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