UCLA

“London’s Pacific Rim” studies transurban imaginaries, geographies connecting London to the Pacific Rim, and vice versa. Conceptualized in contradiction to the opium den, the space typifying Orientalist imaginaries of London in nineteenth-century British literature, my research forges a counterimaginary of London through the capital’s intimacies with East Asian people and spaces. Taking the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) as inciting historical moments, the dissertation studies places impacted by the events leading to and proceeding from this rupture. Thus, specific historical locations are the organizing principle of this dissertation, namely, the East India Company (EIC) China-trade ships, or East Indiamen; Company-contracted housing, or “the Barracks” and riots occurring in proximity to this space; and Shanghai’s racecourse. These locations matter to this project because they attest to both the shaping logics of a colonial environment and the activities of East Asian people laboring and imagining within, around and beyond its regime. “London’s Pacific Rim” links up an imaginary system that is otherwise fragmented in contemporary accounts of the period (confessional autobiography, newspaper reports, visual culture) and in seemingly disparate historiographies (maritime labor, London crowd history, treaty port leisure, to name a few). The dissertation coordinates these references to tell a story of places, working outside a reliance on London literary genres that have come to inform our understanding of the city, from metropolitan journalists’ sketches to the myths of Orientalist tale-tellers. The purpose of this work is therefore an anti-formal fabulation of London Pacific Rim, less interested in abstracting colonizing relations, than in making palpable locational content that enables me to theorize specific ways the capital is relational to the empire and its cast of actors, rather than its core.