Events

This AHRC-funded conference, organized by the R/18 Collective (r18collective.org), marks the bicentenary of Elizabeth Inchbald’s death in 1821. Inchbald was the most prolific and successful playwright of late 18th-century Britain, as well as an actress, novelist, and drama critic. The conference will include a professional, script-in-hand performance of her 1788 farce, Animal Magnetism. 

Cultural marketability – the marketability of place, heritage, and collective self-representation – is now a major economic force. As economies continue (unevenly) to transnationalise, culture and heritage industries have become a central pillar of development for diverse communities, ranging from cities to nations to ethnic groups. This is a double-edged sword: it deepens unequal dependencies upon external validation of cultural identity, particularly validation through consumer desire. But it also bears potential to mobilise and preserve important ‘strategic essentialisms’: to ‘help articulations of racial/ethnic/cultural identity survive’.  This conference seeks to investigate the links between cultural commodification, globalisation, and literary form. Taking as premise the notion that cultural commodification and literary texts share procedures of worldmaking and enclosure – the containment and arrangement of symbolic forms – the conference asks how literary form might productively interrogate cultural commodification projects. Join us for panel discussions on literary depictions of cultural commodification phenomena, including: tourism and heritage enterprises, ‘ethno-preneurialism’, culture festivals, and patenting of ‘cultural knowledge’. Does literary form reproduce the dimensions and boundaries of the ‘worlds’ envisioned in such projects? Or does it challenge them?