Thursday, February 26, College of Charleston, Arnold Hall
in Jewish Studies Building, 96 Wentworth Street
Plenary Session
7:00 PM
Chair: Vernon Burton,
University of Illinois, Executive Director of program in the Carolina
Lowcountry and Atlantic World
John Matthews,
Boston University, “The U.S. South, Modern American
Empire, and Post-Colonial Studies”
This session
is generously supported by a grant from the Humanities Council of South Carolina
Reception to follow in lobby of Arnold Hall in honor of Michael
O'Brien and his new book Conjectures
of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
Friday, February 27, Greater Issues Room (Room 230) Mark
Clark Hall, The Citadel, 171 Moultrie
Street
(Transport from hotels and guest houses begins at 8 a.m. A breakfast
buffet will be available in the Reception Room on the first floor
of Mark Clark Hall at 8 a.m.)
Panel on John Matthews's Talk 9:00-10:30
AM
Chair: Patricia
Yaeger, University of Michigan
Panel: Richard
Godden, University of Sussex
Manisha Sinha,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
James Peacock,
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Session 1
10:45-12:15 AM
Jonathan Smith, Mississippi Quarterly and University
of Montevallo, "What Recent Challenges to 'Postnationalism'
Mean to a Postcolonial Model of Southern Studies"
Deborah Cohn, Indiana
University, “Postcolonial Studies, Latin America, and
the U.S. South"
Commentary: Scott Romine, University of North
Carolina-Greensboro
Steven Stowe, Indiana
University
Lunch
12:30-2:00 PM
Reception
Room, first floor of Mark Clark Hall
Session 2
2:30- 4:15
PM
Chair: Randal Jelks, Calvin
College
David Shields,
University of South Carolina, "The Western Design and Southern
Ambition: The Prehistory of Southern Imperialism"
François Furstenberg, University
of Montreal, "National Genealogies in Post-Revolutionary
America"
Commentary: Robert Bonner, Michigan State
University
Jane Dailey, Johns
Hopkins University
Reception 6:00 to 9:00 PM
South
Carolina Historical Society
Fireproof
Building, 100 Meeting Street
Saturday, February 28, College of Charleston, Arnold Hall
in Jewish Studies Building, 96 Wentworth Street
Roundtable discussion of Session 1
9:30-11:30 AM
Chair: Michael O’Brien, University
of Cambridge
Lunch
11:45-1:15 PM
Roundtable discussion of Session 2
1:30- 3:30 PM
Chair: Charles Joyner, Coastal
Carolina University
About the Southern Intellectual History
Circle (SIHC):
The Southern Intellectual History Circle
had its origins in 1988, when
Michael O'Brien asked a number of historians and literarys scholars
to a
symposium at Miami University. These were Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Drew Gilpin Faust, Daniel Singal, Richard King, Steven
Stowe, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Michael Kreyling, Bertram Wyatt-Brown,
and
James Turner. Perhaps because the idea of a `Southern intellectual
history' was then a fairly-novel one and this was almost the first
attempt to foster a conversation about its nature and purposes,
the
event worked well and there was immediately talk of doing it again.
So
the group met at Emory University the next year and have met each
year
since then, mostly in the South (Gainesville, Chapel Hill [twice],
Myrtle Beach, New Orleans, Birmingham, Nashville, Oxford in Mississippi,
Saint Petersburg, Edgefield, Richmond), but also in Bloomington,
Philadelphia and at Cambridge in England. It was at Emory that Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese decided to call us the Southern Intellectual History
Circle. The Circle has never acquired a formal
organization (presidents,
treasurers, subscriptions), but is essentially a conversation that
moves
from place to place each year, with the meeting being sponsored
by a
host organization, usually that of a habitué of the Circle.
It has never
sought publicity, other than that necessary for the locality in
which it
meets, because it has been anxious to keep the group small enough
to
encompass genuine discussion. Its program usually follows the following
format: a plenary address on a Thursday evening, which is followed
on
Friday morning by a panel discussion on the previous evening’s
theme;
two more sessions with papers and critics; and on Saturday a round-table
discussion, two of them for about two hours apiece, in which everyone
participates, on the matters raised elsewhere in the meeting. The
audience is the university or public in the immediate vicinity,
combined
with the Circle itself. Occasionally a meeting has a theme - we
have
done the History of the Book, religion, black culture - sometimes
matters are more miscellaneous. In general, the tradition of the
Circle
is of rigorous and interdisciplinary debate, in which anyone is
free to
come, everyone is free to speak, and only the merit of an argument
commands respect.
This year's theme:
In recent years, there has been a growing
interest in postcolonialism,
i.e. the study of those cultures and societies which were once governed
by a colonial regime, but which are now politically independent.
This
study began, and remains chiefly focused upon, societies in Asia
and
Africa, mostly as a way to appraise the cultural and economic legacy
of
imperialism since the decolonizations that began after the Second
World
War. But, of late, the insights generated by this study have begun
to be
applied older cultures, which experienced decolonization as early
as the
eighteenth century. The United States is, arguably, the first
postcolonial culture and the American South may be said to have
experienced the end of imperialism twice, once after 1783, again
after
the Civil War. So there is merit in devoting a conference to a look
at
the Southern experience, by bringing together literary scholars,
who
have been most zealous in using postcolonial studies, and historians,
who stand in need of these insights.