Papers and Abstracts
Clicking on the titles of individual papers will take you to the text of the full papers (as and when these are provided by the speakers in July).
Gioia Angeletti (University of Parma, Italy)
"The plantation owner is never wearing a kilt":the power of memory versus Scottish amnesia in Jackie Kay's The Lamplighter
In 2007 the Scottish writer Jackie Kay (half Nigerian by birth) wrote a dramatic poem under commission to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade: The Lamplighter. This paper aims to present it as a literary attempt to allow the voice of the subaltern, here both individual and choral, to be heard and listened to. These voices belong to four women who experienced slavery but eventually obtained their freedom; they speak up now both to remember (against the imposed silence of official records) and to forget (the pain caused by hardly endured separation, marginalisation, loss and abuse).
Ian Brown (University of Glasgow and University of Glamorgan, UK)
Fostering the imperial view in a school: life-writing in Dollar Magazine before the First World War
This paper considers a selection of articles published in the magazine for pupils and former pupils of Dollar Academy in the years before the 'Great War'. It addresses issues of racial typing, the representation of the former pupil's role in the Empire, as businessman, missionary, soldier and sportsman. It proposes that articles by both former pupils and friends of the school shape and nurture a virtual world. In this, local community and colonial world are artfully conjoined into a continuum of experience, so familiarising readers with a view of colonialism as a natural order and the hierarchies of power former pupils will inherit and sustain.
Liam Connell (University of Winchester, UK)
Kailyard Money:the local and the global in Scott’s Malachi Malagrowther letters
Following the recent crisis in Scottish banking, I read Walter Scott's 1826 argument for the retention of Scottish bank notes against Adam Smith’s view of paper-money as "a sort of waggon-way through the air" which allows the nation to exceed the physical limits of "land and labour" through international transactions of credit. From, here I re-evaluate both Scott’s depiction of the Scottish "nation" as locality and his anxious terminology of "empire" (as the Union and colonialist imperialism). I ask how the internationalising potential of money and the context of British imperialism shape Scott’s rhetorical parochialism of a currency.
Giovanna Covi (University of Trento, Italy)
Reconstellating the PostcolonialThrough Caribbean-Scottish Gendered Relations
Pinning down the where and when of the postcolonial is a fruitless abstraction that erases anticoloniality within discourse: narratives by Caribbean women (Collins, Philip, Lalla, Kincaid, Anim-Addo) foreground Caribbean-Scottish relations that place the black woman's body at the center of colonial encounter, thus accepting the risk of conjugating biology with history, struggling to turn Flesh into Word, articulating an epistemology (Moraga, Anzaldua, Glissant, Spivak) that reframes the there and then of the Caribbean and Scotland in order to shape the here and now of creolization, as both a risk and an opportunity of the current process of globalization.
Bashabi Fraser (Edinburgh Napier University, UK)
This paper will consider how the Jutewallahs from Scotland congregated along the Hoogly (Hugli), working in and managing the numerous jute mills in Bengal, and establish how the transnational Scottish migrant was able to cross nation-state boundaries while maintaining links with the 'homeland.' It will consider how imperial constructs were challenged or compromised by Scots in India through a study of their personal documents. The problematic nature of imperial constructs of hierarchy, domination, hegemony and exclusion will be explored in an industry, which became the centre of a flourishing trade with the processing factories being located where the cash crop was grown, disturbing the centre-periphery dichotomy.
Patrick Hart (University of Strathclyde, UK)
Voglie divise:William Drummond of Hawthornden and Petrarchan national sentiment in the wake of the Union of the Crowns
Petrarchism's complex relation to national sentiment has recently been the subject of increasing scholarly scrutiny. Scottish poets' Petrarchan sonneteering after 1603 has for the most part been interpreted as evidence of their anxiety to 'English' their output. This paper, however, explores how Drummond deploys the Petrarchan mode's dialectic of public national affiliation and private withdrawal to negotiate tensions between various local, regional and national loyalties, ultimately arguing that in doing so he was seeking to lay the foundations for a coherent, synthetic, imperial British poetry that might hope to win recognition in continental Europe.
Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
The Redefinition of the Scottish Split Self in Brian McCabe’s The Other McCoy
Contemporary Scottish writing increasingly involves complex negotiations between the different Scottish identities that have proliferated since the nineteen eighties. As is well known, the previous monologic understanding of identity relegated Scottish art to the status of "artistic wasteland", and viewed Scottish culture as "traumatic". However, the later dialogic conception(s) of identity allow for more positive redefinitions of Scottish culture. As a consequence of this, new identitarian configurations had to be explored. Brian McCabe's novel The Other McCoy (1990) is an excellent example of an ironic and parodic way of subverting and conferring new meanings on traditional Scottish stereotypes.
Nigel Leask (University of Glasgow, UK)
Unfortunately Prof Leask will be unable to attend the conference.
The Colonial Cotter: Pastoral Virtue from Robert Burns to Thomas Pringle
This paper will explore the role of the ideology of cottage virtue in writings of the Scottish colonial diaspora in the Romantic period. I'll suggest that the influence of Burn's 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' in defining a distinctively national image of domestic piety and virtue informed the writings of colonial poets like Hector Macneill, John Leyden, Thomas Campbell, and Thomas Pringle. I'll follow David Bunn's seminal account of the construction of a 'transitional landscape' in Pringle's South African writings to examine similar constructions in other Scottish settler colonies, as well as in the USA and South Asia. The political ambivalence of Burns's pastoral permitted the cottage interior to be understood as either a site of radical republican virtue or conservative domesticity and Presbyterian piety: I'll explore how these competing visions play out in colonial space, and to what extent they undermine the ideology of colonial expansion. As well as being a gendered site, the cottage might also form the nucleus of an incipient, and distinctively Scots-inflected public sphere within the British empire. An alternative intepretation was also deployed in Elizabeth Hamilton's novel Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808) that represented the Burnsian cottage as a disorderly 'unimproved' site in need of moral reform. I close by considering the influence of the 'colonial cotter' on the development of Victorian Kailyard literature in the Scottish tradition.
Graeme MacDonald (University of Warwick, UK)
Complicity, Resistance and Distance
Somewhat remarkably, the US/UK sponsored conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan has registered little commentary in Scottish cultural critique. The prevalence of recent 'war-work' by several Scottish writers provokes questions about this critical disconnection. An aesthetic and thematic elaboration of 'distance' in this 'internationalised' Scottish literature can be interpreted as corresponding to several related issues governing Scottish and British modes of dissociation from the violent international reality of (neo)imperial conflict. It also presents a specifically Scottish accusation concerning participation and positioning in past, present and future modes of British Imperialism.
Peter MacKay (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)
Unfortunately Dr MacKay will be unable to attend the conference.
Gaelic negotiations
Secular Gaelic publishing began with Alexander MacDonald’s 1751 Aiseirigh na Seann Chànain Albannaich [The Resurrection of the Old Scottish Language], which presented Gaelic as one language (and one language literature) among many (with Latin, English and Gaelic all featuring in the collection). This instituted a 'tradition' of published Gaelic literature which recognised the possibility of engaging with other cultures in different ways: translation, borrowing, adoption, competition, being (in)offensive. This paper will discuss the various cultural negotiations in Gaelic literature over the 100 years following MacDonald's collection, with a particular focus on Gaelic literature involved in imperialism/colonialism, such as the songs celebrating the part of Highlanders in British military endeavours, and (pro- and anti-) emigration tracts.
Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Dr McLeod will not attend the conference in person but has submitted a paper which we will discuss as part of our session.
Gaelic poetry and the British military, 1756-1945
Soldiers from the Scottish Highlanders played a key role in the expansion of the British Empire, and their achievements and experiences are reflected in a large corpus of Gaelic verse. Some of this poetry was composed by soldier-poets thickly involved in conflict, more from a range of poets who remained at home. While there are occasional undertones of dissent, there is little questioning of the imperial enterprise.There is also little sense of a specifically Gaelic perspective on Empire; on the whole, the poetry reflects the assimilationist political identity of Scottish Gaeldom during this period.
Kei Miller (University of Glasgow, UK)
On discovering Tom Leonard might be Jamaican
From Jamaica to Scotland: Some initial notes on writing in dialect
My students often seek my opinion/approval on what they feel is the most obvious intersection between the literature in which I consciously participate (Caribbean) and the literature they are attempting to write (Scottish). That area is the matter of dialect and its representation on the page. I want to share some of my reflections and hesitations on this process of trying to capture and represent a certain 'sound' onto the page, and to think through some of the limitations behind what both Scottish and Caribbean writers have seen as an important project in distinguishing their english from the english of the centre.
Alan Riach (University of Glasgow, UK)
Wole Soyinka and Hugh MacDiarmid: The Violence and Virtues of Nations
This paper examines the idea of national identity forged by two modern masters committed to political intervention. Soyinka, in writing and action, has attempted to interrogate and alter Nigeria's modern history, and MacDiarmid in writing and political activity did likewise in Scotland. Both stand at a distance from the idea of the dispassionate, politically uncommitted writer. The political construction of nation-states is central to their visions of what a better future might be. The limits of violence in these constructions are manifest yet the virtues inherent in their aspirations are equally significant. Can we describe these virtues and these limits of violence appropriately?
Jacqueline Ryder (University of Strathclyde, UK)
Representations of Colonial Relations in the work of Naomi Mitchison
In 1965, Naomi Mitchison wrote, 'were all my characters Africans?' As someone who could have become 'one of those complacent imperialists', Mitchison's engagement with imperialism was radical in its critique of Empire; rather than simply writing against a monolithic centre, her writing repeatedly explores the ambivalence inherent in the imperial project. From a Scottish studies perspective, Mitchison's writing raises important questions about who has the right to speak for Others. This paper will explore representations of colonial relations in Mitchison's writing and consider whether they can validly contribute to a postcolonial discourse.
Silke Stroh (University of Muenster, Germany)
Celticity and the Gaelic voice in (post)colonial discourse
This paper investigates connections between Celticity, Scottish nationalism and international (post)colonial discourse by highlighting the function of Celticity as an archetypal construct in European colonial discourses, and through case studies of postcolonial strategies in Neil M. Gunn’s novel Butcher’s Broom and the trilingual poetic oeuvre of William Neill. It also hopes to stimulate discussion regarding the neglect of Gaelic issues in Scottish postcolonial discourses, the problematic relationship between Scottish Studies and international postcolonial scholarship, as well as potential benefits of greater interdisciplinary cooperation.