Some Useful Links:
London and Program Basics: Arrival, Travel, Money, etc.
Academic Sites of Use to the Course:
Moving Here: Moving Here is the biggest database of digitised photographs, maps, objects, documents and audio items from 30 local and national UK archives, museums and libraries which record migration experiences to the UK of the last 200 years.
Colonial and Post-Colonial Web Sites
Political Discourse: Theories of Colonialism and Post-Colonialism
History Libraries and Collections in London
Your Housing & Internet Use Sites:
Easy Internet Cafe, Tottenham Ct. Road
London & UK Sites:
London Hyperlinked A-Z of Museums
Museums around the UK on the Web
Colonialism's Impact on the Shaping of English National Identity
London: June 28 - August 6, 2004
Welcome to the London Seminar! You should be able to use this syllabus to get the information you need about the course and other London-related issues. If there is some information which you feel would be useful to the group, just write to us and we'll put it up.
Course Meetings and Expectations:
As a general rule, classes will meet from Monday-Thursday, from 10:00 AM to 12:30. We might hold class on Friday (which we will do the first week), when we have a class trip that will take up a day earlier in the week. Except for the first week, if you have arranged to be away on a Friday when, it turns out, we will be having a class, don't fret; enjoy your time away. We will also have some required and a few optional museum visits during some afternoons (but not on Fridays). We will let you know about these as far in advance as possible.
We expect that you will be doing the required readings. We also want you to turn in "journal" style reports after each of the units. These can be handwritten, printed, turned in on a 3.5" disk, or sent as an e-mail attachment. We'll talk more about what we will want, but, in general, they are to be reflections on the readings, discussions, and your London/UK experiences to the extent that they influence your reading. We will also be dividing up the class so that you can act as "presenters" a number of times during the course. Presenters will be in charge or organizing and kicking off the discussions.
SYLLABUS AND READINGS
A note on getting readings:Except where noted, no particular edition of any book is required. Generally speaking (with a few exceptions), books will be significantly cheaper in the U.S. than in London, so you would be wise to purchase what is needed before you depart for London. Some of the books will be available in the small Oberlin-in-London library; you are also welcome to leave books at the end of the term for the use of future students. Finally, you may want to arrange with flat-mates to divide up the books among you (i.e., with different people in charge of bringing different books to cut down on what you have to carry). For materials that are on “Electronic Reserve,” we would recommend that you print the needed pages and take them with you. For on-line materials, you will have some access to computers in London and can simply wait until the appropriate week to read on-line materials or, in the case of some of the shorter selections, you can download them and/or print them in the U.S. and take them with you. You will have some limited access to printers in London.
You should have already received from Anu information about how to access Oberlin's electronic reserve system, which is password protected. You can get to the appropriate starting point by simply clicking on the (above) link on this syllabus. Otherwise, you can get to that starting point by typing in: http://eres.cc.oberlin.edu/. Click on "Electronic Reserves and Course Materials." Go to "Select a Department," and choose "English." Then go to "Instructor" and choose "Needham, Anuradha." Click on "Go," then "ENGL001", and then enter the password that Anu has given you.
You'll see that there are a variety of “levels” of readings. We have required readings (both for background and during each week), some recommended readings (which, as the name suggests, are not required, but would help you in that week's discussions), and "further" readings, which are only if you would like to pursue the themes further.
Recommended Background Reading:
These readings can be done prior to arrival in London and can give you a good grounding in some materials and issues that we will be covering. They are not required readings, but will be quite useful as you prepare for the course.Linda Colly, Britons: Forging the Nation (Yale 1994).
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 (University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1-15. [Electronic Reserve]
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People. Politics,Culture and Imperialism in England 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1998.
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge), 2002.
David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2000.
Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge), 2000.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (any edition, although the Norton Critical edition is quite valuable).Skim through the opening and concluding sections, concentrating on the section that covers Crusoe's life on the island and Friday's arrival and education by Crusoe; we will focus on that section.)
Sam Selvon, Moses Ascending (London, Portsmouth, NH: Heineman), 1991.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (any edition).
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London, Portsmouth, NH: Heineman), 1976 [1969].
Unit 2: Slavery and Liberty Re-Considered
Primary Materials:
Olaudah Equiano, Life of Olaudah Equiano, of Gustavus Vassa, the African [1790](Dover Thrift Editions, 1999). Other editions also acceptable.
John Locke, Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina [1669]: [http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/nc05.htm].
Selections from John Locke's Two Treatises of Government: From the First Treatise: Paragraphs 1,2,3; From the Second Treatise: Chapters 4,6,6 (paragraphs 77-86), 16.
You can get Locke on-line at a number of sites. Try these:
John Locke, Selections from Two Treatises of Government [1690][http://www.lonang.com/exlibris/locke/].
From the Second Treatise: Chapters 4, 6, 7 [paragraphs 77-86], 16. [http://www.thisnation.com/library/books/locke/2ndtreatise.html].
If you would prefer to purchase a paper edition, there are many, very cheap (but good) editions available. I would recommend Locke: Two Treatises of Government - Student Edition, ed. and introduction by Peter Laslett (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1988. You can find used editions at Amazon.com for less than $2.00.
Secondary Materials
David Brion Davis, "The Response to Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Thought," The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Oxford, 1966), pp. 91-121. [Electronic Reserve]
Orlando Patterson, "Freedom in the Religious and Secular Thought of the Middle Ages," in Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (Basic Books, 1992), pp. 376-401. [Electronic Reserve]
E.P. Thompson, "The Free-Born Englishman," in The Making of the English Working Class (NY: Vintage, 1963), pp. 77-101. [Electronic Reserve]
Gretchen Gerzina, "Sharp and Mansfield: Slavery in the Courts," in Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 90-132. [Electronic Reserve]
Useful background reading if you want additional materials:
Robin Blackwell, The Making of New World Slavery (Verso, 1997).
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 2000.
Unit 3: British Romanticism
Thomas de Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" and "The English Mail Coach" [any edition will do, but two editions have both selections: The Works of Thomas De Quincey, general introduction by Grevel Lindop, edited by Barry Symonds (London, Brookfield, VT: Pickering and Chatto), 2000 or Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings; edited with an introduction and notes by Barry Milligan (London: Penguin), 2003]. There is a readonable version of "Confessions" on line at: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/dequinc1.htm
While it is not easy to read, Project Gutenberg has put "The English Mail Coach" on-line: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=6359
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein [any edition will do; if you want a recommendation: Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus; edited with an introduction and notes by M.K. Joseph (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press) 1998.]
William Wordsworth, Prelude, Books 7-8, selections to be provided. Book 7 can be found in an (almost unreadable) version on line: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~curran/250-96/prelude7.html. I'm still looking for Book 8: We will provide you with the necessary pages.
Samuel Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner (any edition, or various on-line versions. The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia has a very nice on-line edition with illustrations from many 19th century editions of the work: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Col2Mar.html
V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (any edition will do, you might try the 1988 Vintage edition).
Unit 4: Colonialism, Race, and Class
Primary Materials
John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty" (1859), selections to be assigned: [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/jsmill-lib.html].
John Stuart Mill, "The Negro Question," Fraser's Magazine (1850): [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/texts/carlyle/millnegro.htm].
Thomas Carlyle, "Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question," (1853: slightly expanded version of 1849 Fraser's Magazine edition): [http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/texts/carlyle/odnqbk.htm].
Secondary Materials
"The Carlyle-Mill 'Negro Question' Debate," http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/texts/carlyle/negroquest.htm#texts
Simon Gikandi, "Through the Prism of Race: Black Subjects and English Identity," in Maps of Englishness. Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia, 1996), pp. 50-83. [Electronic Reserve]
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Viking, 1995).
Peter Linebaugh, "Sugar and Police: The London Working Class in the 1790s," in The London Hanged (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). [Electronic Reserve]
Unit 5: Inhabiting Englishness?
Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist (Plume), 2003. (NOTE: Kunzru will meet with our class.)
Recommended background reading:
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (any edition). Available on-line at: http://www.online-literature.com/kipling/kim/
E.M. Forster, Passage to India (any edition; the Harvest 1984 reprint edition is relatively inexpensive).
For this unit, we will also view a film, Lagaan (Dir: Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), and read two essays that relate cricket to (English) national identity:
Satadru Sen, "Cameleon Games: Ranjitsinghji's Politics of Race and Gender," Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2:3 (Dec. 2001) [Electronic Reserve], and
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, "Inhabiting the Metropole: C.L.R. James and the Postcolonial Intellectual of the African Diaspora," Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (1993): 281-304. [Electronic Reserve]
Unit 6: "A New Kind of English[ness]"
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Penguin), 1991.
Hanif Kureishi, "The Rainbow Sign," pp. 3-37. [Electronic Reserve]
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. [Electronic Reserve]
Kuan-Hsing Chen, "The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Stuart Hall," in Morley and Chen, eds., Stuart Hall, pp. 484-503. [Electronic Reserve]