by Dr. Fariha Shaikh The ‘Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ conference was a stimulating two days of rigorous discussion: the carefully curated programme meant that papers spoke both to each other and across panels, allowing us to explore productively the analytical and methodological overlaps, connections and contentions between them….
Some brief and informal notes of my closing remarks delivered with thanks to a fantastic group of participants at the recent “Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere” conference at UCD. Southness Elleke Boehmer opened the conference by thinking about the “South” or “Southness” not just as place…
The SouthHem team recently participated in a two-day workshop on the subject, “Institutions as Networks” held by the AHRC-funded ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ research network. The diverse range of papers and the productive closing roundtable raised numerous questions of pertinence to the SouthHem research project: Definition: A central task…
In his landmark study of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ in imperial discourse, Duncan Bell identified three different meanings ascribed to the term by nineteenth century political thinkers after 1870. In some conceptions, it included the ‘totality of the British empire’, including Britain’s expanding African empire and,…
How do you establish the existence of a literary institution’s collection when none of the early records have survived? How can you trace the circulation of books without a catalogue or accession records? How do you determine the way an institution was managed if the committee minutes have…
Harry Harootunian’s fascinating article ‘Remembering the Historical Present’ (2007) is a blistering critique of the banalities of modernization theory; the poverty of spatial configurations for understanding the global world order; and the problems of national borders and methodologies in historical and area studies. Reading the article, I was…
In his 2008 article for the Australian Humanities Review ‘Keys to the South’, Kevin Murray offers three frameworks for thinking about ‘Southness’: the Southern Hemisphere, the Global South, and the Colonised South. Most obviously, the Southern Hemisphere refers, in a conventional Mercator understanding of the globe, to the…
For economic critics of empire, the cost of acquiring and maintaining colonies far exceeded their benefits. An emphasis on the priority of the domestic over the foreign market, for example, is central not only to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), but also to Josiah Tucker’s The Case…
On Friday 5 May the SouthHem team attended a fascinating inter-disciplinary conference on commodity cultures organised by Dr. Fariha Shaikh at University College Dublin. The plenary paper was given by Michael Niblett, Assistant Professor in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick, and entitled ‘Commodity Cultures: Work,…
This case study focuses on the literary culture of the Cape Colony during the 1820s. Cape Town in the 1820s was establishing an Anglophone ‘bourgeois public sphere’ that accompanied the socio-economic transformation that followed the departure of the Dutch in 1806. (Mackenzie 1998:90) Industrialisation and the removal of government…