‘Violent Passions’ and ‘Inhuman Excess’: Simplicity and the Representation of Non-western Music in Nineteenth-century British Travel Literature

This chapter provides that, not, however, by an examination of the music itself (which is largely the focus of studies of music and Orientalism), but by an exploration of musical representation. It focuses on a geographical range of material broadly considered Orientalist, insofar as the Orient is the land to the east of the West, as Ziauddin Sardar suggests. In itself, Forster’s suggested conflation of emotional simplicity and violent passions is unremarkable, because it is a fixture of his anthropological horizon. Of certain pariah-like dancing girls, for example, he shows just how ‘violent passions’ can lead to ‘inhuman excess’: Their dancing has little of elegance; its chief peculiarity being a very rapid vibrating motion of the hips, from side to side. As such, most Africans, including Egyptians, faired very badly in popular estimation, and this is reflected in highly sexualized anthropological literature from the 1790s.