Senatssaal: Gebäude 05, Raum 205
Abstract:
Material culture was at the very heart of the colonial project. China, tea and sugar, cotton, silk, and ivory are only some of the goods that made the “Empire of Things” in the long nineteenth century. The transfer of foreign products from overseas territories, the appropriation of exotic things, and the commercialisation of colonial objects had a strong impact on political, economic, aesthetic, and epistemological transformations in Europe. “The Great Victorian Collection” (Asa Briggs), London’s Crystal Palace which housed the first world fair in 1851, is an important point of crystallisation for socio-cultural transformations in nineteenth-century Britain and a defining moment in the development of material culture as we understand it today. With the example of the Great Exhibition, this talk will introduce translocation as a veritable concept for postcolonial material culture studies to trace the complex processes of appropriating colonial objects in new webs of (everyday) meaning.
Zur Person:
Nora Plesske is Assistant Professor for Anglophone Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Magdeburg. Since 2018, she has worked on establishing the University Collections at OVGU for teaching, research, as well as third mission. At the moment, she co-coordinates the BMBF-funded project 3ioS which engages with the medical technology collection. She has published widely in the areas of economies of collecting, heritage studies, and material culture studies. Currently, she is finishing her second book on the translocation of colonial objects in the context of the economic-material expansion of the British Empire (1760-1920).