This Sunday, I’d like to highlight three new ‘happenings’ in the field of colonial family history:
First, we are delighted to announce the publication of a special journal issue on families in the British Empire — the recent Spring 2013 issue of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History — which was co-edited by network administrators (Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguro, and Emily Manktelow). This issue contains five articles that emerged from our 2011 conference, Imperial Relations, and that collectively prompt us towards a rethinking of family and its relationship to empire. These are:
- Rhonda A. Semple, ‘Christian Model, Mission Realities: The business of regularizing family in mission communities in late nineteenth-century north India’
- S. E. Duff, ‘”Unto Children’s Children”: Clerical families and childrearing advice in the Cape Colony’
- Fae Dussart, ‘”To Glut a Menial’s Grudge”: Domestic servants and the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883’
- Chie Ikeya, ‘Colonial Intimacies in Comparative Perspective: Intermarriage, law and cultural difference in British Burma’
- Andrew J. May, ‘Exiles from the Children’s City: Archives, imperial identities and the juvenile emigration of Anglo-Indians from Kalimpong to Australasia’
The journal is behind a paywall, but you can find the issue’s table of contents, abstracts, and (if you have access) the articles and our introduction here.
Second, a colleague alerted me to a relatively new book published by Leilani Holmes, Ancestry of Experience: A Journey into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing (University of Hawaii Press, 2012). This looks to be of interest to readers interested in family, genealogy, and ancestry; Indigenous experience, scholarly methodologies, and ways of knowing; and the relationship between colonialism and intimacy, and past and present, more generally. The book will be followed by a website (http://www.ancestryofexperience.com/) with supplementary material.
And finally, for those of you who may be in London this summer, I just came across this call for papers for a half-day symposium, ‘Making a Scene: Networks of Intimacy‘ (19 July, 1:30 pm – 7 pm, Institute of Psychoanalysis, Maida Vale, London). Follow the link for the full CFP, but in short: it’s an opportunity to meet, discuss research, network, and foster collaboration with a cross-disciplinary group of people interested in the study of intimacy, broadly defined. Participants are invited to speak for ten minutes about their research and/or field, and the day will end (6-7 pm) with a book launch for the recent Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature. Advance registration is required, and cost (£7.50, payable on the day) includes afternoon tea, coffee, and biscuits, and wine at the launch. Contact Dr. Jennifer Cooke, Loughborough University, to register or for more information, and if you would like to give a paper, then send a 150 word description and a 50 word biography to writingsofintimacy@lboro.ac.uk.
Happy reading and proposing!
Family & Colonialism Research Network 