Inheriting Empire Exhibitions
The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a series of imperial exhibitions. In London, Johannesburg, Jamaica, Toronto, Glasgow and elsewhere, large scale exhibitions both marked the cultural culmination and punctuated the decline of the British Empire. This talk considers the legacies and complicated afterlives of the modern empire exhibition, and the ways in which such exhibitions have been both remembered and forgotten in literature. The 1924 Wembley exhibition is re-imagined from new perspectives in the works of Black British authors such as Zadie Smith’sWhite Teeth (2000) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004), while poems by Ian Hamilton and Vahni Capildeo suggest the continued resonances of exhibition culture. In exploring both the weight of the past and the gaps in imperial memory, this talk will consider the different things that authors and scholars might seek to find by looking back to the empire exhibitions of history, asking how we not only inherit, but also negotiate, reframe, and repurpose the imperial past.
Biography
Dr Alexandra Peat is a Visiting Fellow in the Arts and Humanities Research Centre at Maynooth. She is an Associate Professor and Docent in the Department of English at Uppsala University, where she researches and teaches modernism and world literature. Her publications include Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys(Routledge, 2010), Modernism: Keywords (Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), as well as essays in journals such as Literature & History, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, and Women: A Cultural Review. She is currently writing a book about modernism and exhibition culture.