"Body, Nation, Empire: Victorian Embodiments of Place"
NEMLA
March 30-31, 2001
Hartford, Connecticut
This panel seeks papers that explore the ways in which the imperial
English nation and/or its colonies were variously embodied in the
nineteenth century. Racialized, classed and gendered bodies have often
been pressed into service in the cultural imagination and construction of
both English nationhood and foreign colony. Spaces like the Victorian
middle-class home, the English pastoral landscape, the tropics or the
unknown jungle are particularly rich sites for imagining cultural,
national and regional identities. The construction of
recognizable accompanying bodies is often used to underpin such
ideologically charged notions of space.
Some questions that might usefully be addressed here are:
How might theories of the body and embodiment illuminate theories of space
and vice versa?
How are particular bodies discursively portrayed and made symbolically
resonant of specific places? Is the English body at home portrayed
differently from its counterpart abroad?
In what ways might the representation of racially hybrid bodies or the
bodies of colonized peoples relate to the consolidation as well as the
subversion of imperial power and authority?
Papers that deal with autoethnography or the self-portrayal of
non-white bodies from the colonies and how these accounts led to
resistance and formulations of proto-national imagined communities are
also welcome. Panelists should seek to illuminate the intersection
of body and space and are encouraged to do so from a wide range of
texts--novels, travel narratives, poetry, art, conduct literature, essays,
photographs, maps, museum catalogs, advertisements and other popular
culture forms.
Please send 1-2 page abstracts by 15 September to
Angelia Poon
20 Banks Street, Apt 2
Somerville
MA 02144
Email submissions, as message rather than attachment, may be sent to
poon@brandeis.edu.
Angelia Poon
English and American Literature Department
Brandeis University
Waltham, Mass.
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