Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: 26 June 2010
Bristol, UK

…

Karin Barber (University of Birmingham)
Popular voices in the print culture of 1920s Lagos

In the 1920s, Lagos (Nigeria) experienced an explosion of print culture – five new Yoruba-language weekly newspapers and also several new English-language publications. This print culture was produced and consumed predominantly by a small educated elite, the core of which was the “Saro” – people repatriated from Sierra Leone after return from slavery overseas or rescue from slave ships. The Saro culture since the 1880s had been highly exclusive, protecting the elite’s distinctive Anglophile culture and affirming their proximity to the British colonial authorities.  But in the 1920s we see a shift, indicated in part by the creation of new Yoruba-language papers accessible to the large Lagosian constituency of primary-school educated people who could read Yoruba but who were less conversant with English. The 1920s newspapers set out deliberately to bring these people into the fold. This was (at least partly) in response to the advent of restricted electoral politics from 1920 onwards: the Lagos oligarchy had begun to realise how important it was to demonstrate to the British that they had a large popular following, even if, at that moment, most of their supporters were not yet enfranchised. The Yoruba newspapers of the 1920s emphasised their remit to educate the populace and explain the ins and outs of current political developments to them. The tone was often didactic. But at the same time, popular voices were incorporated – through letters to the editor, local events columns, and through the collection and inscription of popular genres such as topical street ballads, gossip, and fictional narratives set in lower-class Lagos. This paper will explore the changing class dynamics of 1920s Lagos through the Yoruba print culture.

Karin Barber, University of Birmingham, email
Karin Barber is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Her main interest is African everyday culture, with a central focus on verbal texts, both oral and written, in African languages. Most of her research has been concentrated on the Yoruba speaking area of southwestern Nigeria, but she has also done broader comparative work on popular culture across sub-Saharan Africa and on approaches to texts in Africa and beyond. She is the author of many books and articles, including the prize-winning I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town (1991) and The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (2000) She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a past president of the African Studies Association of the UK, and the editor of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute.

——————————————————-

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————————-

questions:

PLAY

download

——————————————————-

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: 26 June 2010
Bristol, UK

…

Antoinette Burton (University of Illinois)
Postcolonial Flyover: Above and Below in Frank Moraes’ The Importance of Being Black (1965)

Frank Moraes was an editor for the Times of India who wrote a searing analysis of the African continent called The Importance of Being Black in 1965 in the wake of decolonization. Very much the view from an airplane (he never lived in Africa), it is nonetheless a critical ethnography of emergent African nation-states — refracting the fate of postcolonial India and Indians through its telescopic lens and honing in on African cultural practices on the ground as evidence (or not) of Africans’ fitness for self-rule. In Moraes’ work as in that of a number of his contemporaries, the figure of the African woman recurs, serving as a sign of Africa’s postcolonial possibility and as a site of anxiety about racial intermixture. The Indian woman, if she appears at all, functions as an index of national virtue and as key to the making of a worldly Indian masculinity, whether secular or communal. Whereas postcolonial histories have either emphasized Indians’ relationship with Britons or have glossed their solidarity with Africans, I argue that concerns about south-south racial and sexual politics were paradigmatic of postcolonial Indian culture and history. Moraes’ text offers a view from the vantage point of a newly postcolonial Nehruvian state which saw itself as a patron of emerging African nations. My paper plays with the scalar complexities of this promontory view in an attempt to capture some of the shifting ground of the post-imperial world.

Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, email
Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois. Her core research interests are in the areas of Britain and the empire, the history of women and gender, and world history. She is the author of many articles and books including: Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (University of California Press, 1998), Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India Oxford University Press, 2003) and The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Duke University Press, 2007).

——————————————————-

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————————-

questions:

PLAY

download

——————————————————-

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: June 24-­26th 2010
Bristol, UK

…

Paul Pickering (Australian National University)
The Rhythm of the Hustings: Music and Electoral Politics in Victoria’s Empire

This paper explores the integral part that music played in the rituals in nineteenth century elections. At a time when the vast majority of people stood outside the political nation and those who could vote did so under public scrutiny, musical performances helped to rally support for rival candidates, offered short-hand manifestoes to the undecided, steeled the courage of timid voters, heralded famous victories and provided a rich avenue for those who sought to protest against the inequities of the political system. In Britain these rituals were part of a long established tradition of public theatre and counter-theatre. In what ways were they replicated across the Empire, particularly in the colonies of settlement? What role did music play in facilitating continuity or change?

This paper is offered as part of a panel with Dr Kate Bowan. Both papers draw up on their joint research project which examines the place of music in politics in the nineteenth-century British world.

Paul Pickering, Australian National University,  email
Professor Paul Pickering is Convener of Graduate Studies and Director of the National Europe Centre at the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University. He has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history and public memory and commemoration. His current project is a study of music and politics in the nineteenth-century British world (with musicologist Kate Bowan). This will be published by Manchester University Press.

—————————————————–

talk:

PLAY

download

—————————————————–

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: 26 June 2010
Bristol, UK

…

Nicholas Nourse (University of Bristol)
Music as an adjunct to punishment in the armed forces and the people of Britain and the Empire

The inspiration for this paper came from the various erroneous comments that wrongly attribute the tune, ‘The Rogues March’, in its application as an accompaniment to the naval punishment ‘flogging around the fleet’, to the popular song- and opera-writer, Charles Dibdin. This paper will examine the true source of the tune, and the symbolic features it brings to instances of punishment and mockery across the armed services and in the general population too.  This tune, and the symbolisms attached to it, seem to address the ‘from below’ aspect of this conference particularly well. I will also examine two other songs with established associations with punishment, even death: the ‘Dead March’ from Saul, and the oft-quoted doleful song, ‘Fortune my Foe’.

This paper is offered as part of a three-way panel with Dr. Kate Bowan and Prof. Paul Pickering. Our papers will meet with instances of rituals and punishments, and public theatre and spectacle, which were repeated across the expanding Anglophone world and were not exclusive to Britain’s shores.

Nicholas Nourse, University of Bristol, email

Nicholas Nourse originally trained as a violin maker and graduated from the Open University as a mature student in 2007. He moved into full-time postgraduate study at the University of Bristol studying their MA in Music: British Music pathway. He is continuing to work with Prof. Stephen Banfield as his supervisor on his doctoral thesis, ‘Who took the singing out of popular song? Britain and the Empire, 1800-1863’.

——————————————————–

talk:

PLAY

download

——————————————————–

questions:

PLAY

download

——————————————————–

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: 26 June 2010
Bristol, UK

Arnab Dasgupta (University of Delhi)
Conflicting ‘selves’ and the project of Empire: The case of Anandaram Dhekiyal Phukan

Narratives about the lives of natives in the service of the Empire, especially at times when his loyalty puts him at odds with the general public sentiment, tend to throw up a precarious equation. The individual’s life becomes a complex negotiation between an apparent public loyalty to the colonial state and at times a subdued, rather private, sense of angst at the subjugated state of his motherland. This specific negotiation can be detected in the writings of Anandoram Dhekiyal Phukan, one of the foremost political thinkers of early – colonial Assam. Born in 1829 to a liberal, western educated family with a strong alliance with the colonial state (father Haliram Phukan employed with the Collectorate at Gauhati, Assam), Anandaram received education at Hindu College, Calcutta in 1841-44 and joined Government service at Gauhati in 1845. Around the same time, scattered voices of resistance to various policies of the government, primarily the decision to impose an alien language (Bengali) in the Courts and schools of Assam, started taking shape. With the inception of the first Assamese periodical named Orunodoi in 1846, this polyphony of voices found an organizational platform for ventilating disparate opinions about the state of the country. Organised resistance to the colonial language policy acquired steam in the early 1850s. When a Judge of the Sadar Dewani Adalat named A. J. Moffat Mills visited Assam in June 1853, a number of petitions and letters were dispatched for his consideration by various functionaries of the colonial machinery.

This paper seeks to analyse one such treatise submitted to Moffat Mills titled ‘Observations on the administration of the Province of Assam’ by Anandoram Dhekiyal Phukan in 1853. Read in conjunction with an 1855 tract ‘A Few Remarks on the Assamese Language and on Vernacular Education in Assam’ written by Phukan but under the pseudonym ‘A Native’, this paper hopes to explore the extent of negotiation between the private and the public in the life of a native official of the Empire. Does this attempted negotiation shed more light on the nature of Empire as it unraveled in early-colonial Assam? Are these proto-nationalist tracts critical milestones in the history of micro-nationalism in Assam? This paper seeks to locate these tracts and their author Anandaram Phukan within the volatile matrix of mid-nineteenth century Assam and examine their long shadow in the consolidation of a predominantly middle class nationalism in Assam.

Arnab Dasgupta, University of Delhi,  email
Arnab Dasgupta teaches English at Ramjas College, University of Delhi. His areas of interest include colonial historiography in India and popular print cultures in early-colonial Assam. He is currently working on representations of Assam in prominent nineteenth century periodicals appearing in Assam and Bengal.

————————————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

————————————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

————————————————————

Writing the Empire: Scribblings from Below

An international & interdisciplinary conference

Phillipe de Vigors, ‘Convicts letter writing at Cockatoo Island, New South Wales, 1849’
Reproduced by kind permission of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Event Dates: 26 June 2010
Bristol, UK

…

Kimberley Rae Connor (University of San Francisco)

Reading from the Heart Out: Chief Bromden Through Indigenous Eyes

Recently I was presented an opportunity apply my knowledge of American minority literatures to the interpretation of American Indian cultures, ably led by Daniel Wildcat, a social scientist at Haskell Indian Nations University. From him I learned that re-writing empire means also re-reading empire.  Indeed, in the canon of American experience, acquiring the ability to not just read but interpret text has served a pivotal function in the development of many a protagonist.  Applied in a series of stages of increased vision, I offer a post-colonial reading of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that recasts the Indian protagonist not as a victim but as an individual relying on indigenous strategies to negotiate the world after empire. The essay unfolds the process of engaging in this kind of reconsideration, offering an experiment in reading an American classic after empire, culminating in the application of a method developed by an Indian writer to Kesey’s text. The novel and its Indian narrator can be understood from an indigenous point of view by applying the narrative logic behind N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. This text directs a way of reading Chief Bromden’s narrative from the multiple points of view by which he presents it but without the presumption of psychosis. Indeed, by rendering his tale as myth, memoir, and history, Bromden performs a supremely sane act.

Kimberley Rae Connor, University of San Francisco, email
Kimberly Rae Connor attended Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania where she received a B.A. in English in 1979. In 1981 she earned an M.A. in Literature and Theology at the University of Bristol, England, and completed her graduate studies at the University of Virginia, receiving a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature in 1991. Connor has steadily taught various courses in religion and literature, ethnic studies, and writing in a variety of academic settings. Currently she is Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco. Connor’s scholarship focuses on African American religious life and cultural production. She also applies the interpretative lens she acquired through the study of African American life to the cultural production of other marginalized populations, including gay men and women, people with AIDS, Japanese Americans, and Native Americans. She has published two books: Conversion and Visions in the Writings of African American Women and Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition that was selected by Choice as an outstanding academic title in the humanities for 2000. Connor has received grants for her work from The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Jesuit Foundation, and The Lilly and Luce Foundations. In addition to her books she has edited a book of essays on academic satire and published numerous articles, reviews, and reference book entries on topics related to African American religion and literature and multicultural pedagogy. Connor is a board appointed member of the Publications Committee of the American Academy of Religion for which she serves as editor of the Academy Series, a joint publishing venture of the American Academy of Religion and Oxford University Press.

—————————————————

talk:

PLAY

download

—————————————————

questions:

PLAY

download

—————————————————