Monday, October 18 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM
Peter Hulme is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex, where he teaches literature and postcolonial studies. Hulme has written widely on the relations among ideologies of colonialism, European texts of colonial discourse, and literature, primarily in the Caribbean context. In Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (Methuen 1986), Hulme practices a form of radical history centering on a critique of colonial discourse, which he defines as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships.” He combines rhetorical analysis with contextual historical study to tease out the dicursive fantasies of Europe’s colonization of the Caribbean across a span of four centuries. His recently co-edited collection of essays, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998), extends these concerns world-wide and across time in analyses of cannibalism, both as heatedly debated anthropological “finding” and as discursive fantasy in popular culture. His talk is taken from his research-in-progress which looks at fictional imaginings of indigeneity in the Caribbean since the end of the eighteenth century.
Professor Hulme’s talk is sponsored by Pre- and Early Modern Studies and the Center for Cultural Studies.