Conference Programme
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Crispin Thurlow
University of Washington, USA
Making Place: Tourism Discourse and/as Banal Globalization
Described as ‘one of the greatest population movements of all time’, tourism is firmly established as a truly global cultural industry. Nor is it just people who travel. Language and communication are also on the move, and, thanks to digital technologies, in all sorts of new ways. In this talk, I take up the theme of mobility by looking at the circulation of symbolic practices in both tourist sites and on tourist websites. Specifically, I will consider tourists’ multimodal stancetaking (the different ways they position themselves vis-à-vis things they do or say) as they ‘surmount’ the Jungfraujoch and as they ‘topple’ the Leaning Tower of Pisa. These playful performances of conquest are often posted to photo sharing sites like Flickr where a wider community of tourists add further comment and evaluation. It is through their embodied actions and (re)mediated interactions that tourists do more than simply ‘explore’ or ‘discover’ places; they are actually in the business of making place. Through this analysis of tourism discourse, I mean to demonstrate the everyday, often unnoticeable ways that neocolonial (or global) ideologies are realized ‘on the ground’ – how some privileged people come to know the world and to know themselves as “global citizens”.
Prof. Elleke Boehmer
University of Oxford
Worlding Genre – the case of the Jingo poem
The lecture examines the circulation and expansion of a particular genre, the jingoist poem, as championed by Rudyard Kipling, W.E. Henley and others, at an earlier phase of globalization, the high point of British imperialism. The reading of analogies between past and present forms of such worlding is invited. In particular, the talk will look critically at the exchanges mapped by the jingo poem as cultural artifact and imperial message throughout the networked domain of the British empire. Traversing colonial borderlines and ocean spaces, migrating, as refrain, from music hall to newspaper page, and, as exhortatory rhetoric, from the oeuvre of one colonial versifier to that of another, the poem carried not only British imperial convictions but also British nationalist feelings, projected on to a global stage.
University of Oxford
Worlding Genre – the case of the Jingo poem
The lecture examines the circulation and expansion of a particular genre, the jingoist poem, as championed by Rudyard Kipling, W.E. Henley and others, at an earlier phase of globalization, the high point of British imperialism. The reading of analogies between past and present forms of such worlding is invited. In particular, the talk will look critically at the exchanges mapped by the jingo poem as cultural artifact and imperial message throughout the networked domain of the British empire. Traversing colonial borderlines and ocean spaces, migrating, as refrain, from music hall to newspaper page, and, as exhortatory rhetoric, from the oeuvre of one colonial versifier to that of another, the poem carried not only British imperial convictions but also British nationalist feelings, projected on to a global stage.
