Book Description

Inspired by Hannah Arendt's discussion of the Victorian Tory politician and novelist Benjamin Disraeli as a Jew who fought back, this book explores the complex ways in which mid-Victorian discourses of identity and belonging were interwoven with discourses of race. The book looks at Disraeli's response to the antisemitism of the period, leading him to become convinced that race was the key to understand how society works. It traces Disraeli's use of the category of race as a pivotal idea of social difference and looks at how race intersected his thinking with class, culture, gender, nation, and empire. It also shows how Disraeli's "one-nation-politics" was dependent on the idea of empire and how his representations of both nation and empire became based on race. (Series: Racism Analysis - Series A: Studies - Vol. 2)