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Postgraduate Research Day

Postcolonial Memory: Resistance, Representation, and Revival

2009 Conference Report

Prof. Joseph Roach – Keynote Speaker

The conference ‘Postcolonial Memory: Resistance, Representation, and Revival’, took place on 18 September 2009 at Royal Holloway, University of London. Hosted by the Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group (RHPRG), it provided an opportunity for approximately 30 postgraduate students and early career researchers to present, learn about, and discuss current doctoral research on the broad theme of postcolonial memory. Participants came from Royal Holloway, the wider University of London, as well as a number of other academic institutions around the UK, with training in a diverse range of disciplines including drama and theatre, music, sociology, literature, history, anthropology and geography. The event consisted of paper presentations, provocations, reading groups, and a keynote lecture by Prof. Joseph Roach (Yale University).

The first panel included presentations by Richard Lee (Open University) on women’s autobiographical representations of experiences of violence during Indian partition in 1947, and Daniela Jara (Goldsmiths) on the application of the notion of ‘post-memory’ (Hirsch 2003) to memory transmission within families in post-coup Chile. This was followed by provocation-based discussions led by by Yen-ying Su (RHUL), who spoke about hybridity in Taiwanese film music, and Caoileann Thompson (Queen’s, Belfast), who discussed Stewart Parker’s place in Irish theatre. In the second paper panel, Charlotte Keys (RHUL) and Ole Birk Laursen (Open University) both drew on the writings of Paul Gilroy to reveal the politics of colonial memory and national identity in contemporary Britain, the former by focusing on post-World War II postcolonial melancholia, and the latter by exploring the theme of trauma in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon.

After lunch, the final paper panel included presentations by Claire Launchbury (RHUL) on the 1982 siege of Beirut in the absence of an official Lebanese state archive, and by Jenny Doubt (SOAS) on the notion of a ‘postcolonial archive’ (McEwan 2003) in relation to the AIDS pandemic in South Africa, both exploring the potential of visual arts, literature and local community projects in the building of alternative archives. Reading group sessions, chaired by Dr David Lambert and Prof. Tina K. Ramnarine, allowed students to discuss and debate in smaller groups set texts including Roach’s book Cities of the Dead (1996) and Chakrabarty’s article ‘ Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?’ (1996). In the late afternoon participants joined a larger audience for the public lecture by Prof. Roach, ‘ The Return of the Last of the Pequots: Disappearance as Heritag e’. Here, Roach gave us a glimpse of a kinaesthetic approach to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, exploring the politics of representation and performance, historicisation and mythicisation of Pequot, Native American heritage . Finally, participants and a wider community of scholars of performing arts enjoyed performances by the Aboriginal poet Romaine Moreton (University of Newcastle at Australia), and staff and postgraduates of the RHUL Department of Drama and Theatre, marking the launch of the newly founded Centre for International Theatre and Performance Research at Royal Holloway. A champagne and canapé reception concluded the day’s activities.

Now in its second year, the annual RHPRG Graduate Research Day proved important for consolidating an already thriving community of RHUL doctoral students interested in postcolonial studies, complementing the group’s regular term-time workshops. The event was particularly valuable for exploring current ideas concerning notions of memory in relation to historicism, national identity, archives, performance and textuality within societies shaped by the legacy of colonialism. Moreover, through showcasing current research, highlighting connections between diverse research projects, and encouraging discussion between young scholars from a number of institutions, the conference helped build communication between and beyond different departments and disciplines.

The event was organised by a committee of doctoral students at Royal Holloway (Thomas Hilder, Daniel O’Gorman, Emer O’Toole, Yasmine Van Wilt, Lowri Jones and Brahma Prakash) with the kind support of the coordinators of the RHPRG Prof. Helen Gilbert, Dr David Lambert and Prof. Tina K. Ramnarine, as well as Dr Mark Mathuray.

Thomas Hilder

Keynote lecture by Professor Joseph Roach (Yale): ‘The Return of the Last of the Pequots: Disappearance as Heritage’ (podcast).

Conference report: ‘Interrogating the Postcolonial’

Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group, 29 July 2008

The inaugural Royal Holloway Postcolonial Research Group postgraduate research day, entitled ‘Interrogating the postcolonial’, was held on 29 July 2008. Attended by 25 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers from RHUL and beyond, the day began with a short introduction to the history of the group by co-convenor, Dr David Lambert (Geography, RHUL). Dr Yasmin Kahn (Politics, RHUL) then introduced some of key intellectual themes for the day by considering the continuing salience of postcolonialism. Attention next turned to the first presentation panel. Brian Rock ( Stirling) began proceedings with an account of new directions in Irish postcolonial theory organised around a case-study of Irish novelist Flann O’Brien. This was followed by Lucy Watson’s ( Southampton) discussion of whiteness, femininity and Australian nationalism in the travel writings of Mary Gaunt, and Andy Pursell’s (RHUL) discussion of space and the theatricality of empire in the writings of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. The second session opened with a paper on colonial Colombo and postcolonial geographies by Lois Jones (St Andrews). Dan Haines (RHUL) then talked on the recovery of abducted women in post-Partition India and Pakistan, before Humaira Saeed (Manchester) completed the panel with a paper on trauma and representations of the partition of India in film. Following lunch, the participants broke into three smaller groups to discuss their work and its relationship to postcolonial studies. The day concluded with a keynote discussion, led by Dr Lambert and Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford), structured around readings selected by the speakers and involving all attendees. Themes addressed included the nature and status of ‘the archive’, cartographic representations of (post)colonial London, problems with postcolonial canon-formation, and questions of interdisciplinarity. The stimulating discussion offered by all attendees demonstrated that postcolonialism in its many forms continues to be interrogated at great length by early-career researchers across the disciplines. Given its success, it is likely that similar events will be forthcoming in future years.

Daniel Whittall and Amanda Rogers

Leverhulme Prize

David Lambert was awarded a 2009 Philip Leverhulme Prize (£70,000) for outstanding contribution to the field of Historical Geography, recognised at an international level. With the funds provided by the prize, he will take a period of research leave from autumn 2010 to Easter 2012 and use the first half to finish a book, The Armchair Explorer. Extending his previous work on Caribbean slavery and imperial networks, the book is situated at the intersection of histories of slavery, abolition and empire, and histories (and historical geographies) of science and knowledge. It is focused on the early nineteenth-century Scottish geographer and pro-slavery publicist, James MacQueen, who solved the ‘Niger problem’ despite never once visiting the African continent. Instead, he drew on the testimony of enslaved Africans he had managed in the West Indies. Through MacQueen, the book examines the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, geographical knowledge and imperialism from which the Victorian ‘civilising mission’ – and its most famous explorer-missionary, David Livingstone – would emerge. For further details on this project, see: http://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/news/releases/Jan2010/Jan2010. David will then begin a new research project into the forms of time consciousness and historicity associated with responses to Atlantic slavery in the past and present. Comparative in character, the project will involve language training and international collaboration, and will advance understanding of African diasporic philosophies, cultures and aesthetics.

New Books by Group Members

Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia, by Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

Performance and Cosmopolitics, a ground-breaking study of cross-cultural theatre in the Australasian region, inflects and counters the valorisation of cosmopolitanism in global cultural discourse. Focusing on a range of theatrical events and practices in avant-garde, mainstream and community contexts, this book explores the cultural, political and ethical dimensions of Australia's engagement with Asia. Aboriginal theatre is also featured as an important aspect of regional arts traffic. A complex and fascinating analysis that sheds light on international arts marketing, broad trends in cross-cultural performance training, and current debates in performance studies.
Contents: Performing Cosmopolitics – (Anti)Cosmopolitan Encounters – Indigenizing Australian Theatre – Asianizing Australian Theatre – Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival – Crossing Cultures – Asian-Australian Hybrid Praxis – Performance and Asylum – Cosmopolitics in the New Millennium.

Beautiful Cosmos: Performance and Belonging in the Caribbean Diaspora, by Tina K. Ramnarine (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007)

What are the musical sounds that people remember in the diaspora? What do they create? Recognising the importance that people attach to musical performances, this book examines the significance of widespread Caribbean genres (including calypso, steel band, reggae, chutney, salsa and carnival) in diaspora politics. Ramnarine uses detailed analysis of musical practices, unravelling creative processes of memory, innovation and production, to interrogate geographies of musical canons, hybridity discourses and culture theory. In doing so, she challenges us to rethink diaspora as only being about displacement, to move beyond the limits of race, marginalisation and otherness, and to imagine the possibilities of ‘beautiful cosmos’. Asking ‘where is home in the diaspora?’, this book presents radical perspectives in and for diaspora studies.

Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction, by Klauss Dodds (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007)

n places such as Iraq or Lebanon, moving a few feet on either side of a territorial boundary can be a matter of life or death, dramatically highlighting the connections between geography and politics. This Very Short Introduction illuminates the concept of geopolitics, revealing how a country’s location and size as well as its sovereignty and resources all affect how its people understand and interact with the wider world. Using wide-ranging examples, from historical maps to James Bond films and the rhetoric of political leaders like Churchill and George W. Bush, Klaus Dodds describes how people and places are inter-connected with each other, and how our geopolitical outlook molds our understanding of the world. He shows why it is vital that we understand how and why we divide the world into zones and territories--and how these divisions depend on your perspective. The book explains how terrorism, globalization, environmental degradation, and new technologies such as the internet are all challenging the geographical basis of global politics, and it sheds light on the history of terms such as “the iron curtain,” “the third world,” and “the axis of evil.”

Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World, by Lina Khatib (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006)

Today the world's media have a pressing need to understand and interpret the modern Middle East. In this timely study, Lina Khatib examines how contemporary American cinema and the cinemas of the Arab world contribute to this global preoccupation. The book covers films made in the USA, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine over the last three decades, showing how these cinemas represent major political issues in the Middle East, from the Arab-Israeli conflict, through the Gulf War, to Islamic fundamentalism. It also uncovers the challenges presented by Arab cinemas to Hollywood’s ways of representing Middle East politics. Khatib goes beyond an analysis of difference to address similarities in how political themes are selected and how the cinematic language gives them life. This book is inspired by Edward Said's writing on Orientalism, but it goes further to show not only how the ‘Orient’ is constructed by the ‘Occident’ but also how the ‘Orient’ itself is consumed by power struggles, both internal and external.

Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006)

This volume uses a series of portraits of ‘imperial lives’ in order to rethink the history of the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It tells the stories of men and women who dwelt for extended periods in one colonial space before moving on to dwell in others, developing ‘imperial careers’. These men and women consist of four colonial governors, two governors’ wives, two missionaries, a nurse/entrepreneur, a poet/civil servant and a mercenary. Leading scholars of colonialism guide the reader through the ways that these individuals made the British Empire, and the ways that the empire made them. Their life histories constituted meaningful connections across the empire that facilitated the continual reformulation of imperial discourses, practices and cultures. Together, their stories help us to re-imagine the geographies of the British Empire and to destabilize the categories of metropole and colony.

The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903, by Matthew Isaac Cohen (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006).

The Komedie Stamboel toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship performing musical versions of the Arabian Nights, European fairy tales and operas, Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories. While audiences marveled at spectacles involving white-skinned actors, there were also racial frictions between actors and financiers, sex scandals, fights, bankruptcies, imprisonments, and a murder. Matthew Isaac Cohen shows how the theater was used as a symbol of cross-ethnic integration in postcolonial Indonesia and as an emblem of Eurasian cultural accomplishment by Indische Nederlanders. This evocative social history situates the Komedie Stamboel in the culture of empire and in late nineteenth-century itinerant entertainment, offering a new picture of the region’s art and culture.

Fifty Key Thinkers on Development, by David Simon (London: Routledge, 2006)

This authoritative text presents a unique guide to the lives and ideas of leading contributors to the contested terrain of development studies. Reflecting the diverse, interdisciplinary nature of the area, the book includes entries on:
• modernisers like Hirshman, Kindleberger and Rostow
• dependencistas such as Frank, Cardoso and Amin
• progressives like Prebisch, Helleiner and Streeten
• political leaders enunciating radical alternative visions of development, such as Mao, Nkrumah and Nyerere
• progenitors of religiously or spiritually inspired development, such as Gandhi and Ariyaratne
• development-environment thinkers like Blaikie, Brookfield and Shiva.

Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947–1962, by Sarah Ansari (Karachi: Oxford UP, 2005)

By the 1990s, ethnic politics had come to dominate Sindh, with calls for Karachi to become a fifth province in its right. Life After Partition examines the historical background to these developments by focusing on events in the province in the years immediately following partition, when migrants from India and local people in Sindh found themselves living alongside each other in the newly created state of Pakistan. How far they retained distinctive notions of community and identity, and what its impact was on processes of accommodation and integration forms the main focus of this study of life in Sindh between 1947 and 1962.

Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation, by Elleke Boehmer (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005)

This pathbreaking study explores the perennially fascinating relationship between gender icons and foundational fictions of the nation in different postcolonial spaces. Focusing on Africa as well as South Asia, and sexuality as well as gender, Boehmer offers perceptive close readings of writers ranging from Achebe, Okri and Mandela to Arundhati Roy and Yvonne Vera, shaping these into a critical engagement with theorists of the nation like Fredric Jameson and Partha Chatterjee. Moving beyond cynical deconstructions of the postcolony, the book mounts a bracing reassessment of the postcolonial nation as a site of potential empowerment, as a ‘paradoxical refuge’ in a globalised world.

Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors, by Elleke Boehmer, 2nd revised edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005)

Elleke Boehmer’s foundational study provides a broad contextualizing narrative about the unfolding of colonial and postcolonial writing in English. The book provides illuminating close readings of texts by a wide variety of writers – from Kipling and Conrad through to Kincaid and Naipaul, from Ngugi to Bernadine Evaristo and Arundhati Roy – and explicates key theoretical terms such as ‘subaltern’, ‘colonial resistance’, ‘writing back’, and ‘hybridity’. This revised tenth-anniversary edition includes new critiques of postcolonial women’s writing and migrant literatures, an expanded and richly annotated bibliography, and a full new chapter on postcolonialism today exploring key debates in the field relating to transnationalism, postcolonial ethics, and resistance.

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, Edited by Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire is devoted to an exploration of images of the tropical world produced by European travellers over the last three centuries. This book brings together a distinguished group of authors from a variety of fields – notably art history, postcolonial studies, literature, cultural geography and the history of science – to address the visualisation of the ‘tropical' within a variety of aesthetic, scientific and political projects. The contributors highlight the multiple practices through which the tropics were known, practical and bodily as well as intellectual and discursive. And they encourage greater attention to the ways in which European conceptions of the tropics may have been shaped by interactions with indigenous peoples and places.

Colonial Connections, 1815-45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government, by Zoë Laidlaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005)

Colonial Connections challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century, examining the complicated networks of personal connection that were fundamental to metropolitan and colonial officials, lobbyists, settlers and missionaries. While these networks flourished in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, successive crises in the 1830s exposed this mode of rule to hostile metropolitan scrutiny. This triggered a profound transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition, by David Lambert (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)

White Creole Culture focuses on white society in the Caribbean island of Barbados during the turbulent period 1780–1833. The book tells of a colonial community in crisis and confusion, unable to understand the momentous changes occurring in Britain that were turning opinion against the material and ideological basis of their society – slavery. But this is not a story of dead white men making history. By focusing on emblematic moments – an effort to reform slavery from within, the writing of a landmark local history, the largest slave rebellion ever on the island, an episode of religious persecution and the final years before the ending of slavery in 1833 – White Creole Culture examines the Atlantic-wide influences that shaped white culture, politics and identity, and particularly the role of the slaves and other non-white people. The central question is how did the white colonists of Barbados – so long used to claiming their pre-eminence in the British Empire – respond to attacks that their society was fundamentally “un-British”?