BRITISHNESS AND OTHERNESS
Locating Marginal White Identities in the Empire
Program and
Abstracts
and Report
Our purpose in convening Britishness and Otherness: Locating Marginal
White Identities in the Empireis to question and ultimately contest,
the assumption that "Britishness" was a static cultural
identity accessed easily and equally by all phenotypically similar
(ie white skinned) subjects of the British Empire.
Academic consideration of 'otherness' in the Imperial context
has continued to meditate on the dynamics of the colonial "encounter"
(ie with the racially different colonised).. As such, much of
this work has been structured by the presence of a literal difference
based on skin. This workshop will investigate marginal identities
in the Empire produced outside of the collision of the "white
presence" with the "black semblance'. This theme is
currently under-explored in the British context and in existing
studies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Workshop themes
Papers offered to the workshop should respond to two broad areas
of theoretical concern:
(i) That there is a singular narrative of white experience in
the Empire that can be collapsed into the homogenising signifier,
"British"; and
(ii) That relatively little work has considered why subjects
who were phenotypically similar did not access the privileges
of "Britishness" equally.
We have identified three general areas for discussion: Ethnicity,
Diaspora and Metropole. Papers should engage with one (or more)
of the follow sites of discursive production:
· Ethnic difference within the Imperial center: the Scots
and the Welsh
· The racially similar colonized: the Irish
· Dislocation from the Metropole: "white" or
"British" identities in settler societies such as Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and South Africa
· Religious difference both in Britain and the colonies:
Judaism, Catholicism, Reformed Protestantism
· Political and ideological difference: Radical, unionists
etc
· The white body as "non-subject": Criminals,
convicts, "deviants"
· Gender difference at home and on the colonial frontier:
the experience of women
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