Module description
The story of the British Empire is frequently told as a story of globalised trade: Britain was the world’s largest importer of raw materials (as foodstuffs, cotton, sugar, rubber, indigo, tea, opium, gold and diamonds, to name just a few), which it turned into manufactured goods to sell back to its colonies. At the same time, the phrase ‘raw materials’ quickly expanded to refer to people - especially to the slave, indentured, low-paid, reproductive, or migrant labour on which the empire was built - and was also used to describe the thoughts, experiences, archives, texts, or chemicals from which intellectual life was to be forged. In each case, the assumption behind the term was that the world was made of passive stuff (animals, humans, minerals, rocks and plants) awaiting a certain kind of ‘human’ imagination, industry and agency to call them into action.
This course deploys literary-critical thinking and attention to literary forms in order to interrogate the narrative of the ‘raw material’, and the histories that have emerged from it. From vital materialist accounts of the agencies and powers of nonhuman things, to Marxist analyses of the hidden labour that produces the ‘raw’ material before it can even be said to exist, we will consider the ways in which the Victorian invention of raw materiality contributed to violence, environmental destruction, and ideologies of domination over the earth and its species. Studying nineteenth-century fiction, poetry, and drama from across the world, this course will ask: how did storytelling participate in creating the fictions and violences of ‘raw materiality’, and when and how did it operate as a mode of critique? How can studying the literatures of empire help us recapture those aspects of an object, like ivory or gold, that are ‘cut’ from our understanding of it by the idea of the raw material ( its ecological interconnectedness with other habitats and species, for instance, or its cultural and emotional importance beyond its power to transform into capital)? How else might we begin to imagine the things of the earth, and to what extent can diverse literary forms help us in this project? And how might attention to ‘raw materials’ help us understand the workings of imperial power in the nineteenth century, and its ongoing legacies in the twenty-first?
Assessment details
1 x 1000 word reflective writing (15%) and 1 x 3000 word essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
- To consider a seemingly self-evident category, the 'raw material', by exploring the wide range of cultural, literary, economic, racial and ideological processes that have shaped its very existence. In doing so, to allow students to explore the intersections between nature, culture and society, and to think about the place of literary texts in managing and mediating these intersections.
- To introduce students to key texts and criticism in environmental studies and ecocriticism, especially as these intersect with postcolonial studies of empire and of capitalism
- To encourage students to reach a more global understanding of 'Victorian' writing, introducing them to key texts by Black and indigenous authors and critics on, for instance, enabling imaginative, intellectual and cultural significance of these texts in the broader history of the nineteenth century and its literatures
- In doing so, to enable students to conduct informed discussions about the diversification and decolonisation of the literary canon.
- To enable students to think hard about the processes by which literary cultures and forms help shape and cement ideologies - particularly across seemingly-fragmented global contexts - as well as in the ways they might actively participate in resistance, critique, or the imagining of alternate realities. At the same time, to consider the ways in which literary writing may give us access to histories that are submerged, suppressed, or otherwise hidden by more official historical forms.
- Through these aims, to create for students a richer sense of their academic voice, a more expansive sense of the political connotations of literary study, and a more nuanced, flexible approach to historical and cultural research.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to:
- Recognise the centrality of Black, Asian and indigenous writing to the history of 'Victorian' literature and have developed a set of critical tools for analysing them
- Summarise, connect, and analyse precise ways in which ideas about 'nature' are often linked to economic, racial, and gendered assumptions, and the ways in which environmental histories are also histories of racism, colonisation, oppression and power
- Show how the exploitation and movement of goods, people and things is shaped by narrative concerns that are often defined and codified by literature, but can also be resisted, critiqued, and reimagined by it. Develop a set of critical tools for thinking about the ways in which literature and materiality intersect, drawn from (but not limited to) New Materialism, feminist Marxism, and genre theory.
- Discuss the decolonisation of the canon, and the reading of texts, genres, peoples, and places that have often been marginalised, including (but not limited to) critical race theory, queer studies, labour history, the history of multiculturalism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and environmental history
Teaching pattern
1 x 2-hour seminar, weekly