Programme:Textual Commodities in Empire
Sponsored by SLLM, Faculty of Humanities, IFAS, WISER
Monday June 10-11
Venue: WISER, Richard Ward Building
Day 1: Monday June 10
9.00-9.15: Welcome and opening remarks
9.15-10.45
Session 1: Distant Reading – Backwards, Forwards and Sideways
 Ian Henderson, King’s College, University of London
Towards a History of Reading Backwards
 Elaine Freedgood, NYU
Hetero-Ontologicality
 Discussant: Sarah Nuttall
TEA: 10.45-11.15
11.15-13.00
Session 3: Paper empires
 Sarah Gundry, King’s College London
‘Homeward Bound’: Periodicity and the Cape Monthly Magazine
 Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand
Imperial Commons
 Fariha Shaikh, King’s College
‘An Imagined Community’? The Social Life of Nineteenth-Century
Emigrant Shipboard Newspapers
 Discussant: Ashlee Neser
LUNCH: 13.00-14.00
14.00-16.00
Session 2: Secondhand empires, imperial jumble
 Brenda Mhlambi, University of the Witwatersrand
The afterlives of the Zulu Empire: From the oral through the written to
popular performance
 Khwezi Mkhize, University of Pennsylvania
Dangerous Liaisons: Making Affiliations and Black Empire in early Twentieth
Century South Africa
 Achal Prabhala (Independent scholar, Bangalore)
 Word domination: The Enduring Legacy of the Cultural Cold War in India and
Africa
 Discussant: Sharad Chari
TEA: 16.00-16.30
Day 2: Tuesday June 11
9.00-10.30
Session 1: Cutting Writing and Image
 Sandra Young, University of Cape Town
Visual literacy and imperialist logic: the circulation of woodcut images of
‘new world’ peoples in the sixteenth century
 Adrien Delmas, (IFAS)
The history of writing in the early modern period through the reception of
the Codex Mendoza
 Discussant: Cynthia Kros
TEA: 10.30-11.00
11.00-13.00
Session 2: Affect, Pedagogy, Distance
 Tanya Agathocleous, Hunter College, CUNY
Criticism on Trial: Criminalizing Affect at the Wilde trials and the trial
of the Bangavasi
 Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University
The Calcutta School-Book Society and the Production of Knowledge
 Devleena Ghosh, UTS
Burma-Bengal Crossings: Representations of Liminalities in Bengali
literature of the pre-independence era
 Discussant: Dilip Menon
LUNCH: 13.00-14.00
14.00-15.00
Session 3: Closing Comments
Isabel Hofmeyr, Sarah Nuttall, Tanya Agothocleous
TEA: 15.00-15.30