Saturday, September 29th, 2012 Genocidal Massacre in Early Modern Europe, Asia, and the Americas

Description

This day long interdisciplinary workshop on the subject of “Genocidal Massacre in Early Modern Europe, Asia, and the Americas” is being held in connection with a planned new volume of essays under that name and edited by Bindu Malieckal and Pablo Garcia Loeza. Four of the volume’s ten authors (Pablo García Loeza, Bindu Malieckal, Su Fang Ng, & Amrita Sen) will be coming to Toronto in order to present their findings in a workshop setting. Three members of the University of Toronto History Department (Heidi Bohaker, Melanie Newton, and Nhung Tran) will also make presentations on related themes in their own research.

This will be an interdisciplinary and cross cultural discussion of genocide which deliberately moves the discussion out of the twentieth century and European/Western contexts that shape so much of current research. We plan the presentation of papers in two morning sessions, and then a couple of panel discussions in the afternoon to consider comparatively both historical and theoretical issues. The first panel will aim to identify comparative themes between different papers, and the second panel will take a step back in order to consider the language that is and can be used around genocide in the pre-modern period and in contexts that may be either distinct from or only indirectly related to European and/or colonial powers.

Confirmed Presenters (in alphabetical order):

1. “The Elimination of the Huron Wendat and the Language of Genocidal Massacre”
Heidi Bohaker, University of Toronto

Heidi Bohaker is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in North American Aboriginal history, pre-Confederation Canada and ethnohistorical research methodologies. She has published on the significance of kinship networks to Anishinaabe people in the Great Lakes region and methods for reading pictographic expressions of Aboriginal identity on treaty documents. Current projects include a book about the political history of Anishinaabe peoples in the eastern Great lakes from 1600 to 1840.

2. “Discourses of Violence: Writing the Massacre at the Templo Mayor”
Pablo García Loaeza, West Virginia University

Pablo García Loaeza is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics.at West Virginia University. His research interests include the manipulation of history and identity formation, especially in the early-modern literature of Spanish America. He has published on these topics in Pegaso, the Colonial Latin American Review,and the Colonial Latin American Historical Review.

3. “Genocide and Gendercide in Sixteenth Century Portuguese Goa”
Bindu Malieckal, Saint Anselm College

Bindu Malieckal is Associate Professor of English at Saint Anselm College and specializes in the representation of Muslims, Jews, and women, with specific reference to India, in early-modern narratives. She has additional interests in post-colonial literature. Her publications appear in Papers in Language and Literature, The Muslim World, Essays in Arts and Sciences, The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal, Shakespeare Yearbook, and Atenea, and in the volumes The Mysterious and The Foreign in Early Modern England and The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia. Presently, she is completing a book on English and European trade with India.

4. “The narrative of ‘aboriginal absence’ in the Caribbean”
Melanie Newton, University of Toronto

Melanie Newton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the Caribbean and the history of slavery, gender and emancipation in the Atlantic World, and recently published The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Baton Louisiana State University Press, 2008). Her current research project is entitled _This Island’s Mine: Indigeneity in the Caribbean Atlantic World.

5. “Massacre Victims into War Casualties in Sja’ir Kompeni Welanda Berperang Dengan Tjina: Race and Representation in the 1740 Chinese Massacre in Dutch Batavia”
Su Fang Ng, University of Oklahoma

Su Fang Ng is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in the early modern period with a secondary interest in postcolonialism. She has published Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and articles on various topics. She is currently working on a comparative study of English and Malay appropriations of the legends of Alexander the Great, titled Reviving Alexander’s Empire: Early Modern Classicism from the British Isles to Islamic Southeast Asia, and researching Anglo-Dutch interactions in the East Indies, using sources in European languages and in classical Malay (written in Arabic script).

6. “Chiattorer Monnontor: Taxation, Mortality and the Bengal Famine of 1770”
Amrita Sen, Michigan State University

Amrita Sen is currently completing her dissertation “Trading India: Commerce, Spectacle, and Otherness, in Early Modern England” at Michigan State University. She has published on “Maqbool and Bollywood Conventions” in Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation, and helped edit the online proceedings of the Newberry Library for Renaissance Studies 2010 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference,“Intersecting Disciplines: Approaching Medieval and Early Modern Cultures.”

7. “Anti-Catholic Violence in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Vietnam?””
Nhung Tran, University of Toronto

Nhung Tuyet Tran is Canada Research Chair in Southeast Asian History at the University of Toronto. Her intellectual interests lie at the intersection of gender, law, and religious practice in Vietnamese society. She is completing a social history of gender, entitled, Vietnamese Women at the Crossroads of Southeast Asia: Gender, State & Society in the Early Modern Period. She has published in the Journal of Asian Studies and is the co-editor of Viêt Nam: Borderless Histories (2006), a collection of revisionist essays on Vietnamese histories. She is currently researching the cultural history of Vietnamese Catholicism, using sources written in classical Chinese, the Vietnamese demotic script (chũ nôm), and European languages.