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Writing the empire: scribblings from below
An international and interdisciplinary conference
Over recent decades, scholars of colonialism and post-colonialism have
explored the representations of peoples and places in a host of texts and
the written word has been acknowledged as a key technology of power.
However, while some attention has been paid to gender difference, there
has been more limited consideration of how other less powerful and less
privileged actors made use of the written word. This conference asks key
questions about the appropriation of reading and writing by subaltern
groups in empire. It brings together scholars who study less privileged,
lower class Britons like convicts and sailors with those who work on
histories of the colonized. It thus foregrounds the fact that these groups
were often becoming more fully exposed to the written word at much the
same moment and that literacy was regarded as a civilizing and
disciplining mechanism more generally. The primary interest of many of the
presenters is less in the formal published text than in a wide variety of
everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, folk song,
suicide notes, graffiti and more. Rather than assuming that literate
cultures smoothly and fully replaced their oral counterparts, our
participants instead ask questions about the entangled and dynamic
character of relationships between the spoken and the written word. A
number of presenters also go beyond the writing and reading of texts, to
examine their performance with papers on topics like courtroom oratory,
‘folk’ music, street ballads and broadsides. Finally, a range of papers
also explore the conceptual and methodological issues that arise from
working with fragmentary and often fleeting types of sources and so with a
less hegemonic ‘imperial archive' than those created by colonial states.
Speakers include: Tony Ballantyne, Karin Barber, Antoinette Burton, Norman
Etherington, Gareth Griffiths, Jonathan Hyslop, Isaac Land, Marilyn Lake &
Paul Pickering.
The conference will be held at the University of Bristol (UK) from June
24th-June 26th 2010.
Dr Kirsty Reid
Department of History
University of Bristol
11 Woodland Road
Bristol
BS8 1TB
United Kingdom
Email: [log in to unmask]
Visit the website at
http:///www.bris.ac.uk/arts/birtha/conferences/writing_the_empire
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