the mainstream Victorian taste for what
Amy Levy satirically called “plush ottomans, stamped velvet tables, and other Philistine splendours
of the [...] drawing room” ([1888] 2001:4) even as it linked Jewish and queer cultures.

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2. & 3. Cover of The Yellow Book (1895) and

Ada Leverson by Walter Sickert also from The
Yellow Book. Leverson, one of the better-known
Jewish women writers of the period, stood by Wilde
during and after his trial. Sickert’s drawing gives
her an androgynous look, as if she were playing
Pierrot.

These links were quite literally marginal. When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press
in 1890, he inspired a private press movement across Europe (Thompson 1977:581). Prominent
among these small workshops producing tiny editions of exquisitely crafted volumes were the Dial
Press, created by Ricketts and Shannon, and the Eragny Press, run by Lucien and Esther Pissarro.
All the presses shared a disdain for modern commercial printing. Ricketts saw type as being a physi-
cal body, a work of art in Winckelmann’s terms, that had experienced “degeneration” until it became
a mere “tracing of a tracing.” For the print movement, type was the portrait of Dorian Gray, making
modern corruption visible in representation. It was now undergoing a “modern revival” in the work
of the private presses (Ricketts 1899:34, 25) that sought to restore what Ricketts and Lucien Pissarro
called “the anatomy of the letter” (1897:7). Ricketts insisted that like must go with like in the book,
so that woodcut illustrations should accompany woodcut type. This coded allusion to the prefer-
ence for the same was typical of the highly allusive quality of these small editions, read only by insid-
ers. The private presses all insisted on leaving prominent margins on the page, especially at the
bottom because “the hand clasps the book from below” (Ricketts 1899:24). In this way, the book be-
came a prosthesis to the body and vice versa. The Vale and Eragny presses left even larger margins
than Morris, extending some three or four inches up the page of their small volumes, creating a
square block of text. They did so as a public defiance of “that necessity for economizing on space
that the great good market demands” (Ricketts and Pissarro 1897:12), preferring their own cult of
Nicholas Mirzoeff

extravagance. The margin was understood as a symbolic place as well as one of utility. Ada Leverson
famously commented:

There was more margin; margin in every sense was in demand, and I remember, looking at
the poems of John Gray (then considered the incomparable poet of the age), when I saw the

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tiniest rivulet of text meandering

through the very largest meadow of
margin, I suggested to Oscar Wilde
that he should go a step further than
these minor poets; that he should pub-
lish a book all margin; full of beautiful
unwritten thoughts, and have this
blank volume bound in some Nile-
green skin powdered with gilt
nenuphars and smoothed with hard
ivory, decorated with gold by Ricketts
(if not Shannon) and printed on
Japanese paper; each volume must be
a collector’s piece, a numbered one of
a limited “first” (and last) edition:
“very rare.” (in Wyndham 1964:105)

Wilde was extremely taken with this idea

and replied: “It shall be dedicated to you,
and the unwritten text illustrated by
Aubrey Beardsley. There must be five
hundred copies for particular friends, six
for the general public and one for Amer-
ica” (in Lambourne 1996:216). Beyond
the humor, the point was that in reading
“minor poets,” it was the collective inter-
pretation of minority that mattered, not
the text. When Thomas Sturge Moore
defended the virtues of the wide margin
against their critics, his language was ex- 4. Charles Ricketts’s cover design for Oscar Wilde’s Poems
treme: “These are barren souls and wish (1892). Rickett’s design subordinates the book’s title to his
to substitute a law for love, preferring elaborate pattern. The book as a whole was designed to be
what they call correctness for beauty” held in the hand as a prosthetic object.
(1903:8). No one can have read this
passage and assumed it referred just to printing techniques. It was a densely intersected but invisible
place of linking.
Such links can also be traced across Wilde’s published work. The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the fa-
mous transformation of a portrait of the young socialite Dorian Gray into “the most magical of mir-
rors” ([1890] 2000a:95) that ages while its subject does not, has been extensively reread to produce a
variety of subject positions (Nunokawa 2003; Joyce 2002; Otten 2000). Without rejecting those
readings, it also produced a disoriental decorative incoherence. Following Wilde’s suggestion that
the book was an “essay on decorative art” (Wilde 2000b: 436) would complicate any assertion that
the portrait was representation in the mimetic sense, opening the door to the strange perspectives of
ornament, decoration, and adornment. Wilde’s circle would have been familiar with his definition of
decorative art: “the whole history of these arts is the record of the struggle between Orientalism,
with its frank rejection of imitation [...] and our own imitative spirit” ([1891] 1997:787). The “pa-
gan” element in art that Pater, himself following Winckelmann, had seen as “the Dorian worship of
Apollo” (Pater [1873] 1980:204) was reworked in Dorian Gray as decoration. From this “strange per-
spective,” the formerly least important aspects of the novel take on a new importance. It calls atten-
tion to what Jeff Nunokawa has called “the practically unreadable chapter where he [Dorian] appears
Disorientalism

to do nothing but drift for years from booth to booth in a global arcade, whose spectacular immen-
sity lights up even the darkest places and times” (2003:147). As Nunokawa’s reference to Benjamin

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suggests, it was in the exegesis of the decorative

that Wilde traced the dream-house of collective
minority. Wilde noted that these passages “be-
long not to culture but to curiosity” ([30 June
1890] 2000b:436), a knowing allusion to the
place of the curious as a minor degree of the per-
verse in Victorian terms. These apparently mar-
ginal domains of the novel created a series of
links running across the main narrative for the
curious initiate, which mainstream readers were
intended to overlook. For example, Wilde left a
trace of the premodern consensus that, far from
refusing to make art, “Judaism was synonymous
with too much opulent visuality” (Bland
2000:7), in a reference to the Spanish-Jewish
medieval writer Petrus Alphonsus and his story
of a snake with eyes of jacinth. The long de-
scriptive pages provided a rhizomatic network of
Orientalism ranging from Dorian’s collections
of Eastern perfumes to Amerindian musical in-
struments, fine jewels, and embroideries.
The culmination of Wilde’s Orientalism
5. Charles Ricketts, page design for Oscar Wilde’s was his French verse play Salomé. Set in Herod’s
The Sphinx (London: Dial Press, 1894). Ricketts Oriental court, where the Jewish belief in an
designed and cut his own font for Wilde’s poem that invisible god is derided as “ridiculous,” Salomé
demonstrates Leverson’s sense that “there was more desires the captive body of Iokanaan, better
margin; margin in every sense was in demand” as a known as John the Baptist. Symbolic and imagi-
typographic metaphor. native reason nonetheless dominates the play as
the viewpoint of the powerful is literally under-
cut. So enthralled by desire are both Herod and Salomé that they forget Herod’s dictate: “Neither at
things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us
masks.” In trying to seduce Iokanaan, Salomé “unfolds a multitude of breathtaking sights from all
over the world” (Nunokawa 2003:124) or, more exactly, describes these sights. She catalogues the
disoriental arcade of decorative art by pushing the verbal into the visual to tempt a desire that can
only emerge by displacement. Iokanaan rejects each advance by declaring her to be a daughter of
Babylon and Sodom. Here Babylon referred to the modern metropolis, the scene of disorientalism,
while Sodom was the name for same-sex desire. By declaring Salomé to be a daughter of Sodom,
Iokanaan highlights her sexual ambiguity. The desire evoked by the decorative is fulfilled by Herod’s
desire to see Salomé perform the dance of the seven veils, a dance that is not described because it has
no name. As her reward, Salomé demands the head of the Baptist. When Herod attempts to prevent
her from exacting her desire, it is his turn to iterate a catalogue of exotica without success. His final
offer to her is to take from the Jewish Temple the “mantle of the high priest. I will give thee the veil
of the Sanctuary.” This veil was the screen behind which the high priest would enter the Holy of
Holies, the ultimate forbidden sight. The logic of disorientalism made this apparently worthless ob-
ject the last barrier to execution. At the level of manifest Orientalism, it evokes both Salomé’s Jew-
ishness, via her mother Herodias, and that of the actress Sarah Bernhardt who was intended to play
the part. As latent Orientalism it evokes the very hinge of imaginative reason, the frontier between
the material and invisible worlds. The veil of the sanctuary sustained the suspension of disbelief by
Nicholas Mirzoeff

preventing worshippers from seeing that there was no physical presence or object in the Holy of
Holies. That same suspension was required to enable the performance of disorientalism in the mod-
ern Babylon to prevent it from being known as Sodom. When Salomé rejects the veil, Herod loses
interest in her and offhandedly has her killed.

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The Assistants
It is now commonplace to assert that the possibilities for such minor discourse ended with Wilde’s
trial, which inaugurated a new regime of disciplinary power. While it is clearly true that the modern
state engaged with the criminalization of “homosexuality” after 1895, it is not so apparent that
minority was thereby constrained to abandon its affiliations and analogies in favor of a sober mod-
ernism. By way of conclusion, the evidence for the persistence of minor visuality can be found in the
very work of Franz Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari’s exemplar of minor literature. In October 1911,
Kafka visited the Café Savoy in Prague where he saw a Yiddish theatre troupe. His diary records how
he was struck by “Mrs. K ‘male impersonator’” and her husband, who performed as a kind of chorus.
Kafka found it hard to define their role and his attempts to do so seem to refer as much to the Jewish
community in general as to the play: “people who, precisely as a result of their being set apart, are
very close to the centre of the community’s life [...;] people who are Jews in an especially pure form
because they live only in the religion, but live in it without effort, understanding, or distress.” Yet
their theatrical mode is comedy:

They seem to make a fool of everyone, laugh immediately after the murder of a noble Jew, sell
themselves to an apostate, dance with their hands on their earlocks in delight when the un-
masked murderer poisons himself and calls upon God, and yet all this because they are as light
as a feather [...,] are sensitive, cry easily with dry faces. (1975:64–65)

Max Brod, Kafka’s editor and close friend, recognized in this sketch the first appearance of the
mysterious assistants who come to the aid of K. in The Castle (Kakfa 1975:494, n.18). The assistants
arrive unexpectedly in place of K.’s old assistants, who had his surveyor’s equipment, and witness
K.’s attempts to carry out his commission. In Walter Benjamin’s sublime reading, the assistants are
in a state of becoming:
In Indian mythology there are the gandharvas, mist-bound creatures, beings in an unfinished
state. Kafka’s assistants are of that kind: neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other
groups of figures, but rather, messengers busy moving between them [...] It is for them and
their kind, the unfinished and the hapless, that there is hope. (Benjamin [1936] 1999b:798)

If the assistants represent that sense of minority “open to a future that is radically to come” (Derrida
1996:70), it is somehow comforting to know that they were inspired by a Yiddish drag king playing
comedy to a pit full of kings. Is it coincidence that Kafka’s favorite Yiddish play was Der Wilde
Mensch?
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