Bridget Bennett: Performing Terror: Reading The Scarlet Letter After Iraq
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
4:00 p.m.
Cross-Cultural Center, ArtSpace Gallery

Since the events of 11 September 2001 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the language and practice of political terror has been scrutinized to a renewed degree, especially within Postcolonial Studies and American Studies.  While the usual critical consensus  focuses on the changes brought into being by – and symbolized - by 11  September 2001, some have contested this. Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus argue, for example, that after the invasion of Iraq, 'postcolonial studies must change not because the world has changed but because "Iraq" shows that, in quite substantial  ways, it has not changed.' [Emphasis given.] (2006:7) Recasting September 11 and its consequences  in this way belies its status as exceptional event.   I draw upon ideas of continuity rather than discontinuity, of similarity rather than difference or change, to look at a series of moments and geographies and to trace significant ongoing relationships between them.  My particular foci are colonial North America; the nineteenth century United States; and the United States 'after Iraq'.  Using distinct historical moments and geographical locales I argue that the ways in which the idea and performative practice of terror is invoked as a mode of disciplinary social and political control has significant correspondences which cut across time and space, epoch and nation. The narrative of the pre-history of the United States with its unruly and heathen indigenous population living chaotically and violently in the wilderness awaiting civilisation (and annihilation where civilisation cannot be accomplished) is rescripted to suit the contemporary moment.  The plotting heathens are now both within and without the borders of the nation: shoring up and protecting borders and aggressively intervening overseas is central to maintaining homeland security.

Bridget Bennett is Professor of American Literature and Culture,School of English, University of Leeds.   Her most recent work is amonograph titled Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007) and she has also published widely on nineteenth century American literature; transatlanticism; representations of twins.  Her current work includes a monograph in progress titled Danger in the National Home.  

Bridget Bennett: Graduate Student Seminar: Homes and Homelands: The intersections of American Studies and Postcolonial Studies : A Graduate Seminar with Bridget Bennett

Thursday, April 23, 2009

4:00-7:00 p.m.

LGBT Resource Center Conference Room

Professor Bridget Bennett is Professor of American Literature and Culture, School of English, University of Leeds. Her most recent work is a monograph titled Transatlantic Spiritualism and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2007). She is also the author of The Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997) and editor of several other books including Special Relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936 (with Janet Beer), Grub Street and the Ivory Tower (with Jeremy Treglown) Ripples of Dissent: Women’s Stories of Marriage from the 1890s. Her current work includes a monograph in progress titled Danger in the National Home.

Professor Bennett is visiting UCSD for a two-week collaboration with professors, Rosemary M. George and Shelley Streeby. Her visit is funded by a grant she received from WUN (World Universities Network).   This one session seminar is open to all interested graduate students and Professor Bennett has provided the following description of the focus of the  seminar.  Since the inception of the modern nation state, the home and the family have served as both models and mirrors of the nation's self-representation. This is clear not only in the political structures of the nation, but also in its culture and its linguistic structures. Nations, for example, are often termed 'motherlands' or 'fatherlands', 'homelands' or 'home countries'. Discourses of home, therefore, are profoundly bound up with questions of national identity.  Yet home is also a transnational category, simultaneously exposing the limits of nation-based understandings and disciplinary constructions.  In this seminar we will consider the complexities of developing methodologies of thinking about home, that familiar, comforting, yet highly political, term.   The reading/ viewing list for this one session seminar is as follows:   Primary Text(s):  The Wizard of Oz (1939) Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM.  Frank L. Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) (recommended reading: any edition).

The following REQUIRED readings have been placed on electronic reserves at UCSD library. Please search under LTEN 297 with Prof. George:

Sarah Ahmed, Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement International Journal of Cultural Studies 2:3 (1999), 329-47.

Amy Kaplan, Homeland Insecurities: Transformations of Language and Space, in September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? Ed Mary L. Dudziak (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005).

Donald Pease, The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement boundary 2 30:3 (2003, 1-18.

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-91 (London: Granta Books, 1992), 9-21.

Students wanting to an official record for or wanting to receive credit for participating in this seminar should enroll in 1 unit of LTEN 297 with Prof. Rosemary George.  In order to manage enrollment, it would be best for the students to contact Thom Hill by April 8th to get the appropriate registration code and then to enroll by April 10, 2009.  Students can also sit in on the seminar session without registering for this LTEN 297. If you would like to do so, please send Rosemary George an email by April 16th indicating your interest in taking this one-session seminar.   Please contact Prof. George (rmgeorge@ucsd.edu) if you have any concerns or questions about this graduate seminar.