Organ pipes and bodies with organs: Listening to De Quincey’s First Opium War essays

Abstract

War is prominent in sound studies, yet the sonic dimensions of the Opium Wars remain understudied. Analysing essays on the First Opium War by the English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), this article explores the dense relationships between opium, empire and sound in nineteenth-century Britain. It brings the tropes of the pipe as connector and organ as musical instrument, body part and instrument of the body politic into dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation of the ‘Body without Organs’, and suggests how the empires of China and Britain and their opium-taking subjects could be imagined as violently sounding bodies.