As I submit the final report for the SouthHem project, I have taken some time to reflect on the opportunities and problems that have arisen during the project’s lifetime. It is my hope that SouthHem has produced a fuller picture of (a) the extent to which colonial literary…
As co-organisers of the ‘Entangled Modernities’ conference, Lara Atkin, Michael Falk, David Stirrup, and I were asked by The Modernist Review to reflect on the what the move online has meant for conferences and how we organise, promote, and attend them. Primarily written by Lara, with some contributions…
On 26 May 2020, the SouthHem team participated in the second of two virtual online events convened by the University of Kent’s Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies (Director, David Stirrup). This event discussed Kristofer M. Ray’s draft chapter from his new book project tentatively entitled Cherokees, Europeans, and Empire in…
On Monday 25 May 2020, the SouthHem team attended the first of two ‘Virtual Conversations in American & Indigenous Studies’ organised by the Centre for Indigenous & Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent. These events served as an opportunity to engage with some of themes posited…
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…
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,…
In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said argues that empire rests on crucial spatial and geographical mappings that involve a ‘hierarchy of spaces’. For Said, the struggle over space is ‘complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms,…