Reading After Empire:
Local, Global and Diaspora Audiences

The Iris Murdoch Centre | University of Stirling 3-5 September 2008

All panels, keynotes, roundtables, coffees and lunches take place in the Iris Murdoch Centre

- WEDNESDAY 3rd SEPTEMBER
- THURSDAY 4th SEPTEMBER
- FRIDAY 5th SEPTEMBER

DOWNLOADABLE VERSION

WEDNESDAY 3rd SEPTEMBER

From 8.30am Registration and coffee at the Iris Murdoch Centre

9.30-9.55 Welcome
(Organisers, David Richards, Kim Knott)

10.00- 11.30
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 1, 2, 3)

PANEL 1
Reading Against the Grain
Chair: Andrew Smith

Baidik Bhattacharya: ‘Kipling’s “British Seamen and Colonial Soldiers”: Reading Empire with Walter Benjamin’
David Farrier: ‘ Reading “Bartleby” at the Limits of Citizenship’
Lindsey Moore: ‘Modernity at the Margins: Contrapuntal Readings’

PANEL 2
Consuming the Caribbean: Local and Global Audiences
Chair: Nicholas Laughlin

Lucy Evans: ‘The Politics of Reading in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales’
Ariel Bookman: ‘Reading Africa, Writing Haiti: The Transatlantic Imagination in Carpentier's El Reino de Este Mundo.’
Joscelyn Gardner: ‘Subverting Colonial Narratives: The Representation of Female Creole Identity in the Work of a Contemporary Caribbean Artist’

PANEL 3
Curriculum and Canon
Chair: Michelle Keown

Patricia Clark: ‘Reading Culture, Confronting Apartheid: South Africa in the 1950s’
Neelam Srivastava: ‘Indias of the Mind: The Role of English-language Anthologies in Shaping the Idea of India’
Christopher de Shield: ‘Indigeneity, Nationalism and the Transatlantic Critical Reception of Zee Edgell’s Beka Lamb (1982)’

11.30-12.00 COFFEE

12.00-13.00
Keynote: VRON WARE
‘Café Diplomacy: Close Encounters of an Intercultural Kind’
Chair: Gemma Robinson

13.00-14.00 LUNCH
(buffet lunch in the Iris Murdoch Centre)

14.00-15.30
parallel sessions (PANELS 4, 5, 6)

PANEL 4
Reading Africa: Local and Diaspora Audiences
Chair: Jamal Eddine Benhayoun

Katalin Egri Ku-Mesu: ‘The Inconsiderateness of the Text: The Metonymic Gap in Anglophone African Literature’
Violetta Verge: ‘African Writers Get Wrongs Redressed, Readers Do the Rest’
Emily Davis: ‘Staging Encounters: Ahdaf Soueif and the Transnational Reception of The Map of Love’

PANEL 5
Interpretive Communities
Chair: Danielle Fuller

Molly Travis: ‘The Beloved Mockingbird: Identity Inversion and the Displacement of Race among US and South African Readers’
Juliet Munden: ‘Reading the Same Texts in Norway and Eritrea’
Elizabeth Oldfield: ‘Imagining the Gikuyu: Re-presenting an Interpretive Community in Red Strangers’

PANEL 6
Readings of Place
Chair: Neelam Srivastava

Norbert Bugeja: ‘“A few meters of wood and the thirty years of exile”: Reading the Space of Palestine in Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah’
Sarah Brouillette: ‘Gentrification and the Reception of Ali’s Brick Lane’
Christopher Ian Foster: ‘Reading Diaspora: Globality, Translocality, and “Mapping” in/through the Literatures of Oceania’

15.30 – 16.00 COFFEE

16.00-17.30
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 7, 8, 9)

PANEL 7
Reading in the Margins (RED panel)
Chair: Daniel Allington

Rosalind Crone: ‘Making Good Colonials: The Uses of Reading on the Mid-nineteenth Century Convict Ship’
Katie Halsey: ‘“Macaulay’s Children”: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Literary Legacy’
Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey: Demonstration of Database

PANEL 8
Reading India: Local and Global Audiences
Chair: GJV Prasad

Vedita Cowaloosur: ‘Writing and Reading National Identity in the Language of the Empire: in James Joyce’s Dubliners and R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days’
Maria Ridda: ‘Reading “The Courter”: The “Imaginary Homelands” of the Text’
Florian Stadtler: ‘Reading Hindi Cinema – Rushdie’s Hero and the Postcolonial Indian State’

PANEL 9
Reception after 9/11
Chair: David Murphy

April Biccum: ‘Marketing Development: Communicating Nation after Empire’
Jamal Benhayoun: ‘Beyond Postcolonialism: The Making and Reception of Theory in the Post-9/11 Era’
Kathy-Ann Tan: ‘Reading After 9/11: Diasporic Identities in Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) and Mohsim Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

18.00-19.30
Wine Reception and Poetry Reading: Jackie Kay and Sheree Mack
Welcome: Christine Hallett

Delegates arrange their own evening meal.

THURSDAY 4th SEPTEMBER

9.00-10.30
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 10, 11, 12)

PANEL 10
Diverse Readerships in Africa
Chair: Abigail Ward

Gail Low: ‘“The Scramble for Africa?”: A Comparative Assessment of the African Writers Series and the Three Crowns Series’
David Richards: ‘Staging the word: the spectable of the text in African Literature'
Beth le Roux: 'Does the North read the South? The case of African scholarly publishers'

PANEL 11
The Ethics of Reading
Chair: David Farrier

Hilda Hargestam Strandberg: ‘“The Ethics of Diaspora Encounters”: A Deconstructive/Ethical Reading of Nuruddin Farah’s Novels’
Katherine Hallemeier: ‘Sympathetic Shame in Coetzee’s Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year’

PANEL 12
Reading Cinema and Visual Culture
Chair: Betsy Fuller

Sally-Jane Thompson: ‘Reading Cosmopolitan Tension in Contemporary Graphic Narrative’
Claudia Sternberg: ‘Surviving Sabu: Productive (Post)Colonial Spectatorship’
Mantra Roy: ‘West Rules, East Follows: A Postcolonial Reading of 300, Borat and Blood Diamond’

10.30-11.00 COFFEE

11.00-12.00
2 parrallel sessions (PANELS 13, 14)

PANEL 13
Reading Black British
Chair: Brian Rock

Ying-ying Hung: ‘On Whose Britishness: Multicultural Exoticism in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’
Abigail Ward: ‘“They can refuse to buy my book, and I’ll starve”: Slavery and Audience in the Work of David Dabydeen’

PANEL 14
Reading the Past
Chair: Sheree Mack

Gayle Nunley: ‘Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Forty Days at the Exhibition (1900): Reading the World from Post-Imperial Spain
Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar: ‘Chipaya Mytho-history: Constructing the Past, the Present and the Future’

12.05-13.05
Keynote: GREG MYERS
‘Reception Research and Talk in Groups’
Chair: Bethan Benwell

13.05-14.00 LUNCH
Buffet lunch in the Iris Murdoch Centre


14.00-15.30 ROUNDTABLE
Reading Groups, Reading Diaspora

Participants: Danielle Fuller (convener) Jamal Benhayoun; GJV Prasad; Nicholas Laughlin; Rabi Isma, David Allan, Mary Greenshields

15.30-17.00
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 15, 16, 17)

PANEL 15
Reading Rushdie: Reconfiguring Orientalism
Chair: Bethan Benwell

Gen’ichiro Itakura: ‘“I have become death”: Reading Shalimar the Clown and Post- 9/11 Anglo-American Sensibilities’
Daniel Allington: ‘Reading Rushdie in Bradford and London: Hayden White, Stephen Labov, and a Story about a Book’

PANEL 16
Writers and their Reading
Chair: Baidik Bhattacharya

Sunayani Bhattacharya: ‘The Platonic Satyagrahi: A Revisioning of the West in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj’
Alberto Fernández Carbajal: ‘ The Legacies of E.M. Forster’s The Hills of Devi in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust’
John McLeod: ‘Vido, not Sir Vidia: Caryl Phillips Reading VS Naipaul’

PANEL 17
Reading the Newspaper Archives
Chair: Florian Stadtler

Srila Nayak: ‘Colonial and Nationalist Pedagogies: Reading the Newspaper Archive (1865-1900)’
Jonathan Hensher: ‘Colonialist caricature and the reader – Challenges and Approaches’

17.00-17.30 COFFEE


17.30-18.30 David Morley in conversation with Arjun Appadurai
Video-link session between Stirling and New York
Chair: James Procte


19.30 CONFERENCE DINNER AT THE EAST INDIA COMPANY
(coach to take delegates into town)

FRIDAY 5th SEPTEMBER

9.00-10.00
Keynote: STEPHANIE NEWELL
Articulating Empire: African Print Cultures in Colonial West Africa
Chair: David Richards

10:00-11:30
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 18, 19, 20)

PANEL 18
Reading After the Roman Empire
Chair: Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar

William Mierse: ‘Roman Archaism in a Provincial Capital: The Colonial Forum at Augusta Emerita’
Greg Woolf: ‘The Reading Lesson: Education, Socialization and Empowerment in the Roman Provinces’

PANEL 19
Intertextuality and Translation
Chair: Gemma Robinson

Lisa Fletcher: ‘“I am in hell …” Reading the Mutiny on the Bounty’
Sandra Meyer: ‘The Story that gave this Land its Life: The Role of Intertextuality in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide’

PANEL 20
The Postcolonial Exotic
Chair: Scott Hames

Michelle Keown: ‘“The Pacific Exotic”: “Western” Readers’ Responses to the Postcolonial Literatures of Oceania’
Soo Ng: ‘Reading the Postcolonial Exotic in Contemporary Fiction: Guilty as Charged?’

11.00-11.30 COFFEE


11:30-13:00
3 parallel sessions (PANELS 21, 22, 23)


PANEL 21
Reading Gender and Nation
Chair: Rabi Isma

Anna Bernard: ‘ Libidinal Dynamics: Gender and National Allegory in Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli Women’s Writing’
Asia Zgadzaj: ‘African Women Writers- Reception and Readership’

PANEL 22
High Culture, Popular Audiences
Chair: John McLeod

David Murphy: ‘Football and Negritude: Some Reflections on a Postcolonial Cultural Studies’
Lucienne Loh: ‘Philistinism and the Politics of Reading in Amitava Kumar’s Bombay- London- New York and Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana’
Andrew Smith: ‘ CLR James, Vanity Fair and the Crowd: Some Notes Towards a Jamesian Theory of Reading’

PANEL 23
Life Writing and Autobiographical Narrative
Chair: Gail Low

Ole Birk Laursen: ‘Reading Postcolonial Women’s Life Writing in the 1990s: Lucinda Roy’s Lady Moses and Joanna Traynor’s Sister Josephine as Fictional Autobiographies’
Dorrie Chetty: ‘Memory, Identity and Transition in the Writing of Recent British Immigrants and their Reading Public’
Paul Barrett: ‘Dionne Brand’s Inventory and Transnational Writing’

13:00-14:15 LUNCH

14.15-15.30
Keynote: KOBENA MERCER
Are You Receving Me? Visual Art as a Problem for Postcolonial Studies
Chair: James Procter


Conference Closing

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