Kirk McAuley will give a talk Friday, November 14, in our ongoing colloquium series. His reading will be held in the Bundy Reading Room of Avery Hall from noon to 1 p.m. His presentation is entitled “‘the whisker’d vermine-race’ – or, Ideas about Biological Invasion and Crop Monoculture in Early Caribbean Literature.” Everyone is welcome to attend.
“I will focus on the psycho-geographical (and literal) confusion of Old and New World ecologies in Caribbean “empire writing” – including local newspapers and magazines, such as the Kingston Daily Advertiser and Jamaica Magazine. Such confusion, I argue, not only functions as a form of “colonial quotation,” but also serves to measure the environmental impacts of the sugar revolution. In particular, I will examine how two poems – namely, James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (1764) and John Singleton’s A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767) – encourage us to consider the fragility of island ecosystems and the potentially devastating effects of biological invasion and crop monoculture.”
