'Writing the empire: scribblings from below' conference podcasts

Podcasts of almost all the papers delivered at the 'Writing the empire: scribblings from below' conference held in Bristol from June 24th-26th 2010 are available for listening or free download at: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2010/06/writing-the-empire-scribblings-from-below/

'Writing the empire: scribblings from below' was co-organised by Dr Fiona Paisley, Griffith University, Queensland and Dr Kirsty Reid, University of Bristol. Speakers included: Karin Barber, Antoinette Burton, Jonathan Hyslop, Marilyn Lake, Isaac Land, Norman Etherington, Paul Pickering & more. The conference addressed a range of questions about the appropriation of reading and writing by subaltern groups in empire. It bought together scholars who study less privileged, lower class Britons like convicts and sailors with those who work on histories of the colonized. It thus foregrounded the fact that these groups were often becoming more fully exposed to the written word at much the same moment and that literacy was regarded as a civilizing and disciplining mechanism more generally. The primary interest of many of the presenters was less in the formal published text than in a wide variety of everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, folk song, suicide notes, graffiti and more. Rather than assuming that literate cultures smoothly and fully replaced their oral counterparts, our participants instead asked questions about the entangled and dynamic character of relationships between the spoken and the written word. A number of presenters also went beyond the writing and reading of texts, to examine their performance with papers on topics like courtroom oratory, ‘folk’ music, street ballads and broadsides. Finally, a range of papers explored the conceptual and methodological issues that arise from working with fragmentary and often fleeting types of sources and so with a less hegemonic ‘imperial archive' than those created by colonial states.