This course will assess interactions between Britain and its Empire during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course will take up a series of topics designed to explore the changing nature of these interactions and, in doing so, will examine a range of recent writing on colonial encounters such as, the new imperial history, diasporic studies, subaltern studies, and governmentality. Topics will include the gathering and reporting of information, missions and evangelicalism, the construction of civil society, the metropolitan and colonial interconnections of gender, race and class, and the problems of decolonization. Students with an interest in Britain, any of its colonies, and/or general questions of imperialism are welcome. Requirements will include class participation and the writing of at least two historiographic or analytic papers due on 13 March and 8 May. The course will be taught jointly by Professors Metcalf and Vernon.
Required Texts:
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism 0195146603 $17.50
C.A.Bayly, Empire and Information 0521663601 $27.95
Felix Driver, Geography Militant 0631201122 $22.95
E.M.Collingham, Imperial Bodies 0745623700 $29.95
Catherine Hall, Cultures of Empire 0415929075 $24.99
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason 0691004536 $15.90
Zadie Smith, White Teeth 0375703861 $11.20
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy 0195622375 $8.95
Wendy Webster, Imagining Home 1857283511 $20.95
L.Appignanesi and S.Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie Files 0815602480
$17.95
There will be a course reader for items marked * and all texts will also
be available on reserve. Unpublished ms copies will be available to copy
from 3229 Dwinelle.
Provisional Readings
Some texts to be added or removed
23 January. Introduction
30 January. Historiography
*Linda Colley, "Britishness and Otherness: An Argument" Journal
of British Studies, 31 (1992):309-29
*Dane Kennedy "The Boundaries of Oxford's Empire" International
History Review, 23, 3 (2001):604-622.
Catherine Hall, "Introduction" in Hall (ed), Cultures of
Empire (2000): 1-33.
*Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony"
in their Tensions of Empire (1997): 1-56.
Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism"
in Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire, pp.120-36
Antoinette Burton, "Who Needs the nation? Interrogating 'British'
history" in Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire, pp.137-53.
6 February. The Boundaries of Civil
Society.
*Uday S Mehta, "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion" in A.Stoler
and F.Cooper (eds.), Tensions of Empire, 59-86
*Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, pp.28-65
*Catherine Hall, "Rethinking Imperial Histories: The Reform Act of
1867" New Left Review (December, 1994):3-29.
*A.Burton (ed.), Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain, pp.7-21,
107-38.
13 February: Race, Class and Ordering
of Difference
*Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial
Culture in Nineteenth Century England (1999), chs. 3 & 4.
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire
(2001)
20 February: News from Nowhere
David Pratt, "Narrating the Mutiny? Constituting the News",
42-58 (ms)
*Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects:The Self and the Social in Nineteenth
Century England (1994), pt.3.
*Kevin Grant, "Christian Critics of Empire: Missionaries, Lantern
Lectures and the Congo Reform Campaigns in Britain" Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29 (2001):27-58.
*Antoinette Burton, "From Child Bride to Hindoo Lady" American
Historical Review 103, 4 (1998):1119-1140
Judith Walkowitz, "The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew:
Photojournalism in Edwardian London" Victorian Studies, 42,
1 (1998/9): 3-46.
27 February:. Geographies of Rule
*Mary Poovey, Making the Social Body, ch.2.
Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom (ms), ch.1&5
*Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire, chs.9-10
Felix Driver, Geography Militant, 3, 6, 8
6 March: Information Systems
C.A.Bayly, Empire and Information, intro, chs.2,4,6,9,10.
*James Scott, Seeing Like a State, chs.1&2.
13 March: Infrastructures of Rule
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, chs. 2&6
*Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Vision, ch.5
*Chris Otter, "Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in
the Late Victorian City" Social History, 27, 1 (2001): (ms)
W.Glover, "Objects, Models and Exemplary Works" (ms)
*Deborah Ryan, "Staging the Imperial City" in F.Driver and D.Gilbert
(eds.), Imperial Cities, pp.117-35.
Source?
20 March: Governing Bodies
Ann Stoler, "Bourgeois Bodies and Racial Selves" in Hall (ed.)
Cultures of Empire, 87-119.
*Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood" in in A.Stoler and
F.Cooper (eds.), Tensions of Empire, 87-151.
Prakash, Another Reason, ch.5
E.M.Collingham, Imperial Bodies, chs. 1-5.
Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, ch.5 (ms)
27 March: Spring Recess
3 April: Diet and Government
*Michael Worboys, "The discovery of colonial malnutrition between
the wars," in David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous
Societies, (1988).
*Charles Webster, "Healthy or Hungry Thirties?" History Workshop
Journal, 13 (1982):110-29.
*Joseph Alter, Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism
(2000), chs,1&2.
*Paul Weindling "The role of international organizations in setting
nutritional standards in the 1920s and 1930s" in Kamminga and Cunningham
(eds.) The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940, 319-32.
*Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World (1995), ch.4.
10 April Travel, Migration and
Transculturation
John Barrell, "Death on the Nile" in Hall (ed.), Cultures
of Empire, pp.187-206
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire, chs. 1&4
*Laura Tabili, 'We Ask for British Justice', 135-60.
*A.Woolacott, To Try Her Fortune in London, intro, chs.1&2
*Liz Buettner, "Problematic Spaces, Problematic Races: Defining Europeans
in late colonial India" Women's History Review 9, 2 (2000):
277-298
17 April: Nationalism and Decolonisation
*Partha Chatterjee, The Nations and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories, chs.4&5.
Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy??
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, chs.7&8.
*Gandhi, My Experiments with Truth, 1-80.
24 April The
Mother Country and the Meanings of Home
Wendy Webster, Imagining Home. Gender, Race and National Identity 1945-1964
*Chris Waters, "'Dark Strangers in our Midst': The Discourse of Race
Relations" Journal of British Studies, 36 (April 1997):207-38.
1 May: Postcolonial Britain?
L.Appignanesi and S.Maitland (eds.), The Rushdie Files
*Gayatri Spivak, "Reading The Satanic Verses," in Outside in the Teaching
Machine, 217-242
*Aamir Mufti, "Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam and Politics,"
Social Text, 29 (1991): 95-116
*T.Brennan, "Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism," Social Text,
31-31 (1992), 271-275
*Anouar Majid, "Can the Postcolonial Critic Speak? Orientalism and the
Rushdie affair," Cultural Critique, 32 (Winter 1995-1996): 5-42
*Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, ch. 7.
8 May. Papers
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
Other Useful Texts on Reserve:
F.Cooper and A.Stoler, Tensions of Empires
Paula Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire
James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of
the British Empire
Daniel Headrick, Technologies of Empire
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
David Arnold, "The 'discovery' of malnutrition and diet in colonial India"
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 31, 1 (1994):1-26
J.B.Orr, Food, Health and Income
Diana Wylie, Starving on a Full Stomach
Liz Buettner, "From Somebodies to Nobodies: Britons Returning Home from
India" in M.Daunton and B.Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity:
221-240
Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World
Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness. Writing Identity in the Culture
of Colonialism
Ian Baucom, Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity
W.H.Russell, Russell's despatches from the Crimea, 1854-1856
V.Nash, The Great Famine and Its Causes
H.W.Nevinson, Ladysmith, The Diary of a Siege
H.H.Risley, The People of India
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Michael Banton, The Coloured Quarter
Sheila Patterson, Dark Strangers
