English & Comparative Literary Studies - Events Calendar

This is a working paper offering some of my thoughts on the characteristics of the sounds, silences, and echoes of dying, death, and the afterlife relating to child death in Anglophone literatures of the nineteenth-century. I will look at the ways in which bereavement accounts by public figures such as Charles Darwin and Samuel Iraneus Prime, infant elegies by writers such as Felicia Hemans, David Macbeth Moir, and Lydia Sigourney, and prose works by Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher-Stowe attempted to capture, record, and recall these sonic aspects in written form as a means of positively manifesting the intangible experience of loss into something more material, and as part of a wider cultural endeavour offering consolation in the idea of a shared collective grief.

At the same time, through an examination of some of the same elegies and through prose works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘A Nurses’ Story’, Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘The Lost Ghost’, and M.R. James’s ‘The Lost Hearts’, I will suggest that something darker is revealed in their mournful dirges; bitterness toward a cultural movement that glorified child death as an immortalisation of beauty, innocence and piety, or as salvation from a life of misery on earth, and anxiety and fear that the afterlife for children was not a space of eternal happiness, play, and singing. It is my contention however, that all of these auditory markers should, nevertheless, be read as social constructs – not inherently associated with children, but cultural indicators that contributed to the idealisation and silencing of ‘the child’ during this period.

Chantal Zabus is Professeur des Universités/Professor of Postcolonial Literatures and Gender Studies at the Université de Paris 13 / Sorbonne-Paris-Cité, France. She is the author of Out in Africa (2013); Between Rites and Rights (2007); The African Palimpsest (2007); and Tempests after Shakespeare (2002). She is the Editor-in-Chief of Postcolonial Text.

Her talk addresses the "post-ID" world and seeks to distinguish between five post-ID faces:

1. Accented Identities and Languaging in the Postcolony (including "Writing with an Accent");

2. The DNA of Identity, including discussion of "The Limits of Whiteness" and "Fetishized Identities: Identity under Occupation";

3. Religious "Allegiances";

4. Sexual Dissidence; and

5. Transidentity Cards.

Please join us for our second town hall meeting, which will focus on Decolonising the Curriculum, the University and beyond!

As part of this Town Hall, Gurminder Bhambra and Dalia Gebrial, who are two of the editors of Decolonising the University (and a former staff and student at Warwick!) will give a short talk on the work they've done around decolonisation and some of the wins they've had (for instance Dalia was involved in the Rhodes must Fall movement at Oxford) to inspire us in thinking about the kinds of initiatives and actions we can take. This will also be a chance to share concerns, ask questions, or propose other initiatives and ideas around questions of diversity.

In advance of that Town Hall, we'd also holding a staff-student reading group to talk about the framework of decolonisation. We've booked Room H542 on Wednesday 20 February from 1-2:30.

For that reading group, we'll be reading the introduction and two chapters of Decolonising the University ("Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change" by Dalia Gebrial and "Black/Academia" by Robbie Shilliam) as well as a short excerpt from Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser's "Notes For a Feminist Manifesto." We hope that these readings can open up a larger conversation on the kinds of changes we'd like to see happen in our curriculum, our department, and our university. The readings are attached here. Given recent events, we would also very much welcome readings or discussions on fighting sexism, racism, anti-semitism, transphobia, and homophobia on campus. The readings are provided in the above links!

If you have any questions, please email m.abramson@warwick.ac.uk