Jerusalem is Scattered Abroad

This chapter expands on the complicated relationship between the actual city of Jerusalem and its literary representation. It begins with travel narratives about the real Jerusalem and concludes with Blake’s poem about an imagined Jerusalem, arguing that Jerusalem during the Romantic period is in fact always both real and imagined, simultaneously a material city and the site of an imminent heaven on earth. The second half of the chapter shows that these travel narratives’ vision of a Jerusalem that insists upon being simultaneously literal and metaphorical is key to reading William Blake’s visionary poem Jerusalem. Blake was keenly aware of the contemporary political conditions that framed Britain’s relation to the East, and in particular to the Ottoman Empire (then in control of Jerusalem). Blake uses prophetic revolutionary language to imagine political revolution; Blake’s poem describes a Jerusalem built from the ruins of empire both symbolically and materially. This chapter argues that in imagining such a Jerusalem, the poem offers an alternative to the interconnectedness of empire, calling instead for a planetary network of revolution and resistance.

Conclusion: Land Pirates and Republican Ragamuffins

In conclusion I offer four brief readings, gestures towards places one might venture. The subjects are neither prophets nor pirates, but they are prophetic and piratic, practising a collective resistance both on land and at sea. This resistance is produced by and productive of mobility; it is a resistance that comes out of necessity and – by necessity – imagines a new system of power....

A Pirate or Anything

This chapter explores pirates, and pirate colonies, as imagined by Lord Byron and William Hone. The fictional pirates of these texts, like the pirates of A General History, are deeply implicated in the power structures that historical pirates tended to operate outside of: Byron’s and Hone’s pirates are tied to the nation, to the military, to religion, and to a sense of territory more generally. Reading The Corsair and The Bride of Abydos with the perspective of Hone and Don Juan in mind, this chapter argues that depictions of this particular kind of piratical failure function as a diagnosis of the imperial forces that threaten utopian imaginations, while Don Juan proposes a kind of spatial imagination that escapes rather than reinforces imperialism.

From Here to Timbuktu

Timbuktu was a site for both mystical and imperial projections, both the city of gold and the (always impossible) destination of European explorers. This chapter begins with the narrative of Robert Adams who, in 1815, declared to Britain's African Company that he was the first white man ever to have been to Timbuktu. But Adams was a poor mixed-race sailor who was found starving on the London docks, and he invented the Timbuktu tale to secure food, clothing, and passage back to America. Five years later, James Grey Jackson published the narrative of Al-Sayid al-Hajj ‘Abd al-Salaam Shabeeny, a Muslim merchant who also claimed to have been to Timbuktu; Jackson made the mistake of citing Adams’ narrative as evidence of the veracity of some of Shabeeny’s claims. This chapter argues that Adams and Shabeeny take advantage of British self-conception and colonial imagination to manipulate systems of control, rather than to merely respond to them. Like pirates, Shabeeny and Adams recognize how to work the colonial territorial imagination to their own ends.

Coming Up From the Midst of the Sea

During the time when Joanna Southcott and Richard Brothers squabbled over their respective claims to God's word, England was embroiled in the French Revolutionary Wars, and slaves in Saint-Domingue were fighting for their independence. Despite their interest in the world to come, Southcott and Brothers were also very much invested in the world that was, and that they were attuned to the means by which prophetic accounts of space could be used as a commentary on political revolution. Southcott compares Napoleon to Satan and concludes that his defeat is evidence of God’s triumph; Brothers insists that London, with its trade in exotic goods and slaves, is the spiritual Babylon and will be destroyed. Their respective Jerusalems, conversely, insist on space as mutable and unfixed. This chapter argues that the global nature of these prophecies and the flexibility of the spaces they imagine enable Southcott and Brothers to imagine a land of God that exists beyond the national aims of revolution.

It is Not Amiss to Speak of His Beard

Captain Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pirates had the difficult task of balancing the revolutionary ideology of piracy with the fact of its recent demise and the undeniable triumph of colonial power. This difficulty is distilled in the story of Captain Misson, which shows the idealization of pirate life fall apart in its physical execution. The pirates on Misson’s ship, who establish a colony (Libertalia) rooted in the egalitarianism of pirate ships, eventually devolve into precisely the imperial practices against which their colony was founded. The story of Misson demonstrates the dangers of the imposition of an imagined space on a physical space and seems to insist on the impossibility of such practices. This chapter argues, however, that Misson’s colony, in its delineation of the forces that threaten such utopian settlements, simultaneously imagines an alternative society that manages such forces.

Introduction: Romanticism Off the Map

For the Spaces reachd from the starry heighth, to the starry depth; And they builded Golgonooza: terrible eternal labour! What are these golden builders doing? William Blake, Jerusalem 12: 22–4 Things extra and other insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order....