Punjab Research Group

Inter-University Postcolonial Seminar Series: Spring 2009

Making Britain: South Asian Resistances, 1870–1950

This series of seminars co-ordinated by Dr Sumita Mukherjee and Dr Rehana Ahmed will be addressing various forms of resistance by South Asians in Britain during this period. It forms part of the regular series organised by the Open University Postcolonial Research Group in association with the Institute of English Studies

Venue: NG15 (North Block, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E
Time: 17.30 – 19.00

Tuesday 27 January Anne Kershen ‘The Alien in the Aliens Act: Defining the Outsider’

Anne Kershen has been Director of the Centre for the Study of Migration at Queen Mary, University of London, since its foundation in 1995. Based in the Department of Politics, she is currently Director of the Masters in Migration and Masters in Migration and Law programmes. She has published widely, her most recent book being Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields 1660–2000 (Routledge, 2005). She is currently researching the impact of post-accession migrants on communities with no history of previous immigrant settlement, her spatial focus being Shropshire.

Tuesday 3 February Jacqueline Jenkinson ‘The Role of South Asian Sailors in the 1919 Port Riots’

Jacqueline Jenkinson is Lecturer in History at Stirling University. Her two main research interests are the social history of medicine, on which she has written several books – the most recent being Scotland’s Health: 1919–1948 (Peter Lang, 2002) – and the history of minority ethnic populations in Britain. She has published several articles on the 1919 port riots; the most recent, on the riot in Glasgow, appeared in the journal Twentieth Century British History in January 2008. Her book on the riots, Black 1919: Riots, Racism and Resistance in Post-Colonial Britain, is published by Liverpool University Press in March 2009.

Tuesday 10 February Prabhjot Parmar ‘Strategies of Containment: Censorship and the Indian Soldiers in Britain During the First World War’

Prabhjot Parmar is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Recovering the marginalized experiences of Indian soldiers who fought in the First World War, her postdoctoral project examines their letters as cultural artifacts within the context of war testimonies. She is the co-editor of When Your Voice Tastes Like Home: Immigrant Women Write and has published articles on the literary and cinematic representations of Partition. Currently she is teaching at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Tuesday 24 February Michèle Barrett ‘“Sending them Missing”: Race, Religion and the Imperial War Graves Commission’

Michèle Barrett is Professor of Modern Literary and Cultural Theory at Queen Mary, University of London. She is a noted social and cultural theorist, with expertise in ideology, aesthetics, gender, and post-structuralist ideas. Her recent work has focused on the literature and art of the First World War period. She has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to study shell shock, and a British Academy grant to research the colonial politics of commemoration. Casualty Figures: Five Survivors of the First World War (Verso, 2008) is her most recent book.

All are welcome; booking is not required.

For further information visit, Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad, 1870-1950
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain/index.html