Call for Papers: Essays for Edited Collection

1865 and the Disenchantment of Empire”

1865 marks an important critical moment across a range of areas of study. This call for papers invokes 1865 as one way of bringing American studies, Caribbean studies and Canadian studies into conversation with each other, a conversation that also finds spaces of connection with African Studies, Latin American Studies, South Asian Studies and Atlantic and Pacific Studies. As an organizing hermeneutic, 1865 marks the end of the American Civil War as well as the War of Restoration in the Dominican Republic. The end of these periods of military struggle find an interesting echo in 1965 with the US invasion of the Dominican Republic and the end of the Dominican Civil War. By 1865 Canadian confederation is also on the horizon and there are marked tensions and fears manifesting as a result of the border politics of the American Civil War. This reorganization of global geo-relations, state re-formation, militarization and shifting imperial relationships is also evident in the Caribbean context, where in Jamaica, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 (and the resulting declaration of martial law, and protests and debates in Britain after the violent suppression of that rebellion), prompted a change in imperial policy which culminated in that island becoming a Crown Colony.  In the Pacific context, complex histories of empire, (non)sovereignty and land ownership can also be traced through the enactment of the Native Rights Act (1865) that declared Māori British subjects.

The settlement project, with its economies of resource extraction, was also a project of industrialization. The 1860s saw a massive transition in fuels, away from whale oil and towards petroleum and kerosene and the refinement of palm oil into both industrial lubricants and soap. The period marks the introduction of a set of new manufacturing techniques with increasing demands for coal, iron, nickel and other raw materials, as well as labour. The industrialization of steel-making dropped the price, allowing for railways to be built more cheaply.  It is therefore not surprising that the year 1865 saw the first successful and durable transatlantic submarine telegraph cable between Nova Scotia and England. Nor is it surprising that the Suez Canal was half-way built in 1865.

Focusing on the end of the nineteenth century allows us to observe not just shifts in state and economic relations but also the intimate policing of bodies and sexualities. As Foucault reminds us in The History of Sexuality, in Britain itself, there were shifts in the discursive and ideological understandings of the very boundaries between public and private. In offering 1865 as an organizing hermeneutic this project asks how might we navigate these transnational currents of relations and ideas in their multidirectional flows.

Sylvia Wynter offers one example of engaging critical thought organized around a particular moment in her essay “1492: A New World View.” Here Wynter engages with 1492 as historical-existential,  global sociosystemic, ideological, geopolitical and ecosystemic question. Extending Wynter’s critical reflection on a historical moment as a productive theoretical point of research we ask contributors to engage with contending worldviews, practices and processes and their disenchantments and reenchantments as they meet in 1865 in anti-colonial protests, militarism,  the rise of the black peasantry, dispossession of indigenous lands, industrialization, nationalism, US expansionism, indentureship, colonial pedagogies and their effects in the world of the British Empire.

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics and questions:

• Militarization, Resistance and Rebellion
• The World of 1865 and Shifting colonial relationships
• Transnational/ Postcolonial Intimacies: Travel, Trade and Cartography
• Interpretative framework for theorizing 1865 (eg. Sylvia Wynter’s concept of “transfer of empathy”; the idea, “disenchantment of empire”; Or, tragedy and the anticolonial imaginary)
• Cotton and Empire (eg. British takeover of Egypt facilitated by the collapse of cotton trade in the wake of the American Civil War. The increased production of Cotton in India due to the Cotton trade embargo)
• Maritime histories and ports
• Economy of Law and Taxes
• Transnational finance history (1865 and the founding of “The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank,” now HSBC, to capitalize on the successes of the Opium Wars)
• Spirituality, Magic, Religion and Anti-colonial Thought
• Transatlantic performance histories during and post 1865
• Legacies, Histories and Memorialization of 1865.
• The Black Family in Post-Slavery Societies
• Gender and Sexuality
• Nationalism and Empire
• Sustainability, energy, and ecology (i.e. Britain and the Coal question, the Forest Act of 1865 in India; the early development of machine guns and the refinement of dynamite into a weapon)
• Indigenous land rights and treaties, land grants, dispossession of landed classes
• Labour, indentureship, migration
• Book histories, print culture, and public discourse
• Colonial Education and Residential Schools

Submission Procedure:

1) Abstracts of no more than 300-500 words should be sent to 1865anddisenchantment@gmail.com no later than December 15, 2016.

2) Attach a short biographical note.

3) Type “1865” in the subject line of your email.

Editorial Committee:

Phanuel Antwi and Ronald Cummings