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Category: Methodologies

Reflections on the ‘Entangled Modernities’ Conference in ‘The Modernist Review’

Reflections on the ‘Entangled Modernities’ Conference in ‘The Modernist Review’

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 from Michael, David, and myself, the below is a copy of the article published by TMR in the first of a series of ‘online events dialogues’: https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/online-events-dialogue-1/ We thank TMR for the…

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Kristofer M. Ray on Cherokees, Europeans, and Empire in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774

Kristofer M. Ray on Cherokees, Europeans, and Empire in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774

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 the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774. The event began with a brief introduction by Ray in which he contextualised his arguments for rethinking standard narratives of polity cohesion in early American history via a…

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Kate’s Fullagar’s ‘The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire’

Kate’s Fullagar’s ‘The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire’

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 in the call for papers for the Entangled Modernities symposium, which has now been delayed due to ongoing Covid-19 health and safety precautions. The first of these events served as a virtual…

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Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere: Closing Remarks

Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere: Closing Remarks

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 but also as direction or perspective. As she pointed out, we can understand the South not only in terms of locatedness (“writing from”) but also in terms of directionality (“writing to”). The…

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Colonial Capital and Imperialist Time: Harry Harootunian on the Ontology of the Historical Present

Colonial Capital and Imperialist Time: Harry Harootunian on the Ontology of the Historical Present

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 struck by the way in which Harootunian places temporality at the centre of understandings of colonialism, modernity, and capitalism. Harootunian sees the (often violent) encounters between indigenous and European populations in the…

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Due South: New Directions in Southern Thinking

Due South: New Directions in Southern Thinking

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 ‘geographical region below the equator’. But as Murray points out, this designation also entails an implicit hierarchy of ‘up’ and ‘down’ or ‘above’ and ‘below’ that roughly (but not wholly) ‘aligns with…

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The Southern Colonies and Political Economy

The Southern Colonies and Political Economy

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 for Going to War for the Sake of Trade (1763) and James Anderson’s The Interest of Great Britain with Regard to her American Colonies Considered (1782), all of which were influential on…

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Interrogating Commodity Cultures: Exploring Global Connections

Interrogating Commodity Cultures: Exploring Global Connections

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, Frontiers, and Peripheral Modernisms’. Bourne out of his own difficulties in providing a succinct answer to questions of definition and conceptualisation, Niblett’s paper asked: what is a commodity frontier? Niblett drew attention…

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‘Zoning in’ on Geographies of Empire

‘Zoning in’ on Geographies of Empire

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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, about images and imaginings’ (Said 1993: 58). Over the last thirty years, historians, literary scholars, and cultural geographers have taken up Said’s challenge to think about the intersections between geography and postcolonial…

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