Events
C19c Day Conference: 28 April 2025, Parliament Hall
‘The critical lenses of the c19thc Global South’
Programme
8.45-9am Welcome and Introduction to the Conference: Professor Will Fowler (Plenary and Afternoon Panel Chair) and Professor Mary Orr (Morning Panels’ Chair)
9-10am Oceania and Amazonia
Professor Susau Solomona (National University of Samoa) and Professor Emma Sutton (English)
Musical cultures in colonial Oceania: history and methodologies
Professor Mark Harris (Monash University)
Thinking about the invention of Amazonia from the Global South
10-10:30 Coffee & Tea break
10:30-11:30 India
Maitrayee Roychoudhury (English)
Missing! The Indian Female Detective in the Long Nineteenth Century
Sudarshana Banerjee (History)
Exploring St. Andrews – India connections in the long 19th century
11:30-12:30 Plenary
Professor Patience Schell (Aberdeen)
“‘Engrave these rules on your heart’: Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Iconic 1853 Etiquette Guide as Social Project and Utopian Vision”
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-14:30 East and Southeast Asia
Dr Andrew Cusack (Modern Languages)
José Rizal’s Noli me tángere (1887): A Critical Lens on (Post)colonial Violence Then and Now
Professor Christos Lynteris (Social Anthropology)
Rats and Sera in the White Pagoda: Vincent Rouffiandis’s 1902 Plague Mission to Fuzhou
14:30-15:00 Roundtable discussion led by Prof. Will Fowler, Prof. Mary Orr and Dr Dave Evans: ‘The critical lenses of the c19thc Global South’
***
Abstracts (in order of presentation):
Professor Susau Solomona (National University of Samoa) and Professor Emma Sutton (English)
Musical cultures in colonial Oceania: history and methodologies
This paper offers an introduction to recent work on the role of Western and Indigenous musical cultures in late nineteenth-century colonialism and anti-colonialism in Oceania. It focuses on one exceptionally well-documented case study: the musical life of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson in Oceania, and the Indigenous Pacific individuals with whom he made and exchanged music. In addition to giving a brief overview of these histories, it will introduce a collaboration between St Andrews and National University of Samoa which was established in 2015. The paper will reflect on the co-created methodology of this project and the experience of a decade’s collaborative research.
Professor Mark Harris (Monash University)
Thinking about the invention of Amazonia from the Global South
Amazonia as a concept is often said to have been invented in the nineteenth century. The Humboldtian understanding of the Amazon as an ecologically interconnected system was a critical influence here. Ever since this region has become identified with the fears, desires, designs of outsiders. This presentation will look at two situations to outline what a decolonised Global South perspective might look like. The first example concerns rubber and its Indigenous origins and uses. The second looks at the scramble for the Amazon, a series of unresolved border disputes between European and South American countries in the very early twentieth century.
Maitrayee Roychoudhury (English)
Missing! The Indian Female Detective in the Long Nineteenth Century
This paper examines three texts from Bengali battala or popular fiction and Anglophone periodical evidence to highlight the presence of the Indian female detective from the 1850s to the early 1900s. Locating her within (transnational) histories of policing, feminism, and emergent Indian nationalism, I take a closer look at the practices—academic, political, social—and the “violence” involved in her apparent absence from the archives and the public sphere. Drawing attention to the intersectional nature of this silencing, the paper also contributes towards a diversified and differentiated understanding of the Victorian female detective in the global nineteenth century.
Sudarshana Banerjee (History)
Exploring St. Andrews – India connections in the long 19th century
This paper will introduce my PhD research, which will use St Andrews as a focus to study transnational links between India and Scotland in the long 19th century. There were several locally prominent families with multigenerational links to India, and we know that many alumni of the University of St Andrews chose service in India as their career. I aim to investigate the activities of the St Andrews alumni and residents in different regions of India. I also aim to investigate how the knowledge of India gathered during their years of imperial service came to infuse the fabric of the town and university, whether through correspondence while on service, or through post-retirement activities of those who returned to St Andrews.
Prof Patience Schell (Aberdeen)
“‘Engrave these rules on your heart’: Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Iconic 1853 Etiquette Guide as Social Project and Utopian Vision”
In 1853, a middle-aged Caracas printer and educator self-published a guide to etiquette, citizenship and living in society, called the Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras (Manual of civility and good manners). In the 172 years since its publication, this book has become a cultural icon, classroom textbook and object of fun across the Spanish-speaking world. It is likely one of, if not the, longest selling and most re-published book in Spanish. The surname of its author, Manuel Antonio Carreño, has come to represent the acme of taste, culture and refinement of behaviour. ‘You’ve not read your Carreño’ remains a cutting put down. Too many scholarly and popular interpretations have caricatured the text, focusing on its disciplinary aspects and rules about bodily control (when spitting, nose blowing or snoring), while ignoring its profound social, political and civic aims. Behind this text’s ubiquity lies a largely untold story about its particular origins, in post-independence Caracas, Venezuela, and its internationally-appealing vision of a society of civic responsibility, naturalised hierarchy and mutual respect. A citizens’ manual and an etiquette guide, the original book resonated in Spanish America, a region within living memory of fratricidal independence wars, as much as in Spain. This lecture introduces the publishing phenomenon that is Carreño’s Manual de urbanidad, using Carreño’s biography and his approach to life bound within the guide to understand the text’s origins, context and early appeal. While its Venezuelan roots are key to the text’s beginnings, the wild success of Carreño’s text opens a previously-unnoticed door onto the hopes, fears and aspirations of the nineteenth-century Spanish-speaking world.
Dr Andrew Cusack (Modern Languages)
José Rizal’s Noli me tángere (1887): A Critical Lens on (Post)colonial Violence Then and Now
Rizal’s novel offered perhaps the first serious challenge from the Global South to the colonialisms of the nineteenth-century in the sphere of world literature, in part by rendering the manifold forms of colonial violence in discussable form. But the work’s potential as critical lens and an invitation to further discussion may paradoxically have been limited by its author’s status as National Martyr in the postcolonial Philippines. This presentation will argue that world literature may offer a space alongside national education and commemoration in which readers and authors can make productive use of the critical potential in Rizal’s work.
Prof. Christos Lynteris (Social Anthropology)
Rats and Sera in the White Pagoda: Vincent Rouffiandis’s 1902 Plague Mission to Fuzhou In 1902, the military colonial doctor Vincent Rouffiandis was dispatched from French Indochina to Fuzhou, on the request of Qing authorities, to help resolve an outbreak of bubonic plague. Pivoting around his efforts to deliver anti-plague sera and train Chinese doctors in their use in a pagoda-turned-dispensary, Rouffiandis’s encounter with Chinese approaches to plague vacillated from admiration to ridicule. The paper examines reports, letters and notes from Rouffiandis’s mission. Focusing on his interaction with indigenous medical knowledge, I ask: what counted as knowledge, and what as superstition, and how did serotherapy and rats, both emblems of Pasteurian epidemiological “discovery”, function as points of tension, suspension, and transformation between these two epistemological registers?