Textual Commodities in Empire

Book History Seminars
10-11 June 2013

WiSER Seminar Room
6th floor, Richard Ward Bdg, East Campus, Wits University

 

International colloquium on themes of global circulation and reading across empires and their afterlives.

 

Programme:

Day 1: Monday June 10

9.00-9.15: Welcome and opening remarks

9.15-10.45 – Session 1: Distant Reading – Backwards, Forwards and Sideways

  • Ian Henderson, King’s College, University of London, Towards a History of Reading Backwards
  • Elaine Freedgood, NYU, Hetero-Ontologicality
  • Discussant: Sarah Nuttall

 

11.15-13.00 – Session 3: Paper empires

  • Sarah Gundry, King’s College London, ‘Homeward Bound’: Periodicity and the Cape Monthly Magazine
  • Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand, Imperial Commons
  • Fariha Shaikh, King’s College,‘An Imagined Community’? The Social Life of Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers
  • Discussant: Ashlee Neser

 

14.00-16.00 – Session 2: Secondhand empires, imperial jumble

  • Brenda Mhlambi, University of the Witwatersrand, The afterlives of the Zulu Empire: From the oral through the written to popular performance
  • Khwezi Mkhize, University of Pennsylvania, Dangerous Liaisons: Making Affiliations and Black Empire in early Twentieth Century South Africa
  • Achal Prabhala (Independent scholar, Bangalore), Word domination: The Enduring Legacy of the Cultural Cold War in India and Africa
  • Discussant: Sharad Chari

 

 

Day 2: Tuesday June 11

9.00-10.30 – Session 1: Cutting Writing and Image

  • Sandra Young, University of Cape Town, Visual literacy and imperialist logic: the circulation of woodcut images of ‘new world’ peoples in the sixteenth century
  • Adrien Delmas, IFAS, The history of writing in the early modern period through the reception of the Codex Mendoza
  • Discussant: Cynthia Kros

 

11.00-13.00 – Session 2: Affect, Pedagogy, Distance

  • Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, CUNY, Criticism on Trial: Criminalizing Affect at the Wilde trials and the trial of the Bangavasi
  • Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University, The Calcutta School-Book Society and the Production of Knowledge
  • Devleena Ghosh, UTS, Burma-Bengal Crossings: Representations of Liminalities in Bengali literature of the pre-independence era
  • Discussant: Dilip Menon

 

14.00-15.00 – Session 3: Closing Comments

  • Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall, Tanya Agothocleous