Local and International Research Affiliations
The Centre for Postcolonial Writing has recognised associations with the following centres and projects:
Making Britain - South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870–1950
Open University
This 3-year project (2007–10), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, examines South Asian contributions to Britain’s literary, cultural and political life in the period 1870–1950. Complicating the common perception that a homogeneous British culture only began to diversify after the Second World War, it explores how an early diasporic population impacted on British life and helped to form contemporary Britain’s cultural-political identities. Extensive archival research and an interdisciplinary approach will illuminate the diverse ways in which South Asian writers, artists, activists and professionals in Britain formed affiliations, groupings and solidarities to create a dynamic ‘contact zone’ at the heart of empire. Making Britain is led by Professor Susheila Nasta (Open University), in collaboration with Professor Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford) and Dr Ruvani Ranasinha (King’s College London), and research assistants Dr Sumita Mukherjee (Oxford) and Dr Rehana Ahmed (Open). We are working in partnership with the British Library and SALIDAA, and in consultation with leading scholars Dr Rozina Visram, Professor Lyn Innes, Professor Partha Mitter and Dr Deborah Swallow. Making Britain will be hosting a number of seminars and workshops during the course of the project, as well as a final conference and exhibition in September 2010 at the British Library. There they will launch a database housing visual tools to imagine South Asian interactions with British life and an annotated bibliography of selected materials relating to South Asian artists, writers, activists and organizations in Britain during the period 1870 to 1950. Past workshops include ‘South Asian contact zones in the metropolis’ held in London in April 2008 considering South Asians and their varied interactions with the metropolis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Keynote speakers were Antoinette Burton (Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois) addressing the methodology of transnationalism in relation to a migrant doctor, and Partha Mitter (Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Sussex) addressing ideas of cosmopolitanism.
- For further information, please visit: http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/south-asians-making-britain
- For contact, please email: arts-making-britain@open.ac.uk
Colonialism and Its Aftermath
University of Tasmania
Colonialism and Its Aftermath is an interdisciplinary research centre based at the University of Tasmania. It provides a forum for teaching, research, and scholarship in the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, and facilitates interaction with the local community as well as with heritage and tourism industries.
- For further information, please visit: http://colonial.arts.utas.edu.au
NELK
University of Frankfurt
- For further information, please visit: http://www.nelk-frankfurt.de/home-e.htm
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
University of Melbourne
- For further information, please visit: http://www.ipcs.org.au/
Moving Worlds. A Journal of Transcultural Writing
University of Leeds
- For further information, please visit: http://www.movingworlds.net/
Images of Refugees in British and Australian Literature, Film and Media of the Late 20th Century
Supported in part by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and conducted at Leeds University, UK.
This research project examines images of refugees in British and Australian literature, film and media in the late 20th century. Working with genres of life-writing, young adult literature, novel, drama, film and digital media it seeks to combine studies in anthropology, sociology and postcolonial literature in order to establish a cross-disciplinary and inter-generic analysis. The primary material selected is by migrant authors writing in English about their experiences in multicultural British and Australian societies. The main aim of the project is to investigate individual negotiations of experiences of expatriation in order to envision the shaping of a collective identity in multicultural nation states. By drawing on a variety of refugee perspectives this study will extend the scope of discourses on multiculturalism, human rights and citizenship.
- Researcher: Dr Sissy Helff, Frankfurt University
- Contact: helff@nelk.uni-frankfurt.de