Steve Clark and Masashi Suzuki, ed. The Reception of Blake in the Orient. Continuum, London, 2006. ISBN: 0826490077. Price: US$149.

This welcome collection of essays has multiple aims. Its introduction sets it squarely amid recent attempts not just to look at the origins and contexts of Blake’s output but also at the way it has been received and deployed in later times and places. Here those times and places are extremely diverse. Although the introduction’s tone can sometimes seem unnecessarily hostile to other historical approaches, on to which it anxiously projects a notion of ‘automatic identification’, the essays on display here are varied and impressive, and, indeed, pay as much attention to ‘the original context of enunciation’ as ‘the generation of new meaning in altered and contingent circumstances’ (p. 2). Among others in this collection, these originary contexts include David Worrall’s development of our knowledge of Blake’s post-Swedenborgian context in its account of the movement’s Sierra Leone project and a reading of The Book of Thel and Susan Matthews’s intriguing analysis of the ambiguities of Blake’s idea of an African utopia. Read together, as with several other essays in the collection which pair off together well, these two essays make an intriguing dialogue about the limitations of western ideas of liberty once displaced into a postcolonial context. Perhaps the most influential critic writing in relation to this issue for the Romantic period generally and Blake in particular, as the introduction to this collection acknowledges, has been Saree Makdisi (1998 and 2003). Makdisi’s work exonerates Blake from an imperialist perspective based on rigid ideas of alterity and inferiority, which he believes otherwise warps the writing of even the most arduous of radicals of the 1790s and later. The editors of The Reception of Blake in the Orient and several of its contributors are sceptical of the idea that Blake escapes the taint of his time for which so many others are prosecuted by Makdisi. Yet what has to be respected about Makdisi’s work is the way he traces his case to a fundamental claim about the way alterity is understood in terms of power relations of self-and-other under colonialism. From this perspective, imperialism deals in death because it exports and formalizes an idea of subjectivity that is Urizenic in the extreme. From a related perspective, in this volume Tristanne Connolly offers a rewardingly focussed essay on the particular context of Blake’s painting of the translation of the Geeta in what she thinks of as the ‘older’ Orientalism of Warren Hastings and Williams Jones. Of course, neither Edward Said (1978) nor Makdisi, have much sympathy for Hastings or Jones, whose roles within the British government of India seem to make them obvious cases of the power-knowledge nexus at the heart of what may seem even the most benignly antiquarian Orientalism. From the perspectives of Said and Makdisi, this older discourse is different only in emphasis from what Connolly seems to see as the more savagely utilitarian discourse that came afterwards. What Jones, Hastings et al praise as exotic and genuinely interesting is still (for Said and Makdisi) reproduced as an ‘Other’ that defines the difference of the western subject from those it must subjugate to be itself. Connolly’s essay and others that identify Blake as implicated in the tropology of this kind of Orientalism might consider at more length the degree to which the disposition of these tropes in the Blakean textual universe do or do not perpetuate the power relations that they more usually bring with them in the grammar of imperialism. Simply pointing out the prior discursive framework does not necessarily answer the deeper question of disposition at the heart of Makdisi’s work. The sheer scope of The Reception of …