[Please note that the syllabus is still tentative. You will receive a finished syllabus specifying assignments, etc., when classes begin.]

September 14, 16, 21, 23: Introduction: British National Identity and its Problems

Rafael Samuel, "Introductions" to the three volumes of Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), [(1) Introduction: Exciting to be English; (2) Introduction: The "Little Platoons"; (3) Introduction: The Figures of National Myth]. Course packet (NOTE: There will be one packet of xeroxed course materials in each flat in London)

Houston A. Baker, Jr., Stephen Best, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, "Representing Blackness/Representing Britain: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Knowledge," in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies. A Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.1-15. (Course packet)

Dick Hebdige, "Digging for Britain: An Excavation in Seven Parts," in Black British Cultural Studies, pp. 120-162.

Salman Rushdie, "A General Election," in Caryl Phillips, Extravagant Strangers. A Literature of Belonging (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 235-239.

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 1-54, 98-132, 155-193, 364-375.

Recommended Videos: Henry V (Kenneth Branagh, 1989); Riff Raff (Kenneth Loach, 1990).

 

William Hogarth, O the Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais), 1748

September 28, 30: Defoe & Beyond. Colonialism Made and Remade

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe [1719] (any edition), (pages to be assigned).

Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (Heinemann), 1991.

Kathleen Wilson, "Patriotic Adventure: Libertarianism, War and Empire, 1736-1762," in The Sense of the People. Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 137-205. (Course packet)

 

FIRST ASSIGNMENT DUE OCTOBER 4

The Queen's "Remembrancer"

October 4, 5 (note dates): The "Freeborn" Englishman

Jill Franklin, "The Liberty of the Park," in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, Vol. III, pp. 141-158. (Course packet)

Colley, Britons, Ch. 8 (pp. 321-363).

Gretchen Gerzina, "Sharp and Mansfield: Slavery in the Courts," in Black London. Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 90-132. (Course packet)

Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, in Phillips, ed., Extravagant Strangers, pp. 1-16.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Robert J. Allison, ed. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995), pp. 165-171. (Course packet)

Recommended Video: Quemada! (Burn) (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969).

October 12, 14: Consumption and Colonialism: Slavery and the Working Class

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 108-186. (Course packet)

Peter Linebaugh, "Sugar and Police: The London Working Class in the 1790s," in The London Hanged. Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century (London and New York, 1991), pp. 402-441. (Course packet)

Recommended Video: The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston, 1975).

  Thomas Rowlandson cartoon, 1810

October 19, 21: Romanticism

 Wordsworth, Prelude, Book 7, 8: "Residence in London" (Course packet)

 Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Course packet)

Alex Potts, "'Constable Country' Between the Wars," in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, Vol. III, pp. 160-186. (Course packet)

V.S.Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Vintage), 1998. (selections to be determined)

Visit: View the Constables at the Tate

  Constable, Landscape in the Lake District

SECOND ASSIGNMENT DUE OCTOBER 22

Fall Break: October 25-31

November 2: Romanticism (continued) - finish discussions and readings

November 4: Lake District 

November 5: Liverpool (Transatlantic Slave Museum)

November 6: Return to London

Moira G. Simpson, "History Revisited," in Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 15-49. (Course packet)

Richard Handler, "On Having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec's Patrimoine," in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Objects and Others. Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 192-217. (Course packet)

John Urry, "How Societies Remember the Past," in Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp.45-65. (Course packet)

Paul Gilroy, "This Island Race," New Statesman and Society, 2 February 1990, pp. 30-32. (Course packet)

Guest lecture: Ross Dawson

November 9, 11: The Monarchy

Elizabeth I

Tom Nairn, "Britain's Royal Romance," in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, Vol. III, pp. 72-86 (Course packet)

David Cannadine, "The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the 'Invention of Tradition,' c.1820-1977," in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 101-164. (Course packet) 

Colley, Britons, Ch 5 (pp. 195-236).

Recommended Video: Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998); Elizabeth R (Roderick Graham and Richard Martin IV, 1971).

THIRD ASSIGNMENT DUE NOVEMBER 16

November 16, 18: Locating "Others" in England

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899] - any edition.

David Feldman, "Jews in London, 1880-1914," in Samuel, ed., Patriotism, Vol. II, pp. 207-229. (Course packet)

James Clifford, "On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski," The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 92-113. (Course packet)

Recommended Video: Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981).

November 22, 23 (note dates): The Ethnographic Other

Frederick N. Bohrer, "The Times and Spaces of History: Representation, Assyria, and the British Museum," in Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 197-222. (Course pack) 

Annie E. Coombes, "Temples of Empire: The Museum and its Publics," and "National Unity and Racial and Ethnic Identities: The Franco-British Exhibition of 1908," in Reinventing Africa. Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 109-128; 187-213. (Course pack)

Craig Clunas, "China in Britain. The Imperial Collections," in Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object. Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 41-51. (Course pack)

Visit: Horniman, Victoria & Albert, and/or Assyrian sculptures at British Museum.

Acid Jazz group "Galliano" 

Nov. 30, Dec. 2, 7, 9: New Ethnicities

Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 441-449. (Course packet)

Kuan-Hsing Chen, "The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall," in Morley and Chen, eds., Stuart Hall, pp. 484-503. (Course packet) 

Winston James, "The Making of Black Identities," in Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism, Vol. III, pp. 230-255. (Course packet)

George Orwell, "England Your England," from "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius," [1941] in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. II: My Country Right or Left (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, nd), pp. 56-78. (Course packet)

Hanif Kureishi, "The Rainbow Sign," pp. 3-37. (Course packet)

Paul Gilroy, "'The Whisper Wakes, the Shudder Plays': 'Race', Nation and Ethnic Absolutism," in "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack:" The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 43-71. (Course packet)

 Recommended Video: The Buddah of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi,

FOURTH ASSIGNMENT DUE DECEMBER 13