Are you an undergraduate student uncertain about your career propsects? Do you think you might need more work experience? Come to this event and get advice from the senior careers advisor on how History students can get the experience that will open up more doors.

Dr. Sita Balani (King's College London) and Dr. Sivamohan Valluvan (University of Warwick)

‘Abuse by consent’: the intimate violence of racialisation

In 1979, a 35-year-old Indian woman coming to the UK to join her fiancé was stopped at Heathrow airport and subjected to a ‘virginity test’ – an invasive physical examination to ‘check’ she was a virgin and, therefore, a ‘legitimate’ bride. When the news broke, it emerged that ‘virginity tests’ were being conducted in British High Commissions across South Asia, as well as at the border at Heathrow airport. Asian women were assumed to be virgins until married and this assumption, rooted in colonial governance, was built into immigration policy, upheld by the enmeshment of bureaucracy and pseudo-science that one woman subjected to a ‘virginity test’ described as ‘abuse by consent.’ In these acts of routine violence, we can catch a glimpse of the central role of sexuality in how Asians in Britain are racialised.

As this example indicates, the legal, discursive, and experiential dimensions of sexual life – of being gendered, of desire, of romantic relationships, of family – cannot be viewed in isolation from race. I will offer a partial genealogy of the pivotal function of sexuality in the modern development of race, tracing the continuities and disjunctures between colonial and postcolonial governance. I will use this approach to suggest that, rather than an ‘intersectional’ approach to the relationship between race, gender, and sexuality, we need to consider the co-constitution of these categories as the basis for an assessment of state power.

Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King's College London. In her research and teaching, she explores the relationship between imperialism and identity in contemporary Britain. Her work has appeared in Boundless, Feminist Review, Identity Theory, Open Democracy, the Verso blog, and Vice.

Nationalism and left dilemmas?

This talk will explore some of the theoretical premises by which to make sense of nationalism’s strange resilience. Resisting the tendency to read today’s nationalism as only reflex, the discussion will probe the longstanding ability of nationalism to monopolize the terrain of political community and to filter its attendant political anxieties. Central to this argument is the distinctive ideological cacophony – as spanning the liberal, conservative, neoliberal and left spectrum – that collectively overdetermines the appeal of today’s nationalism and its constitutive racial demons. Particular attention will be given here to the complicity of certain left factions and sensibilities. Not only is this an abject betrayal of working class struggle as imagined along anti-racist and cosmopolitan terms, but the opportunist left cannot even hope to gain on this terrain – as it is the political right that retains the more well-trained authority to always triumph if offered these terms. Some concluding remarks however about the threat nationalism poses to the right too will also be considered – whereby the right’s over-investment in nationalist rupture has unmoored it partially from a more affirmative defence of capitalist virtue and uplift. The fissures that therein arise are I argue conducive to a left revival, even if currently chastened, providing it can steer clear of the call for ‘progressive patriotism’ and its false temptations.

Sivamohan Valluvan is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick. His Clamour of Nationalism was recently published with Manchester University Press.

Prof. Chris Preist (University of Bristol):Digital Technology: Climate Saint or Sinner?

John Shovlin, New York University

seminar: Dr John Shovlin (New York)

Prof. Alison Cooley: 'Debating Tiberian political discourse'

Presentation, refreshments, discussion. All are welcome.

“No more victories! No more conquests!”

The French and British East India Companies’ search for an entente, 1752–1788

Between the mid-1750s and the 1780s, the French and British East India companies recurrently sought an entente to reduce conflict between them in India, to preserve access to key commercial resources there, and to disentangle trade competition in Asia from the Franco-British geopolitical rivalry. In the 1750s, the companies bargained for nearly two years to end proxy wars that embroiled them in the Carnatic, to share access to the areas they controlled, and to make common cause against Indian powers. They pressed their governments to establish a vast neutralized zone in which the European trade to Asia could be carried on free from European conflicts. These negotiations foundered when the Seven Years War (1756–1763) broke out in North America. But officials returned to the idea in the early 1770s when the French colonial ministry proposed an agreement to establish a permanent peace in India between the French and British nations. Again, no agreement was reached. However, in 1785 a newly established French Indies Company and its nominal British rival negotiated a cartel for the East India Company to supply Bengal goods to the French market. Versailles blocked the deal, but the governments subsequently signed a convention to guarantee French merchants readier access to territories controlled by the British company. Common themes arose repeatedly in these negotiations: officials and company directors imagined a Franco-British concert in India; they aspired to disentangle the Asian world of trade from European geopolitical competition; they talked of establishing “free trade,” and affirmed the superiority of commerce to conquest. This paper will explore the factors that drove this search for an accommodation between the companies and their governments, consider its significance for our understanding of interimperial relations in the eighteenth century, and ask how it illuminates the dynamics of a capitalism embedded in a system of competing commercial states.

Seminar presented by Dr. Jenny Alexander.

Next week we will welcome Evelyn Araluen Corr and Jonathan Dunk on Wednesday 22 January, 5-7pm, in room S0.13 in the Social Sciences Building (please see Warwick Interactive map , here) for our second termly seminar on the theme of “Sounding the Anthropocene”, their talks will be entitled “Teleological Conflict in Indigenous Climate Poetics”, delivered by Evelyn Araluen and “Pyrocumulus: Making our own Weather in Narrative”, delivered by Jonathan Dunk. For their abstracts and bios please see our website here.

Please join Myka for a glass of wine, water, or juice and a discussion about the job letter and how to write one. This informal session will include a brief discussion of what the job letter is meant to do, a guide to its general structure, and strategies for how to write a letter that gets you in the door. There will be lots of time for questions (and anxieties - which hopefully we can allay!).

We will be using the job letters up on our collective “job binder” (please email me if you require the password) as the basis for our discussion.

The hope is that following on from this session, participants will start drafting (or revising) their own job letters, which they will submit and then receive feedback on from colleagues in the department.

Everyone who is considering applying for an academic job is warmly welcome to attend, even if you’re just starting out. Job letters are not only quite useful things to write in that they help you to articulate your project and your identity as an academic, but they also take a bit of time to master and the more practice you have, the more ready you’ll be when a job you’d like to apply for does come up.

Please let Myka know if you’re planning to attend so she knows how much wine to buy and how many materials to bring. All are welcome.

Evelyn Araluen Corr and Jonathan Dunk (University of Sydney)

Sounding the Anthropocene