The ‘Exotic’ Body in 19th-century British Drama
Faculty of English, University of Oxford
Lecture Theatre 2
September 25-26, 2014

For more information please visit http://bavs.ac.uk/events/3/

Programme
25 September

9:00 Registration

9:15-9:30 Opening remarks

9:30-10:15 Project presentation: The Representation of the ‘Exotic’ Body in 19th-Century English Drama (Tiziana Morosetti and Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Oxford)

10:15-11:15 First Keynote: ‘From the 1970s to the 1790s and the Importance of Metanarratives’ (Hazel Waters, Institute of Race Relations, London)

11:15-11:45 Refreshment break (Foyer)

11:45-1:15 Panel 1: Staging the Other in Georgian England

1. ‘By a Nose or By a Hair: Bearding the Jew on the Georgian Stage’ (Toni Wein, California State University at Fresno)
2. ‘The Jew on Stage: Exoticism and Ostracism in Dramas of Milman and Wade’ (Michael Bradshaw, Edge Hill)
3. ‘The Exotic, the Magical, and the Ancient: Staging the Arabian Nights in Early Nineteenth-Century London’ (Melissa Dickson, Oxford)

1:15-2:30 Lunch (Senior Common Room)

2:30-4:00 Panel 2: Embodying the Other

1. ‘Edwin Forrest: The Exotic American Body on the 19th-Century English Stage’ (Arthur W. Bloom, independent scholar)
2. ‘“L’atelier de Canova”, Vauxhall Gardens, 1837: Sculpture and Body Doubles’ (Claire Jones, Chichester)
3. ‘Becoming the Other: Pantomime techniques for staging the “Exotic” Body’ (Bernadette Plageman, Sorbonne/Sorbonne Nouvelle)

4:00-4:30 Refreshment break (Foyer)

4:30-5:30 Panel 3: Exotic Bodies between Theatre and the Novel

1. ‘Impressment, Exoticism, and Enslavement: Revisiting the Theatre of War across the Nineteenth-Century’ (Sara Malton, Saint Mary’s, Halifax)
2. ‘“Dancing on the Dead”: Performances of Slavery and Abolition in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’ (Lucy Sheehan, Columbia)

5:30-6:30 Professor Heard’s Exotic and Curious Magic Lantern Show (Seminar Room K)

6:30 Welcome Reception (Senior Common Room)

26 September

9:00 Registration

9:30-10:30 Second Keynote: ‘Jumbomania; or, the English, their Elephant, and the Imperial Politics of the Early 1880s’ (Peter Yeandle, Manchester)

10:30-11:30 Panel 4: India on the Victorian stage

1. ‘Transcultural Operatics of a Bodily Nature: Staging Indian Femininity in Solomon’s The Nautch Girl’ (Zara Barlas, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg)
2. ‘Colonial Villains and Native Victims: Fin de siècle subversion in Murray’s Carlyon Sahib’ (Robert Dean, South Wales)

11:30-12:00 Refreshment break (Foyer)

12:00-1:00 Panel 5: Defining Britishness and the British Other

1. ‘Grotesque Bodies, Parochial Lives: Offsetting the Exotic in 19th-Century British Drama’ (Jim Davis, Warwick)
2. ‘Innoculative Hybridity: Blackface Performance and the Anti-Exotic’ (Michael Meewis, Warwick)

1:00-2:00 Lunch (Senior Common Room)

2:00-3:30 Panel 6: Female Bodies: fin de siècle and beyond

1. ‘“That’s what a woman can do”:  The representation of Women in the Victorian Music Hall’ (Louise Wingrove, Bristol)
2. ‘“Shall it be Mark Antony?”: The Imperial Chant of the Abject-Exotic in G. B. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra’ (Arup K. Chatterjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
3. ‘The Dancer, the Pioneer and the “Don’t Care Girl!”: 1911-25’ (Katharine Cockin, Hull)

3:30-4:00 Refreshment break (Foyer)

4:00-5:00 Panel 7: The Victorian Exotic as interpreted today

1. ‘Singing the Exotic Body across the Atlantic: From Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado to Chicago’s Swing Mikado’ (Serena Guarracino, L’Orientale, Naples)
2. ‘A Progressive Othello: Black Modernity in Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet (2012)’ (Sophie Duncan, Oxford)

5:00-6:00 Third Keynote: ‘“An Object Lesson to the Chinese Mind”: The Boxer Rebellion, Exoticism, and Abjection in Imre Kiralfy’s China, or the Relief of the Legations at the 1901 Military Exhibition’ (Ross Forman, Warwick)