Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2025
Abstract
Scholars have highlighted Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849) as a point of no return for Carlyle’s descent into a full-throated advocacy of racism, imperialism, and proto-fascism. His 1843 article “Dr. Francia” on the late Paraguayan dictator has garnered much less critical attention than the provocative “Occasional Discourse,” but it simultaneously anticipates the latter essay and offers an alternative representation of Carlyle’s ideas—and Victorian ideas more generally— about shifting categories of race and imperialism before they congealed. Instead of positioning himself as the authoritative interpreter of Francia, Carlyle highlights his own uncertainty, taking as a central premise his inability to truly understand South America and its revolutions without engagement with native discourse. His prose registers consciousness of racial difference and mixture but with ambiguous diction that refrains from assigning a generalized meaning to color beyond the tincture of psychological idiosyncrasies. This essay contends that the figure of Francia, whom Carlyle simultaneously romanticizes and racializes with the epithet of “tawny,” provokes a productive confusion as both exception and exemplum of an independent South America that defies informal imperialist mastery.
Recommended Citation
Knox, Marisa Palacios. "Tawny, Tyrannous Dr. Francia and Carlyle's Confused South America." Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature 148.1 (2025): 251-270. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975899
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Publication Title
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
Included in
English Language and Literature Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
Comments
Copyright © 2025 by The Ohio State University This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.