Research interests
My research interests include postcolonial and world literatures in English, including literatures from Africa, Canada, and South Asia, postcolonial theory, critical and cultural theory, poetics and politics, and visual culture. I have recently edited a special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures on Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God (with Ranka Primorac), and completed a chapter on 'Colonial Violence, Law, and Justice in Egypt' for a major new collection of essays on The Postcolonial Middle East, edited by Anna Ball and Karim Mattar. I have published books on States of Emergency in colonial and postcolonial literatures and law; the fiction of Salman Rushdie; and the postcolonial thought and criticism of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I have also co-edited Terror and the Postcolonial (with Elleke Boehmer); Foucault in an Age of Terror (with Stephen Bygrave); and a special issue of the journal New Formations on Hannah Arendt after Modernity (with Devorah Baum and Stephen Bygrave).
Current Research projects
My current research includes two major new scholarly book projects: Indigenous Thought and the Invention of the World System and In the Debt Colony: A History of Colonial Debt.
Indigenous Thought and the Invention of the World System argues that indigenous thought, or the dynamic and complex knowledge systems of hunter gatherer societies, continue to offer valuable conceptual resources for understanding the modern world economy and the environment long after the colonial encounter with the cultures of European capitalist modernity. This research engages with the symbolic forms of indigenous thought in the specific contexts of Canada, Southern Africa, and West Africa as represented in anthropology, art, economics, and literature. It weaves these disciplines together to argue that indigenous thought offers a crucial resource for re-imagining the contemporary world system.
In the Debt Colony: A History of Colonial Debt argues that narratives of debt colonialism, or the relationship of indebtedness between European imperial powers and their colonies can shed important new light on the historical development of the modern economic world and its cultures of debt. In doing so, it seeks to answer the following questions: How has debt been understood as a colonial relationship? What role did credit and debt play in the management and negotiation of colonial sovereignty? And how significant is the language of debt in the formulation of anti-colonial resistance narratives? By comparing the language and rhetoric of debt in colonial archives and novels, banking records, the economic reports of imperial companies and global financial institutions, and representations of debt and austerity in postcolonial world literature and film, this book seeks to offer a major new account of the economic legacy of European imperialism.
Professor Stephen MortonFaculty of Arts and Humanities University of Southampton Avenue Campus Highfield Southampton SO17 1BF United Kingdom
Room Number: 65/2001
