James Morier, Hajji Baba and Colonialist Literature

James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan is among works in which traces of the new wave of Colonialism at the beginning of the 19th century are clearly evident, a Colonialism which, fortified by the newly-established discourse of Orientalism, employed literary texts as building blocks to expand and buttress authority and dominance of the West over the East. This paper attempts to show how Hajji Baba, as a constituent of a literary- colonial discourse, has internalized, reproduced, and reinforced the structures of Western hegemony. The discussion will be based an a study of Anglo- Persian relations of the first decades of the 19th century. In this investigation, Mories's role will be delineated and a short account of the process of gestation and development of orientalism, and Morier's place in this process will be discussed.