Honors Seminar: Empire & Media
This website was created to share student work created over the course of the semester. The seminar took place at Hunter College, Spring 2018.
Course Description:
This course looks at the relationship between empire and the transnational circulations of texts in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the British empire between 1857 and 1945. The British empire relied on military power to maintain control of its territories, but also on the power of print. Bibles, textbooks, literature, maps, periodicals, photographs, and political pamphlets were all important to the way imperial power was justified and administered, as well as to the way it was contested by colonial subjects. While Thomas Macaulay argued that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” in order to influence educational policy in India, Mohandas Gandhi ran a printing press in South Africa from which he published a protest newspaper Indian Opinion and eventually the pamphlet Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), one of the key texts of Indian nationalism. The course will examine ideas about empire within texts (such as Jane Eyre) as well as the role that various kinds of texts and archives played in the governance of empire. It will draw on the disciplines of literature, history, art history and anthropology.