LIST OF ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES
KEYNOTES
Vron Ware
Café Diplomacy: Close Encounters of an Intercultural Kind
The practice of ‘cultural relations’ has been integral to foreign diplomacy over the 20th
century. In an age of global telecommunications, how is the old-fashioned act of reading
books about and from ‘other’ cultures influenced by geo-political forces? This paper will look
at the explosion of interest in translating Arabic literature in English within the last few years,
and explore some of the reasons for this phenomenon. Composed from the perspective of a
literary tourist, the essay will consider how poetic and creative acts become harnessed by, and
escape from, the contingencies of neo-imperial and nationalist narratives.
Biography
Vron Ware is a journalist and academic and now works at the Open University as a Research
Fellow in culture and citizenship. Her books include Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism
and History (1992) and Out of Whiteness: Colour, Politics and Culture (2002, with Les
Back). Her latest book, Who Cares About Britishness? A Global View of the National Identity
Debate (2007) explores Britain through the perspectives of its post-colonial settlers and
former empires, opening up the nation to the difficult questions of interpretation and
reception which concern this conference.
David Morley in conversation with Arjun Appadurai ‘Reading After Empire’
An interview between one of the founding figures of audience studies, and one of the world’s
leading theorists of globalisation, commodities and consumption.
Biographies
Arjun Appadurai serves as Senior Advisor for Global Initiatives at The New School in New
York City, where he also holds a Distinguished Professorship as the John Dewey Professor in
the Social Sciences. He is a socio-cultural anthropologist with specializations in
globalization, public culture, and urban studies. His major accomplishment has been the
construction of anthropological frameworks for the study of global media, consumption, and
migration. He is the author of Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian
Case (1981); Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) and Fear of
Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (2006). His current work focuses on
poverty, violence, and social inclusion in mega-cities with a special focus on Mumbai (India).
David Morley is Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London,
where he directs the PhD programme in the Dept of Media and Communications. He was one
of the original members of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the
1970s, and has been one of the leading figures in cultural and communication studies
worldwide for almost three decades.. He has held temporary visiting positions at the
University of Stockholm, University of Madison –Wisconsin, at Ramon Llull University,
Barcelona and at the Annenberg Centre for Communications, University of Southern
California. He co-founded both the Transnational Studies Research Unit and the Pacific Asia
Cultural Studies Forum at Goldsmiths. His publications include The 'Nationwide' Audience
(1980); Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries
(with Kevin Robins, 1996); Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (co-edited with
Kuan Hsing Chen, 1996); Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (2001) and
Media, Modernity and Technology : The Geography of the New (2006).
Greg Myers
Reception Research and Reading Groups
Reading groups have a long history, but they have become especially prominent in
UK culture in the last twenty years. There is a tension within the concept: ‘reading’
is often seen as a purely individual activity, pleasurable because it is individual, time
apart from family or work demands, while ‘groups’ are places for sociability, selfpresentation, and possibly conflict. There has not been a great deal of academic study
of reading groups, but there is a tradition of reception studies using focus groups to
discuss books (and soap operas, news, magazines, and other kinds of texts), emerging
from cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s. One problem with this research, if we
want to know more about reading groups, is that the researchers are in general
interested in the readings, but not in the group interaction that provided the occasion
and motivation for those readings. Handbooks, reports, and complaints about reading
groups suggest that the interactions are usually the source of pleasure and problems,
more than the books themselves. When people say what they say about books, they
are not revealing some authentic internal response, but taking a stance projecting a
version of themselves, addressing specific people, and placing the book they are
talking about. These interactions are particularly important when we are considering
how people read a book in different cultural settings – the ‘Diaspora Audiences’ of
the conference title. This paper analyses data from a broadcast discussion of Beloved
to consider how people show their entitlement to talk, how they disagree, and give
accounts explaining their disagreements, and how they act as listeners to other people
talking. Detailed analyses of the talk in groups can help us understand how reading
groups work – or don’t.
Biography
Greg Myers is Professor of Rhetoric and Communication in the English Language and
Linguistics Department at Lancaster University. His work in applied linguistics and discourse
analysis includes conversation analytical work focused on the the expression of opinions in
talk, particularly in focus groups and consultation processes; the social context of written
academic texts, and the language of advertising. He is the author of Writing Biology: Texts in
the Social Construction of Science (1990), Words in Ads (1994), Ad Worlds: Brands, Media,
Audiences (Arnold, 1998), and Matters of Opinion: Talking about Public Issues (2004). It is
the latter work which Greg will be discussing in relation to the methodological complexities
of analysing reading group data. He is currently working on a study of the language of blogs.
Stephanie Newell
Articulating Empire: African Print Cultures in Colonial West Africa
Focussing on locally owned newspapers in colonial West Africa, this paper will present a
history of reading in the colonies which experiments with reading beyond, or reading outside,
the anti-colonial nationalist perspective which dominates current scholarship on ‘reading after
empire.’ The paper will address topics such as: the ways colonial African readers took up and
interpreted printed texts, including the works of Charles Dickens and other English authors;
the ways missionary and colonial officials attempted to control people’s access to books; the
ways ‘non-readers’ in the African colonies called upon elaborate, diverse cultural forms
ranging from the oral to the written; and what kind of ‘information’---in the most biased,
textualised and fragmented sense of information---about the values, attitudes, aspirations and
articulations of diverse readerships in the British Empire, can be gleaned from the Africanowned press.
Biography
Steph Newell is Reader in English Literature at the University of Sussex. She is co-director of
the Centre of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Sussex, an Associate Fellow of
Robinson College, Cambridge, and a Research Associate of the African Studies Centre,
University of Cambridge. Her research interests include West African readerships, African
newspaper culture, African literature, the history of homosexuality in Africa, and postcolonial
theory. She is the author of Ghanaian Popular Fiction: 'Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal
Life' and Other Tales (2000); Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: 'How to Play the Game of
Life,' (2002); West African Literatures: Ways of Reading (2006) and The Forger's Tale: The
Search for Odeziaku (2006).
Kobena Mercer
Are You Receiving Me? Visual Art as a Problem for Postcolonial Studies
The cultural studies model has been widely influential in shifting attention to reception
aesthetics in art history, and yet the visual arts - as distinct from mass media representations
in popular culture - remains entirely overshadowed by the status of the literary text in
postcolonial studies. Why is this? Exploring 'the problem of the visual' in the context of Black
Atlantic art history, this talk examines as a case study the 19th century UK reception of
African American landscape painter Robert Scott Duncanson.
Biography
Described by Isaac Julien as “the doyen of Black intellectual culture”, Kobena Mercer is a
cultural critic whose varied work on the politics of representation in diasporic visual arts has
inaugurated an important line of inquiry into post-identitarian cultural politics. He was
Reader in Art History and Diaspora Studies at Middlesex University, London, and has taught
at New York University and University of California at Santa Cruz. He has received
fellowships from Cornell University and the New School University in New York. He is an
inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. Mercer’s first
book, Welcome to the Jungle (1994), opened new lines of enquiry in art, film, and
photography. He is currently series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, co-published by MIT
and in IVA, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction
(2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers
(forthcoming 2008). A frequent contributor to Screen, ArtForum and Sight & Sound, Mercer
maintains a presence inside and outside the academy.
CREATIVE WRITERS
Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay is an award-winning poet and novelist who currently holds the post of Professor of
Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Jackie was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to
a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted by a white couple at birth and was
brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and
Stirling University where she read English. She is the author of The Adoption Papers (1991);
Off Colour (1998); Trumpet (1999); Why Don't You Stop Talking (2002); Strawgirl (2003);
Life Mask (2005); Wish I Was Here (2006); Sonata (2006) and Darling: New and Selected
Poems (2007). Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, and she has written widely for
stage, radio and television. In 2006, she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.
Sheree Mack
Sheree Mack is an active writer and performer, both nationally and internationally. She is
currently the Artist in Residence at the Newcastle Literary & Philosophical Society/North of
England Mining Institute from which she has already had published The White of the Moon, a
chapbook detailing the North East’s involvement in transatlantic slavery and slave trade.
Forthcoming 2008 poetry collections include SEAM, in relation to North East mining and Like
the Wind Over a Secret, her debut poetry collection within which she gathers scraps culled
from the past; the past of her family, the community and the city, to stitch together into a
coherent narrative. Sheree is currently working on her second full collection, working title,
February Revolution, Trinidad 1970. Sheree is also completing a PhD in Creative Writing at
Newcastle University.
ROUNDTABLE
Reading Groups, Reading Diasporas (Danielle Fuller (convener), Jamal Eddine
Benhayoun (Morocco), GJV Prasad (India), Nicholas Laughlin (Trinidad), Rabi Isma
(Nigeria), David Allan (Scotland), Mary Greenshields (Scotland)
This roundtable session unites book group coordinators participating in the AHRC-funded
Devolving Diasporas project (James Procter, Bethan Benwell, Gemma Robinson and Jackie
Kay). Over a period of 3-5 months, books groups around the world all read the same 4
diasporic texts: Brick Lane, Small Island, White Teeth and The Adoption
Papers. In this session, the coordinators report back on the experience of these sessions,
providing accounts of the kinds of issues that were discussed and the dominant interpretive
values of the group. There will also be some discussion of the contemporary culture of
reading in each location.
PANELS
Wednesday 3rd September
3 Parallel Panels
10.00-11.30
PANEL 1
Reading Against the Grain
Chair: Andrew Smith
(1a) Baidik Bhattacharya
Kipling’s “British seamen and colonial soldiers”: Reading empire with Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” laments the lost art of storytelling in a world beset by
death, destruction, devalued experience and the novel. The reasons for this lamentation are
manifold, but he prioritises two ethical dimensions of storytelling that seem to disappear in
the modern world – first, “every real story […] contains, openly or covertly, something
useful”; and second, the “storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.” Alongside this
lamentation, or rather to accentuate it, he proposes a catalogue of “great storytellers” of an
earlier era and their work – this a curious list as it includes, among others, Rudyard Kipling
and, more to the point, his stories of “British seamen and colonial soldiers.” But why Kipling?
How do we understand the usefulness of such stories? What counsel the greatest apologist of
British imperialism has to offer? How do we read Kipling in light of what Benjamin proposes
as the ethical practice of storytelling? This essay argues that using Benjamin’s work to read
Kipling – especially using Benjamin’s notions of storytelling, translation, history, and
violence – we can propose a new paradigm of reading the empire. This is a theoretical model
of reading stories – in their cultural translatability and historical specificity – that the empire
told itself. This is also an attempt to search for newer epistemological model to understand the
empire and its narration.
Biography
Baidik Bhattacharya MA, M Phil (JNU), D Phil (Oxford) is a lecturer in
Colonial/Postcolonial literature in the School of English, Newcastle University. Recent
publications include “Naipaul's New World: Postcolonial Modernity and the Enigma of
Belated Space,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 39(2), 2006, and “Jokes Apart: Orientalism,
(Post)colonial Parody, and the Moment of Laughter,” Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies, 8(2), 2006.
(1b) David Farrier
Reading ‘Bartleby’ at the Limits of Citizenship
In Paper Machine, Derrida considers the relationship between paper, paperlessness (the
undocumented person), and citizenship. Following Derrida, and also J. Hillis Miller’s
application of Derridean ethics of hospitality to critical reading, I propose to investigate how
reading the economies of paper, re/production, and silence in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ can assist
in developing a postcolonial reading response to the interdisciplinary issues of mobile
populations. Bartleby has recently been subject to several, divergent re-readings (Hardt &
Negri, Deleuze, Agamben, Zizek); reading Bartleby, as one who is both literally and
hermeneutically displaced, therefore presents the opportunity to reflect on the politics of
representing the displaced person. Bartleby’s effacement and lamented humanity align him
with Agamben’s definition of bare life; also, his refusal to read can be read as an articulation
of his potentiality. Like the French sans papiers, Bartleby asserts himself and undermines the
boundaries of belonging through his effacement; he is both the “intolerable incubus” and the
Other for whom, in Derrida’s words, I am responsible. I will therefore invoke the figures of
‘parasite’, ‘guest’ and ‘host’ to consider the extent to which Bartleby corresponds to Liisa
Malkki’s description of the refugee as one who “speaks to us in a particular way: wordlessly.”
Biography
David Farrier is lecturer in post-colonial literature at the University of Leicester. He is the
author of Unsettled Narratives: the Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London
(Routledge, 2007). He is currently working on a monograph on the convergence of
postcolonial and refugee studies, for the Liverpool University Press.
(1c) Lindsey Moore
Modernity at the Margins: A Contrapuntal Reading
Weiss (2004) and Papayanis (2005) recuperate late modernist authors such as Paul Bowles
and Lawrence Durrell, arguing that they represent North Africa in ways irreducible to
Orientalism/exoticism that open up possibilities of constant, aporetic translation, hence ethical
engagement with difference. This paper considers some of the implications and limitations of
this argument. Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading is deployed in order to consider a set of
texts set in the same national space: Bowles’s late modernist Let It Come Down and The
Spider’s House, and fiction – some of which was produced in collaboration with Bowles –
that contributed to the emergence of modern Moroccan literature. The paper focuses on
spatio-temporal frameworks that organise the work in question, considering to what extent
Bowles’s novels enable and/or foreclose upon identification with Moroccans in the final years
of the French and Spanish Protectorates. A metaphor of exchange and the incorporation of a
‘non-reader’, for example, might be interpreted in terms of an obscured allegory of counterhegemonic struggles that become more visible in texts set in the same period, but authored by
Moroccans.
Biography
Dr Lindsey Moore is Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, UK. She has published
several articles on the representation of Arab Muslim women and is the author of Arab,
Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film (London: Routledge,
2008).
PANEL 2
Consuming the Caribbean: Local and Global Audiences
Chair: Nicholas Laughlin
(2a) Lucy Evans
The Politics of Reading in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales
With a cover image of a semi-clad woman eating mangoes, Robert Antoni’s My
Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (1999) has been marketed as a product to be consumed
abroad. However, within the text, the trope of eating is used to reflect upon this process.
Underlying the humour and eroticism of the stories is a critique of the Americanisation of
Trinidadian culture both in the 1940s, when the presence of American soldiers led to the
growth of the sex trade, and in the late twentieth-century climate of global capitalism. I will
read Antoni’s narrative strategies in terms of the aesthetics and politics of Trinidadian
calypso, a form which combines comic, often bawdy, wordplay with a satirical edge. I will
explore how the stories’ exotic appeal is undercut by the text’s commentary on the process of
consumption it encourages. I will also consider the implications of Antoni’s engagement with
a cultural form specific to Trinidad as a means of challenging the reading practices of an
international audience. I will argue that the political efficacy of Antoni’s text depends upon
the collaboration of readers. In inviting us to examine our mode of reading, Antoni’s text
envisages release from the cycle of consumption it depicts.
Biography
Lucy Evans is a PhD student at Leeds University, supervised by Dr. John McLeod. Her
project is ‘Constructions of Community in Recent Caribbean Sequential Narratives’, focusing
on texts which mediate the genres of novel and short story collection. She has presented
papers on V. S. Naipaul, Mark McWatt and Dionne Brand.
(2b) Ariel Bookman
Reading Africa, Writing Haiti: The Transatlantic Imagination in Charpentier’s El
Reino de Este Mundo
In his book Silencing the Past, anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that the Haitian
Revolution had “the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened” (73).
Almost fifty years earlier, Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier had identified the same problem in
his novel on the Haitian Revolution, El Reino de Este Mundo. While Trouillot argues that the
conceptual categories current in colonial thought made it impossible for colonists to conceive
of a slave insurrection, Carpentier treats such cognitive incommensurability as the product of
different strategies of reading. Through his characters’ oral narratives, letters, ekphrases,
performances, and mystical re/visions, Carpentier figures revolutionary Haiti as a
chiaroscuro, riven not only by race and class but by the competing textual imaginations such
divisions engender. In doing so Carpentier employs the unassimilated presence of darkest
Africa, which indelibly marks the novel’s bodies and imaginations, as so powerful a trope that
it verges on fetishization. As such, I will argue, imagining Africa is a critical artistic and
historical move for Carpentier, because it allows him to discover the range of creative
readings that underwrote the Revolution, and consequently enables him to perceive, as he
famously terms it, “the marvelous real” in the Americas.
Biography
Ariel Bookman is pursuing his Ph.D. in English at Northwestern University, Chicago, where
he is focusing on African and Transatlantic literatures.
His interests include
ethnonationalism, South-South cultural flows, and the rhetoric of artistry. He is a summa cum
laude graduate of Emory University, Atlanta, where he was a Woodruff Scholar.
(2c) Joscelyn Gardner
Subverting Colonial Narratives: The Representation of Female Creole Identity
In the Work of a Contemporary Caribbean Artist
This multi-media presentation explores the historical construction of the (white) Creole as
Other and specifically addresses how my visual arts practice seeks to subvert colonial
narratives by rupturing the stereotypical representation of female Creole identity inscribed in
official records and portraiture. As a contemporary Caribbean artist, I use a postcolonial
feminist methodology to mine both private and public historical archives (diaries, travelogues,
abolitionist texts, portraits, and prints) to reveal previously silenced “unspeakable” details of
the lives of the women who lived on Caribbean plantations during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The resulting artwork suggests that black and white Creole women in the English-speaking
Caribbean have shared an intertwined though unequal historical relationship largely shaped
by the white male through colonialism and patriarchy. In fact, owing to the widespread
practice of sexual abuse of slave women by white men, that black and white women have
actually shared the body of the white master while living / working in the same household.
Through interventionist strategies (video and sound), I insert multiple (female) subjectivities
and voices not recognized in the master discourse within the museum, allowing the viewer to
question how the recording of this history has shaped our interpretation of postcolonial Creole
identity.
Biography
Joscelyn Gardner is a Caribbean visual artist whose practice focuses on her (white) Creole
identity from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Her work has been exhibited widely
including several international art biennials. She is currently a Professor of Fine Art at
Fanshawe College in Ontario and works as an artist between Canada and the Caribbean.
PANEL 3
Curriculum and Canon
Chair: Michelle Keown
(3a) Neelam Srivastava
Indias of the Mind: The Role of English-language Anthologies in Shaping the Idea of
India
Anthologies of contemporary literature in English tend to be seen as a “pedagogical” genre,
with especially close links to canon formation. In criticism, all literary genres, prompt the
question of “who” is reading in the first place -- but anthologies more than others. Given the
tension between the explicit or the implicit intentions a text proposes to an audience and the
variety of possibile reading responses, how then can we formulate the role of texts, such as
anthologies, that “operate at interstices between literary works and their readers”? (John
Nichols). And more specifically: how are the gaps between readers and literary works
negotiated to create a narrative when we are dealing with an anthology, namely a
representation of a literary work? How is his question further complicated by anthologies of
postcolonial literature, where readership and reader response are both multi-national and
transnational? This paper examines a range of Indian literature anthologies, published
roughly from independence onwards, and discusses how they have shaped an idea of India
and its literature for national and transnational audiences. I will be focusing more specifically
on Rushdie’s bestselling Vintage Book of Indian Writing and anthologies of women’s writing
and lesbian writing published in India.
Biography
Neelam Srivastava teaches postcolonial literature at Newcastle University, UK. She has
recently published a book entitled Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and
Cosmopolitan Narratives (Routledge, 2007). Her current research focuses on anti-colonialism
and the European left, with a specific focus on responses to the Ethiopian war of 1935.
(3b) Christopher De Shield
Indigeneity, Nationalism and the Transatlantic Critical Reception of Zee Edgell’s Beka
Lamb (1982)
This paper examines the transatlantic critical reception of a postcolonial text, Beka Lamb, by
the Belizean author Zee Edgell. As the only Belizean writer to achieve international
recognition, Edgell has used her status to participate in the “decolonisation of [Belize’s]
collective mind” through use of the bildungsroman — a genre favored by many Caribbean
writers at the nation’s Independence but one which encourages a reading according to
Jameson’s ‘national allegory’. If fictional representation is the author’s explicit, stated
objective, what particular nationalism(s) does she support? And can her text describe a
sufficiently universal nationalism without co-opting or erasing indigenous difference? Do
students and literary critics read Edgell as national metonymy? How does this comment on
the text’s perceived pedagogical utility as prescribed by professionals in their respective
regions? Examining how Edgell’s text is used in courses and curricula as it moves between
the Caribbean, the British Isles and the United States, this paper unearths the implications
when a text is analysed at a remove from the particular, historical and local. It also reveals
the problems attendant to critical reception that denies the translocal qualities of the novel
eluding attempts to pin down its political prescription.
Biography
Christopher De Shield is a Graduate Student in Literature and Transatlanticism at the
University of Edinburgh. He completed a double-degree in Biology and English Literature
from Goshen College in 2006. Before coming to Scotland he was adjunct lecturer in
Environmental Conservation and Development at the University of Belize.
3 Parallel Panels
14.00-15.30
PANEL 4
Reading Africa: Local and Disapora Audiences
Chair: Jamal Eddine Benhayoun
(4a) Katalin Egri Ku-Mesu
The Inconsiderateness of the Text: The metonymic gap in anglophone African literature
The current paper investigates what makes Europhone African literary texts ‘inconsiderate’
(Zwaan, 1996:241) and how this ‘inconsiderateness’ bears on a multiple readership. First,
‘inconsiderateness’ is discussed in the context of the two interpretive levels of hybrid texts.
Then, with a focus on interpretability, it is outlined how the ‘inconsiderateness’ of the
indigenisation of cultural reference in the text of Ghanaian writers is offset by authorial
intervention. The main focus, however, is on how the lack of authorial intervention creates a
metonymic gap (Ashcroft, 2001). The paper argues that it is along this gap that the readers
can be expected to be divided. Through examples taken from Ghanaian English language
literature it is illustrated, in a relevance theoretical framework, how the Ghanaian, nonGhanaian African and Western reader copes with African language words left in the texts
untranslated and unexplained. The paper argues that by withdrawing assistance from the
reader, the author makes it manifest that he concedes ‘the importance of meanibility’
(Ashcroft, 2001:76) and opts for the inscription of difference. The readers’ position in relation
to the gap thus created is indicative of their ability to interpret these untranslated/unexplained
words. The paper concludes that the metonymic gap, because it is a cultural gap, exists
between the Ghanaian writer and the Western reader but does not pertain to the non-Ghanaian
African reader. Full appreciation of the writer’s meanings is shown only by those readers who
share both the writer’s cultural and linguistic experience, but it is not impossible for the
Western reader to cross the metonymic gap.
References
Ashcroft, Bill. 2001. Post-Colonial Transformation. London: Routledge.
Zwaan, Rolf A. 1996. Toward a Model of Literary Comprehension. In Britton, Bruce K. and
Arthur C. Graesser (eds.). 1996. Models of Understanding Text. Mahwah, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 241-255.
Biography
Katalin Egri Ku-Mesu currently holds a lectureship at Adam Smith College and supervises
Master’s students at the University of York. She completed two doctoral theses, one on
Chinua Achebe’s novels, the other on Cultural Reference in Modern Ghanaian Englishlanguage Fiction, forthcoming from Rodopi. She has also published on Ayi Kwei Armah, the
interpretation of hybrid texts, the survival of African literature and has contributed to
Censorship: A World Encyclopedia (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).
(4b) Violetta Jojo Verge
African Writers Get Wrongs Redressed, Readers Do the Rest
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on why the post-colonial African writers and critics
were impelled to write about the subject matter “Africa and the Africans”; as well as on the
global reception of their writings. Achebe, the committed Nigerian novelist and critic, had
been one of the first African intellectuals to use literature as a launching pad to redress the
wrongs done to the African peoples and cultures. Other African writers, such as the Ghanaian
Ama Ata Aidoo or the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, have also pledged themselves to represent
Africa and to teach their peoples and the rest of the world lessons about their cultures and
their unvoiced histories and stories. But the reader could be non-African. Hence the
intellectual background and baggage of experience of each reader could be different in each
case. Moreover, their intentions could be varied taking into account the possible consumption
of books for pleasure, for knowledge, for translation, for a study and for any other reason such
as to fulfil a curiosity. Therefore, depending on the grade of exertion of the reader in each
instant of reception, the final interpretation will be at the mercy of his/ her power as audience.
Biography
Violetta Jojo Verge is a doctorate student and an active researcher at the Dept. of English at
the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, Spain. She is currently writing a PhD thesis: The
Representation of Africa and the Africans in West African Literatures’. She teaches English
at a college and Arabic at Distant University Language School-CUID.
(4c) Emily Davies
Staging Encounters: Ahdaf Soueif and the Transnational Reception of The Map of Love
At a conference in Cairo sponsored by the Egyptian Supreme Council for Culture, Amina
Elbendary describes how “a heated debate threatened to arise [among] several participants
when the chair argued that contemporary Egyptian British author Ahdaf Soueif’s novels were
not part of contemporary Arab literature but of English literature, since the Anglophone
Egyptian novelist writes in English.” However, while the Egyptian and diasporic Arab
response to Soueif centers on her hybrid identity, her relationship to multiple literary
traditions, and the appropriateness of her strategic representation of political concerns in the
Middle East to a western audience, the popular response in Britain and the US has much more
to do with reactions to the familiar conventions of romance and the pleasure or strangeness of
consuming unfamiliar Middle Eastern history in this familiar form. In most of these reviews,
Soueif is unquestionably and authentically Egyptian. In this talk I will use the very different
perceptions of Soueif and her novel The Map of Love as a springboard for articulating
possibilities for a more fluid transnational model for understanding both the text and the
author.
Biography
Emily Davis teaches world literature at the University of Delaware. Her current book project
explores the role new formations of intimacy play in constructing and resisting a ‘globalized’
world. Her research interests include literature and globalization, gender, and genre studies,
and her work has appeared in Camera Obscura and Genders.
PANEL 5
Interpretive Communities
Chair: Danielle Fuller
(5a) Molly Travis
The Beloved Mockingbird: Identity Inversion and the Displacement of Race among U.S.
and South African Readers
Numerous critics have commented on the plummy resonance that South Africa has held for
western liberals starved for affect, allowing Americans, in particular, to displace the question
of race. As such, Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country has fulfilled a host of needs in the
U.S. in the sixty years since its publication, including its function as a recent Oprah Book
Club selection. It would appear that To Kill a Mockingbird has satisfied similar needs for
South Africa’s readers, who in a 2007 poll chose Harper Lee’s 1960 novel of racism in the
American South as #4 in a list of the 101 best books of all time (Paton’s novel was chosen as
#29). My paper will focus on the identity inversions and displacements that have occurred
among readers from two countries grappling mightily with the issue of race. I will end by
considering the importance—both actual and metaphorical—of Barack Obama’s U.S.
presidential candidacy for South Africans as demonstrated by extensive commentary in South
African blogs, which are read and written by many South Africans who have expatriated in
the last ten years to Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S.
Biography
Molly Abel Travis, associate professor of English at Tulane University (USA), has published
essays on narrative, reading/reception, new media, gender and race in 20th-century American,
British, and South African literature and culture. Her first book was Reading Cultures (1998),
and her current book project is “Imagining the New South Africa.”
(5b) Juliet Munden
Reading the Same Texts in Norway and Eritrea
This paper presents my preliminary findings in a comparative study of the reception by two
groups of students to the same four literary texts. These texts - a folktale, a poem, a short
story and play - are about Eritrea and written or told by Eritrean authors. The two groups of
respondents - altogether 48 in number - consist of students at college level who were studying
English at the time of the data collection – one group in Norway, the other group in Eritrea. In
addition to writing response statements, the respondents have also completed a 5-page
questionnaire on their educational background, and in particular on their experience with and
attitudes to literature. In the paper I look at some of the literary texts, and discuss what the
respondents say about them. I also consider how the respondents situate themselves as readers
of Eritrean texts and as writers where the researcher/teacher as the intended reader of their
response. Finally I question what was one of the original assumptions of this research project,
namely that the respondents have read 'the same texts'.
Biography
Juliet Munden holds an MA in philosophy and psychology from Oxford, and an MA in
English from Oslo. She works with teacher education at Hedmark University College,
Norway, but is currently on research leave to write a Ph.D thesis on the reception of Eritrean
literature in Eritrea and Norway.
(5c) Elizabeth Oldfield
Imagining the Gikuyu: Re-presenting an Interpretive Community in Red Strangers
Benedict Anderson suggests both nations and communities are imagined due to members’
collective notion that they have a connection to others of their society whom they will never
meet or even know. In Red Strangers (1939), Elspeth Huxley uses the novel to demonstrate
her imagined connection with the Gikuyu, and as a tool for re-presenting that tribe as an
imagined and interpretive community. In the novel Huxley adopts a seemingly African
perspective to focus on four generations of a Gikuyu family spanning the years from precolonialism up to the late 1930s. Yet as she is not an indigenous member of that community,
the image she portrays draws on her childhood settler experiences of Kenya, a brief stay on a
Gikuyu reserve for the purpose of gaining an insight into the pre-colonial Gikuyu community
and the impact of colonialism, and an anthropological course which she attended in London.
This paper will question Huxley’s success in engaging with and re-presenting a disparate
community and address questions pertaining to the politics of her imagining and
interpretation of the Gikuyu, considering Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of Third Space and its
relation to writer and text. Offering a reading that some may perceive as an act of resistance,
the paper will draw on other select texts by Huxley thereby offering evidence that promotes
the debate of the notion of her imagined Eurocentric interpretive re-presentation of the
Gikuyu.
Biography
Elizabeth Oldfield is an associate lecturer at the Universities of Wolverhampton and Derby,
where she is also a PhD student. The focus of her research is on fiction written by indigenous
and white settler colonial and postcolonial women in East Africa. She has published book
reviews on black British writing and author profiles for The Literary Encyclopedia.
PANEL 6
Readings of Place
Chair: Neelam Srivastava
(6a) Norbert Bugeja
‘A Few Meters of Wood and Thirty Years of Exile’:
Reading the space of Palestine in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah
This paper addresses Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah, a lyrical self-narrative
based on the Palestinian poet’s 1996 visit to the Palestinian West Bank. The memoir’s
innovative stance lies in Barghouti’s spatial reading of the relation between the diasporic
Palestinian communities and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). I argue that
Barghouti eschews the poetic exaltation of a “mythicized” Palestine and the widespread
national-symbolist zeal that threatens to reduce the Palestinian condition to a cluster of
impotent abstractions, or in his own words, ‘a bouquet of symbols’. Barghouti perceives the
diaspora-OPT relation as a productive space of ‘living’ in itself - his narrative embodies the
encounter of material and discursive conditions that reproduces this space of living in
narrative. I argue that through his account of Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali’s assassination
and burial in 1987 – the first year of the Intifada – his narrative forges a solidarity with the
“grave-space” inside the OPT prefigured by al-Ali’s death. In this manner, Barghouti’s seeks
to subvert the logic that abstracts an exilic/diasporic imagination from the symbology of
native terrain. In eliciting the symbiosis of diasporic and occupied (grave-)spaces, I Saw
Ramallah offers a grounding of the OPT themselves within the exilic imagination.
Barghouti’s journey to the OPT occurs in between the hapless 1994 Oslo Accords, Israel’s
50th anniversary and the subsequent al-Aqsa Intifada. His reading of the diaspora-OPT
relation shuns positive identifications and territorial-nationalist demarcations and taps instead
the internationalist condition of a present Palestinian “outsiderhood”. I Saw Ramallah takes
stock of this “being at home in the world” in order to forge a narrative recuperation of
Palestinian representational space as a surrogate location of exilic solidarity.
Biography
Norbert Bugeja is a PhD candidate and Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar in the Department
of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is working
with Prof Benita Parry, Prof Neil Lazarus and Dr Rashmi Varma on modes of liminal
mediation in contemporary self-narrative, focusing on the memoirs of Amos Oz, Orhan
Pamuk and Mourid Barghouti. He graduated with First Class Honours in English Language
and Literature from the University of Malta, and obtained an MA (Dist.) in 2005.
(6b) Sarah Brouillette
Gentrification and the Reception of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
The early circulation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane was attended and facilitated by controversy.
Some Bangladeshi residents of the real Brick Lane area were angered by Ali’s depiction, by
her seemingly tenuous connection to the place, and by the prospect that the neighborhood
might be used to shoot the book-to-film project. I read their hostility as a manifestation of the
politics of gentrification. Official urban planning policy has been granting the creative class a
key role in the work of civic “revitalization.” London’s East End has been a targeted area.
Just as residents began to note the arrival of gentrifying forces – “the haircuts,” in local
parlance – there surfaced a slew of books with the words “Brick Lane” in their titles. Ali’s
was the most visible. It was her publishers who chose the name and sold the novel as the first
literary take on area Bangladeshis. Is their work analogous to the property development that
references the area’s diverse heritages when marketing newly up-market lifestyles? Protest
over Ali’s text, often questioning her “right” to make money by representing the area,
suggests that is it. I read this as a sign of deep-seated concern that those who arrive with more
elite forms of cultural and economic capital may displace existing residents.
Biography
Sarah Brouillette is assistant professor of Literature at MIT. She is the author of Postcolonial
Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007) and of articles about the
relationships between emerging literatures, cultural markets, and the forces of global capital.
(6c) Christopher Ian Foster
Reading Diaspora: Globality, Translocality, and “Mapping” in/through the Literatures
of Oceania
What does it mean to “read diaspora” within the context of globalization? Can diasporic
literatures provide the necessary interrogation of the routes of global capital and the
creation/peripheralization of the global South? Indeed, what does it mean to read diaspora in
terms of translocality and what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms “critical regionalism?”
What can the routes of diaspora tell us about the colonial mapping of the globe? MerleauPonty suggests that geography is a sign-language, and as N’Gugi wa Thiong’o has reminded
us, language is itself a carrier of ideology and culture. Might not the deployment of the map
itself bear the cultural motivations of colonial domination? What does the mapping of the
world under colonialism have to tell us about the world then and the world now? My analysis
of colonial mapping considers a nineteenth century ethnographic text by missionary Reverend
Robert Thomson entitled The Marquesas Islands. To re-think colonial mapping I inaugurate
the term postcolonial poiēsis which contains both the production and reception of diasporic
texts within an imagined translocal community. Postcolonial poiēsis first refers to Spivak’s
re-imagination of Jacques Derrida’s term teleopoiesis, an imaginative reaching out towards
the other set forth by Spivak as a possible if not transitory (counter)ontology of the planet –
“planetarity.” Planetarity contains a double movement suggesting the political possibility of
translocal coalitions resisting globalization and neo-colonial processes, while also proposing
new ways to read the world. Secondly, I explore the ways in which postcolonial/diasporic
writers and scholars (such as Haunani-Kay Trask), through a poiēsis, or production, creation,
or meaning-making, challenge the processes of colonial cartography and interrogate,
epistemologically and ontologically, the subject position of being mapped, while in the same
gesture, re-inscribing, re-reading, and re-imagining the map and thus the planet.
Biography
Christopher Ian Foster is finishing up a Master's degree at The Graduate Center of The City
University of New York. In the fall he will begin a Ph.D. in English.
3 Parallel Panels
16.00-17.30
PANEL 7
Reading in the Margins: Colonial and Postcolonial Readers from the
Reading Experience Database (RED Panel)
Chair: Daniel Allington
Panel overview: The papers for this panel derive from an AHRC funded project, ‘The
Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945’ (RED). Now in its second year, this project aims
to produce the first searchable, user-friendly web-based database of individual reading
experiences of British subjects at home and abroad, and overseas visitors to Britain, from the
period c.1450-1945. The project focuses on the experiences of both ‘famous readers’ and the
‘ordinary reader’, a figure unintentionally marginalised in the sub-discipline of the history of
reading because of a perceived lack of evidence. Available live as an open access database
since June 2007, RED offers a unique opportunity for examining not only individual reading
habits, but also common reading trends and for assessing changes in the make-up of
audiences and readerships of specific texts. The two papers and a presentation in this panel
explore different uses of RED, demonstrating how this new approach to the history of reading
tackles previous gaps in scholarship while presenting new, illuminating research on the
relationship between the reading of British subjects, during and after Empire.
(7a) Rosalind Crone
Making good colonials: The uses of reading on the mid-nineteenth century convict ship
Originally viewed as a simple method of transportation which would rid England of her
hardened criminal population, by the mid-nineteenth century, as a result in shifts in penal
ideology, the convict ship had been elevated to a more important position and came to be
regarded as an important penal stage for those sentenced to exile. As the bulk of prisoners’
incarceration now took place in England, and tickets-of-leave were increasingly distributed to
convicts on arrival in the Australian penal colonies, the convict ship represented the final
moment at which the character of the convict, through an intensive focus, might be effectively
reformed. Moreover, as treatment on board the convict ships had become much more humane,
to the extent that the prisoners’ irons were removed and they were allowed some freedom of
movement and association during the journey, keeping them passive and disciplined was
vital. To assist in this cause, clergymen or naval surgeons with an interest in performing
pastoral duties were employed on these ships. As their surviving personal accounts
demonstrate, they believed that reading was an essential tool in the process of reformation.
These men taught illiterate prisoners to read, supervised the allocation of appropriate reading
matter and read suitable works to ‘captivated’ audiences. They saw the fruits of their success
in the conversion narratives composed by the prisoners, in which the convicts repented of
their crimes, rejoiced in finding God, and expressed hopes for forgiveness. The clergymen
and surgeons hoped that they had created better men through this programme of reading, who
would work hard in the colonies and become worthy subjects of the Empire. However, in the
back of their minds always lurked questions regarding sincerity and hypocrisy.
Biography: Educated at the University of Queensland and at St. John’s College, Cambridge,
Rosalind Crone is an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Open University, where she
works on the RED project. With David Gange and Katy Jones, she is editor of New
Perspectives in British Cultural History (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Her main
research interest is in recovering nineteenth century working class readers.
(7b) Katie Halsey
“Macaulay’s Children”: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s literary legacy
Thomas Babington Macaulay notoriously believed that “a single shelf of a good European
library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Minute on Indian
Education, 1835). Although recent scholarship has suggested that Macaulay’s Minute was
less influential than had previously been assumed, the belief in the superiority of Western
literature (and the English language) over indigenous forms of writing was characteristic of
British educational policy on the subcontinent. This had long-lasting effects on the reading of
generations of Indian readers. In this paper, I will briefly discuss Macaulay’s attitude towards
the reading of a colonised people as manifested in the Minute on Indian Education in the light
of his attitudes towards reading more generally. Macaulay was a compulsive annotator, and I
will draw on his annotations and marginalia, now collected in the Reading Experience
Database, as well as his published works. I will then turn to Nirad C. Chaudhuri's reading of
(and response to) Macaulay, in his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), followed by
some literary examples to discuss the extent to which the debates about reading and language
compassed by Macaulay have influenced Indian literature. Indian nationalists have long
lamented Macaulay’s legacy, denouncing a cultural imperialism that ignored or devalued
literature written in languages other than English. But many Indian citizens still choose to
read and write in English, even if it is not their mother tongue, and most feel that the canon of
Indian literature should include that written by Indian writers in English. I will discuss three
authors often stigmatised in India as “Macaulay’s Children”: Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth
and Salman Rushdie, and three books that have been extremely popular with Western
readerships: Midnight’s Children (1980), The God of Small Things (1996) and A Suitable Boy
(1993) focusing on the issues of language choice, cultural heritage and nationalism in all
three.
Biography
Katie Halsey is an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Reading Experience Database
(RED) at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
She received her BA, M.Phil and Ph.D. from Cambridge, and a PGCE from London, and was
previously a Teaching Fellow in Romantic Literature at St Andrews University. She is
currently co-editing a collection of essays on the subject of conversation in the long
eighteenth century, and writing a monograph about Jane Austen’s readers. She has published
articles on a variety of subjects to do with nineteenth century readership.
(7c) Katie Halsey and Rosalind Crone
Demonstration of the Reading Experience Database
Our demonstration of the Reading Experience Database will focus on material relevant to the
papers in our panel and to the themes of the conference. We will show how the database
works, and the uses to which it might be put by anyone interested in the history of reading.
We will include discussion of some examples of Macaulay’s reading while in India, and
diaries written by chaplains and surgeons aboard convict ships, but will also indicate and
illustrate how RED might be used by literary scholars and book historians more generally. In
keeping with the overall theme of the conference, we will look particularly at evidence of the
reading of diasporic readers in RED, and at examples of resistant and complicit readings by
colonial and postcolonial subjects and citizens. Combining results from various different
types of searches can yield illuminating information. We will demonstrate how to find out
something about not only what people read, in what circumstances, but how they got hold of
reading material, and the many different uses to which they put their reading.
PANEL 8
Reading India: Local and Global Audiences
Chair: GJV Prasad
(8a) Vedita Cowaloosur
Writing and reading national identity in the language of the empire: in James Joyce’s
Dubliners and R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days.
My paper explores the relationship between the language of the empire and the post colonial
reading public, with focus on the short stories of James Joyce and R.K. Narayan. I discuss
why both chose to address an English-speaking audience though they had several other
options, and whether this choice was a deliberate attempt on their behalf to imply a specific
type of reading public. I examine to what extent they transcribe (i.e. report things as they are,
with no explanations or alterations to suit the foreign taste) or transcreate (i.e. interweave
“authentic” colours so as to make the story more relevant for the imagined audience) their
world for the readers potentially unacquainted with the world that they are describing. I also
discuss whether by doing so, they fall short of doing justice to the innateness of their nation
through this imported medium, and if the idiosyncrasies of the Irish and Indian reading
communities find valid expression in a language borrowed from a nation whose own history,
ideology, and indeed whose very essence could not have been more different to theirs. I end
by surveying the Wirkungsgeschichte of these short stories among the colonised and colonial
readership.
Biography
Vedita Cowaloosur is reading for a Taught MA in English Literary Studies at Durham
University. Her areas of interest vary from Old Norse to Modern Literature, but she has
always shown particular interest for postcolonial and language studies, given her origin from
a multi-lingual and ex-colonised country, Mauritius.
(8b) Maria Ridda
Reading ‘‘The Courter’: The ‘‘Imaginary Homelands’ of the Text
The paper analyses how postcolonial texts can be read as ‘imaginary homelands’. By
challenging the prevailing emphasis on London, it argues instead that ‘postcoloniality’ is a
condition and, as such, a postcolonial space can potentially be ‘anywhere’. Utilising Bakhtin’s
model of the chronotope, the paper argues that cities can be read in a mobile or performative
connotation, through the potential offered by fiction as an act of subversion.
This process is analysed in Rushdie’s ‘The Courter’, a short story in which the narrator
locates his ‘self’ in the interstitial space created by fiction. Focusing on the creative aspect of
literature reinforced by Bakhtin’s model, the paper analyses how the conception of home in
Rushdie’s narrative can be read as a space situated on the threshold or limits of India and
England. The text can thus be interpreted as a rewriting and recreation of ‘home’ through
fiction. The paper concludes that the creation and reading of these ‘imaginary homelands’,
rather than constituting an erasure of contingency, reassert the meanings of space, place and
locality as important dimensions of reference. They allow the re-imagining by both the reader
and the author of the connection with the ‘lost country’ and the process of reconstructing the
self in any location. Texts provide the key to understanding the creation of a liminal space
between India and England. Therefore, as Doring asserts, ‘arrival in [this space] becomes a
textual process’.
Biography
Maria Ridda is in the second year of her PhD. She is being supervised by Professor
Abdulrazak Gurnah. Her thesis concerns the mapping of transnational urban spaces in South
Asian diasporic texts.
(8c) Florian Stadtler
Reading Hindi cinema – Rushdie’s hero and the postcolonial Indian State
This paper examines two readers in fiction and how they read filmic texts in order to
comprehend their own ‘being in the world’. I discuss Salman Rushdie’s The Moors Last Sigh
and Shalimar the Clown and how the hero and heroine of the respective novels ‘read’ two
filmic intertexts from Hindi cinema’s canon Mother India and Mughal-E-Azam. Moraes
Zogoiby draws parallels between his own mother and Mother India and in the process
rewrites her as an urban, syncretic and eclectic version of Mother India. Boonyi, on the other
hand reinterprets her life by making analogies to Anarkali from Mughal-E-Azam. In both
instances the films become a prism through which post-independence India is interpreted. The
paper examines the status of both films in the novel, which become the trope through which
Rushdie articulates an ideal of India as free, secular, syncretic and democratic. I argue that
reading in this instance becomes for Boonyi and Moraes an act of resistance against
fundamentalism and a unitary interpretation of Indian Nationhood. In this respect, Rushdie
deploys Hindi cinema as a text through which he articulates the Nehruvian ideal of the Indian
Nation and holds its postcolonial elite to account, yet Hindi Cinema also becomes the idiom
through which ‘India’ is articulated for his local, global and diasporic audiences.
Biography
Florian Stadtler completed his PhD in the School of English at the University of Kent in 2007.
He is currently working at the Open University as a postdoctoral research assistant to Susheila
Nasta on the cross-institutional AHRC-funded research project ‘Making Britain: South Asian
Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950’. He has published on Vikram Chandra, Salman
Rushdie, and Hindi Cinema. His main research interests are in South-Asian Writing in
English, the Postcolonial novel, and Indian popular cinema.
PANEL 9
Reception after 9/11
Chair: David Murphy
(9a) April Biccum
Marketing Development: Communicating Nation After Empire
In the last 30 years or so the UK has undergone a series of shocks to its conception of itself
that configure easily around its former colonial legacy. A debate over British values and this
civil society push for social cohesion figures largely around the crisis in the asylum system
and the tightening of immigration controls, global terror wars and internal transnational
threats, Britain’s role in the ‘new’ international development agenda and the occupation in
Iraq. All of this anticipates what I’m calling a ‘crisis’ in Britain’s national narrative in which
a debate over British cultural values, and a commemoration of the Bicentenary of the slave
trade, occurs while the ghost of empire lurks within debates in international studies. It is
within this context that the crisis in national narrative is yielding to the marketing of the
development agenda in the areas of education, civil society and media. This paper examines
recent attempts to popularise development and makes the case first, that development
awareness raising is a significant new feature of the development apparatus since 1997 and
second, that this mobilisation has to be understood within the a framework of “subject
production” underpinned by claims within postcolonial theory. This paper deploys
postcolonial theory to demonstrate how mainstream development discourse in the UK can be
read in exactly the same way as colonial discourse, and examines how the domestic discourse
of development, produced through policy documents, promotional literature, NGO activity,
educational material, and television programming functions to narrative the nation by
producing the narrative boundary between ‘developed’ and ‘un(under)developed’.
Biography
April R. Biccum is Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at
Lancaster University. In addition to her forthcoming book titled Marketing Development:
Global Citizenship and the politics of empire (Routledge 2009), April has recently published
in Development and Change (2007) and is due to appear in an edited volume with James
Curry titled Development and Colonialism: the Past in the Present.
(9b) Jamal Eddine Benhayoun
Beyond Postcolonialism: The Making and Reception of theory in the Post-9/11 Era
The reception and celebration of postcolonial theory as a triumphant discourse over the last
two decades within academia seems to be reasonably justified. Postcolonialism came as an
answer to many of the poignant social, political, and historical questions that the “new critic”,
the structuralist, and the poststructuralist never thought were part of their immediate
obligations to raise or answer. With the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978),
postcolonialism gained the intellectual authority to force issues of colonialism, power,
resistance, liberation, and otherness into academic debates and exchanges. However, the
sudden shift in contexts as precipitated by the terrorist events of 11th September, 2001 and
after make it more pressing today than ever before to review and challenge both the inveterate
exercises of reception as well as the contents and pertinence of the various theoretical models
elaborated and deployed at successive stages by leading postcolonial critics toward the end of
the twentieth century. My paper will argue that the post-9/11 context as defined by US global
supremacy, the new and violent regional conflicts in the Middle East, global terrorism, new
economies, and globalisation make it imperative today for the contemporary critic or
philosopher to seek to move beyond postcolonial theory into the study, interpretation, and
analysis of the present. If the connection between colonialism and discourse represented the
real hub of postcolonial discourse, the cross-references to cultures, religions, and acts of
terrorism today will certainly dominate public debates within and outside academia for at
least a few more years to come.
Biography
Jamal Eddine Benhayoun currently holds the position of Professor of English and
Comparative Cultural Studies at Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetuan, Morocco. He is
the founder member of the Research Group for Moroccan Studies in English (REGMOSE)
and author of numerous articles and essays, in Arabic and English, on cultural criticism,
Arabic literature, and current world affairs.
(9c) Kathy-Ann Tan
Reading after 9/11: Diasporic Identities in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) and
Mohsim Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
In the last two decades, literary and cultural studies have increasingly reflected an interest in
the basic connection between space and notions of identity and belonging (cf. Arjun
Appadurai’s notion of “scapes” and Anthony Giddens’ concept of “late modernity”). My
paper deals with two novels by diasporic authors – Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and Mohsim
Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist – whose protagonists are, in Kunzru’s own words,
“dislocated individuals seeking nodes of connectivity” to one another and to their
surroundings. I argue that reading these novels within a post-9/11 framework – namely, one
where political discourses on terror(ism) are intertwined with a diasporic ‘aesthetics’ of space,
identity and alterity – raises valid questions concerning the politics of reading and
interpretation. In particular, I will address the following: How are diasporic notions of
selfhood and identity constructed in the novels within a post-9/11, high-tech, global and
diasporic context, and what role does the reader play in this process? What are the politics of
reading and interpretation that both novels suggest? Ultimately, I argue, these two novels
offer alternative reading strategies that examine the complexities of notions of selfhood,
identity politics, and ideologies of belonging within a 21st century framework.
Biography
Kathy-Ann Tan (M.A. (Cantab.)) teaches at the University of Tuebingen, Germany. She
recently completed her Ph.D. thesis on the experimental “poetics of autobiography” in the
works of Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino, and is currently working on a book
on globalization and the contemporary American novel.
Thursday 4th September
3 Parallel Panels
9.00-10.30
PANEL 10
Diverse Readerships in Africa
Chair: Abigail Ward
(10a) Gail Low
`The scramble for Africa?': A comparative assessment of the African Writers Series and
the Three Crowns Series
The African Writers and Three Crowns Series were paperback series launched in the early
sixties by Heinemann Education Books and Oxford University Press for a developing
educational and textbook in Africa on the cusp of political independence. The two series had
much in common: both played had a significant impact on the dissemination of (particularly)
West African writing to a local and an international audience; both imprints were produced
and edited out of London/Oxford in their first decade and lobbied hard to put their published
texts on prescription lists. But both imprints also entered into publishing original writing on
the strength of the work that was to emerge out of (particularly) West Africa at this time, and
achieved a series identity that attracted what are now established and canonical African
writers into their fold. Publishing as they did on the interface between educational and literary
books, both the African Writers and Three Crowns Series also afforded their respective
publishing houses much `symbolic capital' in the scramble for Anglophone educational
marketplace in Africa. The former was (of course) more successful than the latter. This
paper attempts an assessment of two like-minded metropolitan-controlled series that produced
and circulated literary and educational texts for an African marketplace by describing some of
the internal company discussion on the series, comparing some editorial policies and
interventions. In doing so, the paper will attempt to address the difficult relationship between
educational and elite publications, and the series' problematic and contradictory attempts to
produce and market their wares as both education textbooks and general/trade publications.
Biography
Gail Low is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Dundee University. Her research
interests include Post-war British cultural history and literature; Publishing History especially metropolitan publishing of Anglophone West African and Caribbean writers in the
postwar period; Publishers Series (African Writers Series, Three Crowns Series, Hutchinson
New Authors); Black British Writing. She is the author of White Skins/Black Masks:
Representation and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1996) and co-editor of A Black British
Canon? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Dr Low is presently writing a monograph on the rise of
Anglophone writing from the Caribbean and West Africa in the UK between 1950-1970 to be
published with Routledge in 2008.
(10b) David Richards
Staging the word: the spectacle of the text in African literature
‘The spectacle of the text’ refers to the presence of writing within African literature. By this, I
do not mean allusions to other writings or quotations from other sources (although they may
also be a part of what I do mean). My ambitions are much simpler than to try to trace the
networks of influences, borrowings and citations which have contributed to the writings of the
three authors I will refer to. My title alludes, not to texts as resources, but, quite simply, to
texts as objects: books, papers, documents, scripts. The content of these textual objects is, of
course, of significance, but I am primarily concerned with what their ‘external’ physical
presence in African writings may signify, rather than what their ‘internal’ meanings may
contribute. Indeed, so ‘contentless’ is this notion of the ‘text’ that it does not matter much that
some of these texts do not have titles or authors. I wish to address instead how writings are,
quite literally, ‘seen’ in African literature: how a space or ‘stage’ is created within African
writings where textual objects are inspected and what that scrutiny may reveal about the
nature of African readerships.
Biography
David Richards is Professor of English Studies at the University of Stirling where he is the
Director of the Stirling Centre of Commonwealth Studies. His chief research interests are in
the areas of colonial and postcolonial literature, anthropology, art history and cultural
theory.His published work includes studies of individual writers, the representation of other
cultures in literature, anthropology and art, cultural production in post-colonial cities, and
discourses of the ‘archaic’ in colonial and postcolonial cultures. He is the author of Masks of
Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (CUP, 1995)
(10c) Elizabeth le Roux
Does the North read the South? The case of African scholarly publishers
Questions of who reads who and who reads what are closely linked to power relations in the
world. Discussions around access and the ethics of access to research and publications often
look at the problem in terms of an information divide between North and South, or developed
and developing nations: the South lacks access to books and journals, and is therefore falling
behind in the global knowledge economy. An oft-cited figure, for instance, shows Africa’s
consumption of publications at around 12%, but its production at just 2%. But the other side
of the coin is equally important: given that knowledge production and publishing is so low in
the South, then do researchers and scholars in the developed nations have access to material
produced and published in developing areas? This is a distinct challenge for publishers
situated in the South. In this paper, I will look at case studies of a number of African scholarly
publishers. Specifically, the focus will be on what audiences (local, global and diasporic) the
texts produced and disseminated by these publishers are reaching, and what tactics and
strategies are being employed to improve global distribution.
Biography
Elizabeth le Roux is Director of the University of South Africa Press. She has a Master’s
degree in publishing and a BA (Hons) in English and French literature from the University of
Pretoria. Elizabeth was previously the Director of Publications at the Africa Institute of South
Africa. She has also worked as a freelance translator and editor, and is a member of South
African Translators Institute. She has published several articles on publishing, literature and
the media in Africa.
PANEL 11
The Ethics of Reading
Chair: David Farrier
(11a) Hilda Härgestam-Strandberg
‘The Ethics of Diaspora Encounters’: A Deconstructive/Ethical Reading of Nuruddin
Farah’s Novels
This paper responds to a contemporary need for serious reflection upon the origin, journey
and goal of globalization. With a growing interdependence in a world increasingly globally
interrelated exists simultaneously a strong emphasis on particular identities. In fact, many of
the challenges connected to a shared value-system seem rooted in the perception of Self and
Other, and the ensuing loyalties and affiliations. How are the issue of identity, affiliations and
loyalties – to family or nation or region – to be reconciled with global responsibilities? With
postcolonial and ethical literary criticism as theoretical framework and via a deconstructive
reading of Nuruddin Farah’s novels – in my use a ‘textual practice of ethical demand’
(Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas) – I explore Farah’s
renderings of diaspora encounters via the ‘home-coming’ Somali subject. I will argue that
Farah uses the notion of ‘loyalty’ to describe, debate and contest established boundaries and
structures, including the ideas of nation, ethnicity, gender, clan, etc, as well as to question
ideas of identity, belonging and kinship. In doing so Farah calls his reader to (re)negotiate
loyalties, thereby opening up alternative vistas that strengthen the foundation for new political
and ethical perspectives and attitudes expressed in private as well as public spheres.
Biography
Hilda Härgestam-Strandberg is a PhD candidate in English literature at the Department of
Language Studies, Umeå University, Sweden. She began her studies in English/Literature in
1997, and inspired by interspersed experiences of living/travelling in areas like N. Ireland,
Israel, former Yugoslavia, and the southern parts of Africa – her main research interests lie
with matters pertaining to postcolonial and ethical criticism.
(11b) Katherine Hallemeier
Sympathetic Shame in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year
Recent literary theory has posited an ethics of reading centered on the circulation of shame—
a feeling that, scholars have suggested, is preferable to the sympathy propagated by the likes
of the sentimental novel. Whereas sympathy constitutes a feeling for an other, the argument
goes, and so risks denying the other's significant difference, shame heightens one’s awareness
of one’s vulnerability before an other, and so creates a space for the acknowledgment of both
dependency and difference. My paper examines this seeming contrast between an ethics of
sympathy and an ethics of shame through the lens of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Diary of a
Bad Year. Coetzee’s novels have prompted any number of critical reflections on how feelings
of sympathy or feelings of shame mediate one’s relationship with others’ suffering, and how
those feelings are generated by the form of the narratives themselves. My reading, however,
investigates how sympathy works through shame and shame works through sympathy both in
and through the two recent novels. By questioning the contemporary tendency to draw a
strict distinction between sympathy and shame, I also qualify the postcolonial literature and
theory that has sought to elevate and disseminate shame as part of an ethical response to
legacies of empire.
Biography: Katherine Hallemeier is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University in Kingston,
Canada.
PANEL 12
Reading Cinema and Visual Culture
Chair: Betsy Fuller
(12a) Sally Jane Thompson
Reading Cosmopolitan Tension in Contemporary Graphic Narrative
Sequential art has experienced something of a renaissance during the past few years, due in
no small part to the increased flow of imported titles from Japan opening up a wider audience
than has previously been associated with comics in the west. Now that Japanese manga
influences have been internalised to the extent where sustained output is coming from western
comic artists hybridizing styles and influences, it is possible to examine how the innate
tensions of cosmopolitanism relate to contemporary graphic literature, and it’s suitability as a
medium for addressing the questions and issues related to the globalization from which it
springs. The paper examines several works, such as Craig Thompson’s Carnet de Voyage
and Neil Babra’s Taj Mahal, positing that, due to the hybridized visual background of
contemporary graphic novels, as well as the duality of word and image through which they
present their ideas, contemporary sequential work should be approached as an ideal form for
examining the ambivalence and tensions inherent in a globalized environment.
Biography
Sally Jane Thompson is an MA student in art and design at the University of Derby, working
largely in illustration. Having lived in five countries, her interest in ambiguous cultural spaces
and identities informs both her research and practice.
(12b) Claudia Sternberg
Surviving Sabu: Productive (Post)Colonial Spectatorship
This contribution combines a reading of Ian Iqbal Rashid’s award-winning short film
Surviving Sabu (UK 1997, 15 min) with general reflections on the position of postcolonial
subjects vis-à-vis cinematic representation, film history, stardom and fandom, spectatorship
and filmmaking practice. The short film centres on a young British Asian filmmaker and his
first generation migrant father who express and negotiate their conflicting views on life in
Britain, sexuality and the cinema. The son is the director of a film within the film in which he
blends his father’s migratory biography and admiration for the Indian actor Sabu. Surving
Sabu juxtaposes the father’s ‘enduring fandom’ (Annette Kuhn) and the son’s critical analysis
of Sabu’s roles in Empire films and Oriental fantasies; it also addresses (nostalgic) memories
of movie-going and movie-watching which bring father and son together despite their
differences. The short film offers a critique of colonialist and Orientalist representation, but
complicates spectatorship by showing the multiplicity and differentiation of audiences and
viewing positions. Furthermore, Rashid adds the dimension of filmmaking to emphasise
possibilities of empowerment and productive response. The paper will argue that by aligning
the diasporic characters – who metacinematically double up as spectator/fan/film
historian/film critic/film subject/director – with the film’s viewer, a bond is created which can
be regarded as a strategy of migratory and/or diasporic aesthetics and, in more general terms,
serves to underpin the significance of migrant and diasporic cinematic practice.
NB: Rashid’s short film can be accessed and viewed in full through the BFI’s Screenonline
website, but only via registered UK schools, colleges, universities and libraries:
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1180371/
Biography
Claudia Sternberg is lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and was
coordinator of the AHRC Research Network Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in
Contemporary Europe (2006-2008). She co-authored Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and
Asian British Film since the 1990s (2004) and is co-editor of and contributor to European
Cinema in Motion (Wallflower, 2009).
(12c) Mantra Roy
West Rules, East follows: A postcolonial reading of 300, Borat, and Blood Diamond
Cinema is a lucrative and widely popular source of entertainment that reaches millions of
people across the world. Thus, a variety of themes, cultures, and skills travels internationally.
And so do representations of peoples. In my paper I shall argue, from a postcolonial
perspective, that Hollywood perpetuates a Eurocentric vision in the way it portrays the Other,
a non-Euro-American people and/or culture. Drawing on three popular films of 2006 and
2007, I shall discuss how the notion of the West’s natural superiority over non-Western
cultures is kept alive by directors of 300, Borat, and Blood Diamond. While in 300, Zach
Snyder demonstrates the racial superiority of the white Spartans in resisting the Persian army,
Sacha Cohen, in a more contemporary setting, illustrates how Kazaks need to rise above their
uncivilized state by learning from the more advanced Americans in his film, Borat. Edward
Zwick, on the other hand, reiterates the age-old white colonizing fantasy of rescuing nonwhite peoples from their own depravity in Blood Diamond. These films made millions of
dollars and had audiences thronging the theaters – but at the cost of misrepresenting some
groups of people. I conclude with the need to unlearn such Eurocentric ideas in order to
represent non-Euro-American peoples more ethically.
Biography
Mantra Roy is a PhD candidate in the English department of the University of South Florida.
In her Dissertation she is investigating possible parallels, similarities, and influences between
the literatures of African Americans in the United States and Dalits (former Untouchables) in
India by employing a postcolonial feminist perspective.
2 Parallel Panels
11.00-12.00
PANEL 13
Reading Black British
Chair: Brian Rock
(13a) Ying-ying Hung
On Whose Britishness?: Multicultural Exoticism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing argument surrounding multiculturalism, an issue
which preoccupies critics’ analytic focus on Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. In the postimperial
and postwar Britain, the concept of Britishness has been challenged because of the mass
migration from the British Empire and Commonwealth and the rapid flourish of the
descendents of Caribbean and Asian immigrants. Throughout the novel, the question of
authentic British identity haunts readers. While the heterogeneity and hybridity are shown to
be the essences of multicultural Britain, Zadie Smith keeps on reversing the center (the white
British) and the periphery (the black British) with parody of Britishness by representing the
immigrant characters’ uncertainty about who is authentically British and their doubt about
whether multicultural Britain as a happy homeland is their destiny. I would argue that the
novel commodifies the concepts like diasporic identities, Englishness and multiculturalism
while Smith deploys a strategic exoticism that destabilizes the picture of happy multicultural
land. The exoticism, as Graham Huggan has defined, is a “global mode of mass-market
consumption” that reconsiders the distinction between the center and the periphery. This
paper aims to analyze the exoticism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
Biography
Ying-ying Hung, a PhD candidate in English at National Taiwan Normal University, is
working on her dissertation entitled “Re-imagining Englishness: Postwar Diasporic British
Fiction.” She also teaches at the department of Applied Foreign Language in The Overseas
Chinese Institute of Technology.
(13b) Abigail Ward
‘They can refuse to buy my book, and I’ll starve’: Slavery and Audience in the Work of
David Dabydeen
David Dabydeen’s works reveal his anxieties about audience and received readers for his
texts, drawing comparisons between the eighteenth-century slave narrator’s reliance on the
abolition market and twentieth-century readers’ desire to consume books on slavery.
Dabydeen attempts to question the motivation for, and ethics involved in, exploring the past
of slavery. What, he asks, are the consequences of such acts of representation? Criticism of
literary audience and the appetite for the ‘exotic’ finds its strongest articulation in A Harlot’s
Progress (1999). In this novel Dabydeen critiques the genre of the slave narrative, alongside
which is suggested the continuing inadequacy of representations of black people within
Britain, still largely typified by their reliance on stereotype and myth. In returning
imaginatively to the history of slavery, Dabydeen writes from an especially troubled position:
aware of the literary and historical gaps surrounding this past and peculiarly sensitive to the
impossibility of such an act of representation; in particular, of the inappropriateness of
attempting to ‘speak for’ either Indian indentured labourers or African slaves. He finds
himself wrestling with this conundrum as much as with earlier, and inadequate, literary or
historical precedents. The works of Dabydeen I explore in this paper point to his compulsion
to return to the history of slavery, yet are characterised by his anxieties generated by the act of
representing this past, illustrative of the crisis of representation at the heart of his writing.
Biography
Abigail Ward is Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She is
finishing a monograph on representations of slavery in works by Caryl Phillips, David
Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar, and has articles published in the journals Moving Worlds, The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Other work
includes an essay on D’Aguiar’s Bloodlines and a chapter on psychological formulations of
the postcolonial in the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. by John McLeod.
PANEL 14
Reading the Past
Chair: Sheree Mack
(14a) Gayle Nunley
Emilia Pardo Bazán's Forty Days at the Exhibition (1900): Reading the World from PostImperial Spain
In my presentation, I propose to examine the reading of world cultures in Forty Days at the
Exhibition, a chronicle of the 1900 Paris World's Fair by Spanish novelist Emilia Pardo
Bazán, in light of Spain's then-recent loss of its remaining colonial holdings in the SpanishAmerican War of 1898. Imbedded within this ostensibly unassuming collection of touristic
impressions lies a clear sense of international political dynamics, including pointed reflections
on Spanish history and societal circumstances in juxtaposition with the identity discourses
proffered by other exhibitor nations (in particular, its former colonies and the then-ascendant
imperial power of France), thus contributing to the dialogue of national self-examination that
accompanied Spain's passage from the status of diminished imperial state to its post-imperial
phase. By focusing on the dynamics and politics of display played out across the Fairground
map, Pardo Bazán provides her readers a fascinating twist on imperial stylistics in which the
framing of national identity narrative in terms of the exhibitionary impulse --as product of
cultural marketing-- offers strong lessons about the dilemmas and opportunities inherent in
reading the modern world and, simultaneously, a model for realigning Spain's own self-image
in response to its changing role on the international stage.
Biography
Gayle Nunley is Chair of Romance Languages at the University of Vermont (USA). She
completed her Ph.D at Princeton University with a specialization in modern Spanish
literature. Her publications include Scripted Geographies: Travel Writings by NineteenthCentury Spanish Authors, and she is currently completing a book on the representation of
cultural difference in turn-of-the-20th-century Spain.
(14b) Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz
Chipaya mytho-history: Constructing the past, the present and the future
The Chipaya people, who speak their own language, live in the south-western Altiplano plain
of Bolivia, in a precarious ecological environment and extreme climate. Throughout history
they have been marginalised and despised. Their ecological, economic and social isolation
has led them to develop a strong ethnic consciousness which has been reinforced by
anthropological studies and, more recently, also by Bolivian politics.
A 'story' they all know and tell, and which has been documented since the earliest contact
period in colonial times, is the myth of their origin, which includes the subjects of
Christianisation, territory and neighbours. In this paper I will present the myth and address the
question if and how their 'reading' of the myth is relevant for their present life. I will also
reflect on the 'meta-level' of the researchers' interpretation of the reading and the means they
use to construct their reading.
Biography
Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Sáenz is a lecturer in the School of Languages, Cultures and
Religions at Stirling University. Her research interests focus on Andean indigenous
languages, from a formal as well as ethnolinguistic point of view (Quechua, Aymara,
Chipaya); prehispanic, colonial and modern ethnohistory of the Andean peoples; methods in
ethnohistory; microhistory; and the language of Christianisation.
3 Parallel Panels
15.30-17.00
PANEL 15
Reading Rushdie: Reconfiguring Orientalism
Chair: Bethan Benwell
(15a) Yael Maurer
Rushdie's Literary Road Signs in Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Rushdie's 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is arguably his most impassioned hymn
to the power of story telling to create worlds. In this fairy tale like text, Rushdie constructs
contesting textual worlds which mirror the "real world" and fight for domination. The novel
dramatizes the process of reading as a navigational act thus alerting the reader to the process
of signification or of generating meaning from multiple linguistic signs. In this paper, I focus
on Kashmir, the Edenic locale and place of longing in Rushdie's fiction. In Haroun, Kashmir
appears only as a partially erased road sign. I claim that Rushdie reinvents both "Kashmir"
and "India" as textual and fantastic sites. He offers a provisional happy ending to his tale,
reflecting his wishful projection for the future of the troubled nations of India and Pakistan.
Rushdie celebrates the powers of language over the attempts to silence it. He winks at his
readers' wish for happy endings by reminding them that in art, as well as in real life, all they
do is "cheer things up for a while".
Biography
Yael Maurer wrote her dissertation on Rushdie's fiction at Tel Aviv University's Department
of English and American Studies. Courses: Postcolonial Fiction, Postmodern Fiction,
Contemporary American Fiction. Conferences: Two MMLA conferences, a conference on
Colonial and Postcolonial Spaces at Kingston, the Forgiveness Conference in Salzburg.
(15b) Gen’ichiro Itakura
‘I have become death’: Reading Shalimar the Clown and Post-9/11 Anglo-American
Sensibilities
This paper explores the reception of Salman Rushdie’s ‘post-9/11’ novel, Shalimar the Clown
(2005), and the role of predominantly Anglo-American interpretive communities. Primarily
targeting the Anglo-American audience, the novel is supposed to meet their expectation
through the author’s signature style––an odd blend of the supernatural and the political as
well as a hint of the ‘exotic’. Shalimar contains anything, ranging from telepathy and
witchcraft to a tightrope walker turned Islamic terrorist and the Indo-Pakistani dispute over
the territory of Kashmir. Despite its generally favourable reception, the novel has elicited two
types of criticisms: its ‘magic realism’ is viewed as banal on the one hand, and its political
observation as superficial on the other. Indeed, some ‘exotic’ elements are adulterated with
Western (pop) cultural clichés and therefore look banal, and the melodramatic story of
personal revenge is marred, instead of being enriched, by the insertion of trite aphorisms and
sketchy pictures of actual political events. However, the novel’s perceived flaw can be better
read as a mirror held up to Anglo-American readers in that it points to what they expect from
Rushdie in the 2000s.
Biography
Dr Gen’ichiro Itakura is Associate Professor at Chukyo University, Japan, and is currently
taking a research leave at University College London, UK. He has published on
contemporary British fiction, and his paper on Zadie Smith co-won the English Literary
Society of Japan’s Young Researcher’s Award for 2006.
(15c) Daniel Allington
Reading Rushdie in Bradford and London: Hayden White, Stephen Labov, and a Story
about a Book
Factually unverifiable ‘anecdotal evidence’ has been fundamental to many histories of
reading, and is being systematically catalogued by the Reading Experience Database.
However, the question of how to interpret it is controversial. For example, Martin Lyons and
Lucy Taksa largely base their classic Australian Readers Remember (1992) on
autobiographical testimony, but go so far as to describe that form of data as ‘a form of fiction’
(13); Jonathan Rose, on the other hand, gives such testimony an entirely realist interpretation
in his equally classic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). In this
paper, I will argue that reading experiences demand to be understood in terms of narrative
structure, since it is only as narrative that they can become objects of knowledge. In
particular, I will show how Labov’s categories for the analysis of oral narrative and White’s
typology of historical narratives can be applied to an article published in 1989 in the
politically and culturally conservative British weekly magazine The Spectator and purporting
to recount a series of reading experiences relating to The Satanic Verses. My analysis
suggests that the real question is not whether or not these reading experiences ‘really
happened’ but how their representation functioned within the context of contemporary
debates. It shows us not so much how Salman Rushdie’s novel was read as how the meaning
of the act of reading that novel was constructed within a specific context and in relation to
specific interests.
Biography
Daniel Allington is a Research Associate at the Open University working on an AHRCfunded project on the Discourse of Book Groups. His research interests include reception
theory, book history and the history of reading. He was recently awarded his PhD from the
University of Stirling for his thesis on ‘Discourse and the Reception of Literature:
Problematising Reader Response’. He takes up a lectureship in English Language and
Applied Linguistic at the OU in November.
PANEL 16
Writers and their Reading
Chair: Baidik Bhattacharya
(16a) Sunayani Bhattacharya
The Platonic Satyagrahi: A (Re)visioning of the West in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj
This paper hopes to analyse the influence of Platonic thought on Gandhian ideology
and on the construction of Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in particular. It is
interesting to note that for Gandhi, the West symbolizes both the hegemonic power
that needs to be resisted as well as clues to forming that pattern of resistance. In the
Hind Swaraj Gandhi refers directly to Plato’s Apology and draws upon it to create an
idea that is at the core of this seminal text—the crucial moral link between spiritual
and social order. It is possible to read Socrates as establishing the model for the
satyagrahi—one who is willing to suffer physical deprivation as a means of resisting
the dominant discourse. Such a reading, in turn, allows Gandhi to resist and subvert
the Occident from within by appropriating the fundamental tenets of Western
philosophy to address a peculiarly colonized situation. Reading itself becomes a
means of resistance for the colonized as the West can no longer posit a single, unified,
dominant meaning. I wish to explore this peculiar juxtaposition of the orient and the
occident which finds its ultimate expression, in Gandhian thought, in the doctrine of
the supremacy of the conscience over the corrupt/corruptible corporeal body. To
perhaps understand this conjoining, one needs to “re-read” the vision of the west from
the perspective of the colonized satyagrahi.
Biography
Sunayani Bhattacharya is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in English Literature from
the University of South Florida. He completed his B.A in English from Jadavpur University,
India. His areas of interest include postcolonial theory and contemporary rewriting of British
canonical texts.
(16b) Alberto Fernández Carbajal
Reading the Raj: The Legacies of E. M. Forster’s The Hill of Devi in Ruth Prawer
Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust
In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s novel Heat and Dust (1975) a nameless narrator visits India in the
1970s with the only guidance of the letters written by her step-grandmother Olivia in the
1920s. Olivia’s letters establish from the very beginning complex intertextual relations in
Jhabvala’s novel, and point to the ways in which Jhabvala herself is a reader of E. M.
Forster’s letters in The Hill of Devi (1953). In this paper, I argue that Jhabvala is both critical
of and sympathetic towards Forster’s flawed liberal-humanist lens: Forster’s attempt at
connecting with India cannot surmount the impossibility of being explicit about issues such as
homosexuality and court scandals, which Jhabvala probingly and teasingly explores in her
novel. In addition, Jhabvala’s narrator is treated with irony: her contrived enactment of
Olivia’s life is a pale imitation of the text of the past. I suggest that it is only when the
narrator steps out of the boundaries of Olivia’s (and Forster’s) script, by means of exploring
the India that exists outside of Forster’s grasp, that her (and Jhabvala’s) relationship with the
country becomes truly unique. Hence, reading Forster’s work on India is a problematic yet
enabling legacy to readers searching for the Raj.
Biography
Alberto Fernández Carbajal is a PhD candidate at the School of English, University of Leeds.
His thesis deals with E. M. Forster’s legacy in postcolonial writing, and it examines the work
of authors such as Paul Scott, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, J. G. Farrell, Anita Desai, Salman
Rushdie and Zadie Smith.
(16c) John McLeod
Vido, not Sir Vidia: Caryl Phillips reading V. S. Naipaul
This paper explores the work of Caryl Phillips as constituting an of act reading V. S. Naipaul,
and proceeds from an identification of Phillips’s reading of Naipaul’s work as a crucial
component of his activities as a writer. When V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2001, Phillips wrote passionately about the significance of this achievement for
the Caribbean. Yet in his article he struggled with his conflicting feelings towards Naipaul,
whom Phillips called ‘an ungenerous bastard’ who had suggested that the Caribbean ‘can
produce nothing of value’, yet whom Phillips also praised for ‘his ability to synthesise, in
almost equal part, his fiction and non-fiction – the one genre informing the other both
structurally and thematically – [which] has been both original in construction and fascinating
to witness’. As I shall argue, more than any other of those Caribbean writers working in the
immediate postwar years and who constitute an important literary generation prior to
Phillips’s, Naipaul is perhaps the most important for Phillips – not least because of Phillips’s
continued struggle between his admiration as a reader for Naipaul’s achievement on the page
and his disdain for Naipaul’s famous pronouncements regarding the haphazard and futile
‘half-made’ societies of the Caribbean. It is revealing that Phillips has adapted Naipaul’s The
Mystic Masseur for the screen, while his longest essay by far in A New World Order concerns
Naipaul. To be blunt: Phillips cannot stop reading Naipaul. In my paper I shall explore how
reading Naipaul’s work has served as an important procedure for Phillips that has helped him
to formulate and write about a world in which he is more often than not a traveller, moving
between places which are viewed from a displaced vantage. I shall discuss Phillips’s second
novel, A State of Independence (1987), as evidencing the results of Phillips’s reading of
Naipaul. As I shall argue, this novel constitutes a rewriting of Naipaul’s work which results
from a compassionate but critical readerly encounter that is both vitally political and ethical.
Biography
John McLeod is Reader in Postcolonial and Disapora Literatures at the University of Leeds.
He works primarily in the field of postcolonial studies, and has particular interest in
postcolonial representations of London, England and Britain. He is the author of Postcolonial
London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge 2004); Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester
University Press 2000) and most recently the Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies
(Routledge, 2007). He also co-edited The Revision of Englishness (Manchester University
Press 2004).
PANEL 17
Reading the Newspaper Archives
Chair: Florian Stadtler
(17a) Srila Nayak
Colonial and Nationalist Pedagogies: Reading the Newspaper Archive (1865-1900)
My paper will focus on the ways in which native newspapers in India were read by colonial
officials and administrators during the nineteenth century. Post-colonial scholars have argued
that nineteenth-century empire presented a primarily pedagogic justification, and the latter’s
political and epistemological functions were amassed to educate colonial subjects in the
“material and moral conditions necessary for self-government.” I argue that educational
reforms instituted in nineteenth century India by the colonial administration had a direct
impact upon the reception of native newspapers by the English in this period. Native
newspapers, both in vernacular and English languages, were read as integral to the tutelary
aims of empire. My paper positions native newspapers within the nineteenth century imperial
discourse of education. To that extent, I try to show that an imperial hermeneutics aligned the
native press with the overall pedagogic aims of empire. My paper will also explore the
concurrent development of a discourse of surveillance of the native press, and will argue that
imperial views of the press that constructed a distinction between a proper pedagogy for the
reading public and the sort of “half-education” that fostered anti-colonial nationalism,
competed with a developing nationalist discourse that saw native newspapers as crucial to the
education of the populace in the sentiment of nationalism.
Biography
Srila Nayak received her Ph.D in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon
University (Pittsburgh) in May 2007, and is currently an assistant professor in the Department
of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Her teaching and research interests
lie in British modernism and nineteenth and twentieth century colonial and post-colonial
narratives.
(17b) Jonathan Hensher
Colonialist caricature and the reader – challenges and approaches.
How should we engage with caricature of the sort found in cartoons, advertising or comics
from the colonial era? What was the role of this essentially marginal, paratextual material in
structuring readers’ interpretations of more extended examples of colonial textual production?
To what extent did the aggressively overt presence of degrading stereotypes in these
caricatural texts exacerbate the reception of analogous, but far more attenuated
representations found elsewhere, such as in films and novels? Drawing on material published
in French magazines and newspapers from the first decades of the twentieth century, this
paper seeks both to contribute to the creation of an integrated account of colonial readership
and to engage with ongoing debates surrounding colonial nostalgia and the ethical position of
the contemporary reader vis-à-vis colonialist cultural production.
Biography
Dr Jonathan Hensher teaches in French Studies at the University of Manchester, and has
published articles on book illustration and text-image relations including, most recently, a
study of the representation of the Oriental other in eighteenth-century editions of the 1001
Nights.
Friday 5th September
3 Parallel Panels
10.00-11.00
PANEL 18
Reading After the Roman Empire
Chair: Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar Saenz
(18a) William E. Mierse
Roman Archaism in a Provincial Capital: the Colonial Forum at Augusta Emerita
At Augusta Emerita (modern Merida), the ancient capital of Lusitania, the western most
province of the Roman Empire, stand the remains of a forum erected some time in the middle
of the first century C.E. and decorated with sculpted relief figures of caryatids and tondi of
Jupiter Ammon and Medusa arranged across the attic story in imitation of the architectural
decoration of the Forum of Augustus in Rome. Augusta Emerita was founded in 25 B.C.E.,
but this forum does not belong to the initial building phase. It was a work of the second or
third generation of the city. The city possessed a mixed population of veterans, native
peoples, and resident administrators, and the forum was the most public monument in the city,
intended to address all the constituencies residing in the city as well as those using the
facilities of the provincial capital and the region’s major market town. Much has been written
about the stylistic features of the sculptures and the possible imperial political iconography of
the forum, but this paper addresses the monument in postcolonial terms examining how the
different audiences or readers of the monument, who resided in Augusta Emerita and in the
native villages in the hinterland, might have responded to this massive display of archaistic
sculpture set to prominently in their city.
Biography
William E. Mierse is a professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Art Education University of Vermont. His books include Temples and Town of Roman Iberia (University of
California Press 2000); Ocho ensayos intrepretivos sobre el arte romano (University of Sao
Paulo 2000) and he is co-author with George M.A. Hanfmann, Sardis, From Prehistoric to
Roman Times in manuscript: A Study of Continuity and Discontunity in Levantine Temple
Designs from the Late Bronze Age through the Early Iron Age. His articles have appeared in
American Journal of Archaeology, Latomus, Journal of Roman Archaeology, Revue belge de
numismatique, Revista de Historia da Arte e Arqueologia, and Revista do Museu de
Arqueologia
Etnologia.
(18b) Greg Woolf
The Reading Lesson. Education, Socialization and Empowerment in the Roman
provinces.
“I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years
ago -- the other day” Joseph Conrad The Heart of Darkness
A famous chapter of Tristes Tropiques offered an iconoclastic take on writing. That
technology of the mind was refigured as a technology of repression. Surveiller et Punir
offered a similarly dystopic view of universal education. Alongside these post-Enlightenment
visions of the power of the word, ‘Reading’ has become a universal metaphor for the
empowered agency of all those who appropriate cultural objects of any kind. An analytical
gap lies opens between the disciplined reader, and the autonomous subject fashioning a
personalised and hybrid experience of empire. Man makes history, but not in circumstances of
his own choosing. Does the reading lesson open or restrict choice? This paper asks how
(some of) those subjected to Rome became subjects through the medium of education, how
they were taught to read (and to write, and most of all to speak) and what they learned in the
process. Examples will be taken mainly from the western provinces where Rome’s was the
first education system to be installed, rather than from provinces like Greece and Egypt with
their older experiences of writing and of empire. As they became readers how far did Rome’s
western subjects develop “Roman eyes”, and how far did their hybrid vision contribute to a
discourse of empire? The answers ought to be different for Rome than for more recent
empires. The possession of writing as not, in antiquity, seen as a sign of civilization, and was
associated with tyranny as often as with political openness. But perhaps an unfamiliar case
will help frame better generalizations.
Biography
Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at St Andrews University. His main research
interests lie in the cultural history of the Roman Empire and most recently the study of
religious practices in the Roman provinces. At present, he is writing a cultural history of
Roman imperialism and a study of intellectual revolution of the late Republic. Future projects
include preparing the 2005 Rhind lectures on Religious Creativity in the Roman Provinces for
publication, and writing the Bristol Blackwell Lectures for 2009 on the theme of The Ancient
Ethnographer.
PANEL 19
Intertextuality and Translation
Chair: Gemma Robinson
(19a) Lisa Fletcher
“I am in hell…”: Reading the Mutiny on the Bounty
The mutiny on the Bounty has inspired numerous fictionalised accounts of the event itself and
its aftermath. Most recently Peter Corris’s The Journal of Fletcher Christian (2005) and Val
McDermid’s Grave Tattoo (2006) use the tale as the basis for novels about the
untrustworthiness of historical records. Both novels open a gap in the documented history to
re-imagine the life of Fletcher Christian. Both novels’ present-day protagonists are
professional readers: the main character of Grave Tattoo is a Wordsworth scholar fascinated
by Bligh-Christian mythology; The Journal of Fletcher Christian uses a frame tale about the
author’s efforts to “read” (in multiple senses) the journals which form the bulk of the novel.
These novels are only the most recent examples of fiction inspired by the Bounty mutiny.
Beginning with Mary Russell Mitford’s narrative poem, Christina, the Maid of the South Seas
(1811) this paper presents a survey of mutiny fiction. It argues that implicit theories of
reading organise these retellings. In broad terms, mutiny fictions are troubled by the
distinction between reading historiography and reading fiction. More particularly, this tension
is frequently worked out in the opposition of Bligh and Christian, both of whom are
repeatedly characterized as distinct types of readers.
Biography
Lisa Fletcher teaches film and literature at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of
Historical Romance Fiction: Heterosexuality and Performativity (Ashgate, 2008). Her current
research examines the intersections between government and media discourses about present
day Pitcairn Island and literary and filmic representations of the island’s past.
(19b) Sandra Meyer
‘The Story that gave this Land its Life’: The Role of Intertextuality in Amitav Ghosh’s
The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) is a highly intertextual and metanarrative novel
profoundly concerned with the necessity as well as the problem of translation in a hybrid
society. This is first and foremost illustrated by the protagonist Kanai, who is a translator and
interpreter by profession and works as a mediator between different characters as well as
between narrator and reader. In addition to this, there are two intertexts which reappear
throughout the novel and which both are presented to the characters as well as to the reader in
translated versions. My paper will try to show that both these intertexts, Rilke’s
transnationally acclaimed Duino Elegies as well as the local story of The Glory of Bon Bibi,
play an important role with regard to the characters and their development and, in condensed
form, echo several major topics of the novel and of Indian society at the same time, for
instance the problem of language and translation and the need for syncretism in a postcolonial
society. This also leads to the question of the ‘ideal reader’: Can a novel based on intertexts
from two culturally distinct areas be equally compelling or meaningful to audiences in both
societies and others.
Biography
Sandra Meyer, finished her studies in March 2007 with an M.A. Thesis on Magical Realism
in British and Postcolonial novels. During her studies, she focussed on Literary and Cultural
Theory, Postcolonialism and Postmodernism. She currently works on her dissertation project
dealing with Concepts of Identities in Postmodern Literature and works as a research
associate within the Institute of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen,
Germany where she also teaches several classes in literary studies.
PANEL 20
The Postcolonial Exotic
Chair: Scott Hames
(20a) Michelle Keown
‘The Pacific Exotic’: ‘Western’ readers’ responses to the postcolonial literatures of
Oceania
Since the Enlightenment period, the Pacific Islands – and particularly Polynesia - have been
exoticised by ‘Western’ explorers, colonial administrators, artists and authors. Stereotypes of
the ‘Pacific paradise’ have persisted into the contemporary era, fuelled by media and touristindustry representations of the Pacific as a timeless idyll within which Western desires and
fantasies may be played out.
Drawing upon the work of ‘foundational’ reader-response critics such as Wolfgang Iser, Hans
Robert Jauss, and Stanley Fish, as well as the work of more recent postcolonial critics such as
Graham Huggan, this paper will consider the extent to which dominant cultural stereotypes
about Pacific Islanders shape the ‘horizon of expectations’ of contemporary ‘Western’ readers
of indigenous Pacific literatures. The paper will discuss, in particular, responses from the
overwhelmingly white, middle-class constituency of English Literature students that I have
taught at the university of Edinburgh, but will also refer to the work of Samoan writer Sia
Figiel, who has satirised ‘Western’ responses to her writing in her autobiographical poem
‘What They’ve Been Asking … So Far’. The paper will also discuss the relevance of
Huggan’s notion of the ‘postcolonial exotic’ to a consideration of the publishing and
marketing of Pacific literatures.
Biography
Michelle Keown is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has
published widely on Maori and Pacific writing and is the author of Postcolonial Pacific
Writing: Representations of the Body (Routledge, 2005) and Pacific Islands Writing: The
Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford University Press,
2007).
(20b) Soo Ng
Reading the Postcolonial Exotic in Contemporary Fiction: Guilty as Charged?
How do we read the postcolonial exotic figure at the end of the twentieth and the dawn of the
twenty-first century? This figure has become almost ubiquitous in postcolonial discourse
today thanks to Edward Said’s text Orientalism. However, I want to argue that we
inadvertently have also been guilty of becoming overly familiar with the postcolonial exotic,
such that we entrap it further as a victim, and returning it to its beginnings: the unfamiliar
exotic. If we accept Graham Huggan’s suggestion that the ‘exotic’ is “a particular mode of
aesthetic perception’, then it is especially pertinent that we think about our modern reading
experience in terms of the processes of recognising, delineating, and most worriedly,
perpetuating or exploiting the postcolonial exotic. Do we as readers partake in the process of
exoticising the ‘other’ as much as we denounce its construction and exploitation? Are we
guilty of subjecting the postcolonial exotic to predetermined concepts in order to appropriate
them in a consumerist globalised world, albeit in a more politically-correct manner as
compared to the colonial past? I will examine these ideas with reference to Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case, and Michael
Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.
Biography
Soo Ng is in her third year of her postgraduate studies. Her research centres on thinking about
the influence of the postmodern on contemporary novels at the end of the 20th , and the start of
the 21st centuries, from the perspectives of race, gender, as well as science and technology.
3 Parallel Panels
11.30-13.00
PANEL 21
Reading Gender and Nation
Chair: Rabi Isma
(21a) Anna Bernard
Libidinal Dynamics: Gender and National Allegory in Contemporary Palestinian and
Israeli Women’s Writing
This paper revisits Fredric Jameson’s concept of national allegory in order to argue for its
usefulness as a mode of reading contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literatures. I approach
this question through an analysis of two recent novels by female authors: Orly CastelBloom’s Human Parts (2002, Eng. 2003) and Sahar Khalifah’s The End of Spring (2004,
Eng. 2008). Though these novels belong to different genres – Castel-Bloom’s is a dystopian
satire of Israeli life during the beginning of the second intifada, while Khalifah’s is a
fictionalised account of the siege of Jenin – both use gender relations as a means of
representing the state of the nation, defined in each case by the decisive roles that patriarchy,
poverty, and violence play in determining the choices available to both female and male
citizens. In these novels, ‘libidinal dynamics’ (Jameson 1986: 80) cannot be divorced from
each text’s national-political content; gender identity is both subordinated to national identity
and constitutive of it, with particular reference to gendered ideas of heroism and the use of the
family as a metaphor for the nation. Only by attending to the ‘radical difference’ between the
metropolitan and Israeli/Palestinian ‘national situations’ (Jameson 77), I argue, can a
metropolitan reader apprehend Castel-Bloom and Khalifah’s trenchant critiques of the
gender-nationalism nexus in Israeli and Palestinian society.
Biography
Anna Bernard is a lecturer in postcolonial studies in the Department of English and Related
Literature at the University of York. She is currently working on a manuscript about
discourses of national belonging in contemporary narratives by Palestinian and Israeli writers,
including Edward Said, Mourid Barghouti, and Amos Oz.
(21b)Asia Zgadzaj
African Women Writers - Reception and Readership
In the age of globalisation and its influence on the perception of the world literature, the
question of migration of both writers and readers has become crucial in understanding the
reception of trans-national and trans-cultural narratives. African women writers struggle with
the dominance of Western readings and specifically Western feminism criticism which fails
to incorporate the specificity of African women’s narratives and, at the same time, African
women authors have been excluded from the cannon of African literature which has been
mainly represented by African male writers. This paper examines the diversity of texts and
themes by African women and the growing academic contributions solely devoted to African
women writers. As much as authors like Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa or
Yvonne Vera are established and recognised within the academic criticism, the average reader
is more familiar with the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri or Wole
Soyinka, the towering figures in African literature. I argue that the Western audiences must
open up to the narratives coming from African women writers rather than impose and apply
their stereotypical Western readings, however, the change must also come from within
African scholarship.
Biography
Asia Zgadzaj is a postgraduate student at the Birkbeck College, University of London and is
currently working on her PhD thesis exploring frameworks of motherhood and female
identity within the narratives of selected African and Polish writers. She is a member of
British Comparative Literature Association and Postcolonial Studies Association. Her paper
on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will be presented during the conference at the University of
Leicester: Unsettling Women, Contemporary’s Women’s Writing and Diaspora.
PANEL 22
High Culture, Popular Audiences
Chair: John McLeod
(22a) David Murphy
Football and Negritude: some reflections on a postcolonial cultural studies
In December 2001, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet-president of Senegal and creator of the
concept of negritude, passed away at the age of 95, thereby appearing to draw to a close a
particular (post)colonial relationship between France and its oldest African colony. Several
months later, Senegal defeated France at the football world cup: at the level of symbolic
action, at least, the former colony had firmly underlined its independence. This paper uses
these two specific moments to reflect on the ways in which Francophone African culture has
been ‘read’ by specialists in French studies departments, which has involved an almost
exclusive focus on ‘reading’ the French-language literature of a cosmopolitan elite.
Challenging and interrogating the different (and sometimes conflicting) approaches of various
academic disciplines to the analysis of cultural forms, focusing on literature and sport, the
paper thus builds upon the ongoing materialist critique of the field of postcolonial studies
(Huggan, Bongie), which calls for greater attention to specific contexts and a wider range of
cultural practice. The fundamental aim is to attenuate generalised notions on postcolonial
writing/reading practices in order better to explore the complex historical, political and
cultural networks and trajectories visible in (post)colonial societies.
Biography
David Murphy is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Stirling. He has published
widely on African literature and cinema, and the relationship between Francophone studies
and postcolonial theory. He is the author of Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and
Fiction (2000), and co-author of Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (2007).
(22b) Lucienne Loh
Philistinism and the Politics of Reading in Amitava Kumar’s Bombay London New York
and Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana
In the postcolonial context, literacy not only continues to be a broad measure of class, but the
kinds of literature one reads further determines class distinctions. In this paper, I focus on the
Indian context, and through a close reading of Amitava Kumar’s Bombay London New York
and Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, I argue that an appreciation of canonical
Western texts persists as a signifier of class aspirations. But as Kumar and Mishra assert,
reading European literature also affords an alternative vision of the world that resists the
frequently materialistic underpinnings of globalization personified by India’s burgeoning
middle class. However, I would also argue that Kumar and Mishras’ critique of the Indian
middle class’ “philistinism” also reflect an asymmetrical privileging of the Western canon
established through erstwhile colonial institutions. The politics of reading and the fraught
social relationships around them thus contribute to the enduring legacies of empire within a
globalized world.
Biography
Lucienne Loh recently completed her PhD in English at the University of WisconsinMadison. She is in the process of turning her thesis, “Beyond English Fields: Colonial
Nostalgia in a Cosmopolitan World” into a book. She is also guest-editing a special issue of
the Journal of Postcolonial Writing focusing on new directions in postcolonial studies
inspired by young scholars in the field.
(22c) Andrew Smith
C.L.R. James, Vanity Fair and the Crowd: some notes towards a Jamesian theory of
reading.
Abstract: This paper considers the role of reading (and also of watching) in what might be
called C.L.R. James’ cultural sociology. Beginning with the question of James’ own reading
practice, and particularly his early and fondly remembered readings of Vanity Fair, it seeks to
understand both James’ peculiar engagement with the canonical works of the Western literary
tradition, but also the ways in which he came to place an implied popular audience at the
centre of his thinking about cultural practices and their social significance. Moreover, it is
argued, this shift is a part of James’ changing political position: the attempt to place the
demands, the needs and the desires of a popular audience at the heart of his work was of a
piece with his growing suspicion of the politics of the vanguard party.
Biography
Andrew Smith is a lecturer in Sociology at the department of Sociology, Anthropology and
Applied Social Sciences, University of Glasgow. He is currently Director of the Centre for
Research in Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism in the department.
PANEL 23
Life Writing and Autobiographical Narrative
Chair: Gail Low
(23a) Ole Laursen
Reading Postcolonial Women’s Life Writing in the 1990s: Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses
and Joanna Traynor’s Sister Josephine as Fictional Autobiographies
Roland Barthes’s famous claim that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of
the Author’ should in effect end all autobiographies. Such claims overlook postcolonial
subjectivities’ demand for a voice. This paper prioritises ‘life writing’ instead of
‘autobiography’ because of the term’s ability to provide a strategy for reading fictional
autobiographies. Through an analysis of Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses and Joanna Traynor’s
Sister Josephine, this paper aim to show that black British life writing creates subjectivities
where writers become ‘subjects in discourse’ and not ‘subjects of discourse’. Relying on
theories of identity, culture and agency by Gilroy, Bhabha and Spivak as well as revisionist
autobiographical criticism by Smith and Watson, Marcus and Swindells, I will argue that
black British women’s life writing is a necessary fictional strategy that rememorizes and
recreates post-imperial Britain, thus challenging notions of traditional autobiographical Selves
as promoters of a Western Self as well as a Postcolonial Self.
Biography
Ole Birk Laursen holds an MA (2006) in English and History from the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, and specialises in Postcolonial Studies. He is currently studying for the PhD at The
Open University (UK). His research focuses on Bildung and life writing in contemporary
black and Asian British women’s writing.
(23b) Dorrie Chetty
Memory, Identity and Transition in the Writing of Recent British Immigrants and their
reading public
The wide reception of recent autobiographies of second generation ‘immigrants’ in the UK
clearly indicates that some kind of transition has taken place in the interests of the British
reading public. Have authors such as Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, George Alagiah, and Hanif
Kureshi transcended the limits and boundaries imposed by ‘difference’ to find a space to tell
their story? Recently this space has been found, not in the borders of alternative or marginal
discourses but within the mainstream of the British reading public. An analysis of these
authors’ narratives will be conducted, with a view to exploring the significance of memory
and transition in the authors’ journeys in writing their personal narrative. Toni Morrison sees
the process of remembering and forgetting simultaneously as crucial in the construction of our
‘self’. Turning ‘common sense’ thinking upside down, Fanon states that Europe is literally the
creation of the ‘Third World’, and Catherine Hall wants us to refuse the simple binary of
coloniser/colonised when re-thinking Empire and urges us to focus instead on the interconnections between the histories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘peripheries’. What happens then when
those from the ‘peripheries’ are writing in the ‘metropolis’? In this project I wish to explore
the transitions both writers and readers may go through in the processes of writing and
reading. What are the politics and pleasures involved in these processes?
Biography
Dorrie Chetty’s main research interests are Cultural Representations, Globalization and
ethnicity. She is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, teaching across
disciplines of Cultural Studies and Sociology. She teaches Gender, Ethnicity and Cultural
Representations, Identity and Difference and ‘Race’ and Ethnicity at undergraduate level and
Gender and Development at postgraduate level.
(23c) Paul Barrett
Dionne Brand’s Inventory and Transnational Writing
Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand begins her most recent poem Inventory with a
recollection of her own relationship with American entertainment and culture. She writes,
“the black-and-white american movies / buried themselves in our chest / glacial, liquid, acidic
as love” (Brand 1-4). Throughout the poem Brand’s speaker reads and develops an inventory
of contemporary political and entertainment culture, tracing the affective and emotional
responses that come out of such a reading. Brand’s speaker asks us to consider how
contemporary culture inscribes itself on the body and how affect and embodiment can be
mobilized to imagine new modes of resistance and possibility. My paper will discuss Brand’s
poem in the context of her own transnational writing and attempt to show how her work
suggests new modes of citizenship and critical reading organized around the body and
concepts of affect and desire.
Biography
Paul Barrett is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University writing his dissertation on
contemporary immigrant-Canadian writers with a focus on affect, the body and the politics of
multiculturalism.