The Marshall Lecture: ‘Paxman Britannica’: Empire, Sociology, and Postcolonial Reconstruction Event
For more information regarding this event, please telephone Sarah Dack on +44 (0) 23 8059 2522 (ext 22522) or email FSHSIntcomms@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
As part of the University of Southampton’s One Book initiative, you are invited to the prestigious Marshall lecture where this year, Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra will examine the meaning of Empire.
As part of the University of Southampton’s One Book initiative, you are invited to the prestigious Marshall Lecture where this year, Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra will examine the meaning of Empire.
Abstract:
Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra will examine the claim made by Paxman in his book, Empire, that while we think we know what the British Empire did to the world, there has been less consideration of what it did to us, to Britain. This admirable aim – to contribute to the decolonization of Britain itself – is both startling and unfulfilled. In part, this is because Empire maintains the standard dichotomy of ‘empire as them’ and ‘nation as us’ that keeps separate what happened ‘over there’ from considering its impact ‘upon us here’. While Paxman narrates many episodes from the history of the British Empire, there is little reflection upon what those episodes mean in terms of reconsidering the nation, instead, as an imperial state. In this presentation, Professor Bhambra will take issue with the dominant representations of empire, the maintenance of the nation/empire dichotomy, and consider the impact that such selective narratives have on contemporary debates about citizenship and belonging.
Biography:
Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. For the academic year, 2014-15, she is Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Princeton University and Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her research interests are primarily in the area of historical sociology and contemporary social theory and she is also interested in the intersection of the social sciences with recent work in postcolonial and decolonial studies. She is author of Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007) which won the 2008 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book in sociology.
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