Queering Fashion in Hajji Baba: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity

Abstract

James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) shaped orientalist stereotypes until the early twentieth century. Scholars have examined the novel’s racism separately from gender and class anxieties in the often-neglected sequel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Reading these two novels jointly reveals a British imperial masculinity in crisis during a precarious period in Anglo-Persian relations: the embassy of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi Ilchi from Qajar Iran to late Georgian Britain in 1809–10 and 1819–20. This essay argues that Abul Hassan’s celebrity status in the tabloid news media inspired Londoners to adopt Persian fashions queerly, their gender deviancy informing Morier’s fiction about a foppish cross-dressed upstart from Ispahan. I argue that Abul Hassan’s mediatized body drove Morier to satirize fashionable Englishmen as a foreign race, allowing him to claim British gentility. Less concerned with Persians than with their effeminate admirers in England, his satire suggests that the “Orient” was constituted by intersectional gender, class, and racial identities in flux.