Events

Global Migrations and Textual Cultures: The British Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century

‘Global Migrations and Textual Cultures: The British Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century’ is a two-day international workshop to be held at the University of Birmingham in Autumn 2018. It is a collaboration between Dr Lara Atkin, Postdoctoral Fellow on the SouthHem project at University College Dublin and Dr Fariha Shaikh, Lecturer in Victorian Studies at Birmingham University. The workshop will bring together an international network of established and early-career researchers to interrogate the complex junctures between global migrations, textuality, and empire in the long nineteenth century. Energised equally by the need to examine critically the historical roots of large-scale migrations, and the ethical imperative of ensuring the contribution of migrants to the cultural life of Europe and the Commonwealth is recognised, scholars are recovering the oft-neglected literary and cultural productions of Britain and Ireland’s ‘empire migrants’ (Harper and Constantine). As well as recovering the contributions made by non-European migrant literary production to the literary historiographies of the USA and the former British colonies, this critical move necessarily entails moving away from privileging the novel as the ‘paradigmatic literary form’ (Said) and turning instead to the broader archive of imperial print culture.

This workshop will bring scholars working in Victorian Studies into conversation with those working in Postcolonial Studies and World Literature to identify the methodological overlaps between these fields in the context of nineteenth-century global migrations. Scoping out the connections between these different specialisms allows us to historicize contemporary discussions of migration, and to explore the methodological synergies between migration and literary form across these varying fields.

Organisers: Dr Lara Atkin (UCD) and Dr Fariha Shaikh (Birmingham)

Image: 'The Immigrants' Ship' by John C. Dollman, 1884. Oil on Canvas. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.