Graduate Research Journal, Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxfordhttp://english.ohgn.org/journal

Editorial committee 2014-2015: Founding members:

Jennie Cole Camille Pidoux (founder andEd Dodson editor-in-chief 2014-2015)Bárbara Gallego Larrarte Callum SeddonKatharina Herold Jennie ColeJennifer HurdKathleen KeownDaniel MatoreJulia MattisonCamille PidouxCallum Seddon

With special thanks to Charlie Dawkins and Dominic Davies.

EGO logo by Stephen Wragg, Wragg Art House; ORE logo and cover by Kathleen Keown (font: Existence Light); Junicode font by Peter S. Baker.

“Margins” Issue 1, Winter 2014

Contents

Margins conference, June 2014 Charlie Dawkins, University of Oxford 4

“'They now think to plant themselves in liberties': The role of the Blackfriars in moving Early Modern theatre out of the margins” Lana Harper, University of Sussex 6

“Marlow’s Older Brother: A Forgotten Australian, a Moral Morass, and the Last Free Islands of the South Pacific” Victoria Warren, University of East Anglia 16

“Shifting Centres: Crafting a World through Language in Translingual Writing” Josianne Mamo, University of Glasgow 25

Early-career researcher profile: an interview with Dominic Daviesby Ed Dodson 36

Early-career researcher profile: an interview with Dominic Davies

By Ed Dodson

Dom Davies, who spoke at last year’s English Graduate conference on Margins, has agreed tochat with me on that very topic at Oxford’s famous Turf Tavern. ‘When I spoke at theconference,’ he tells me, ‘I discussed an author, Olive Schreiner, who was writing from a veryperipheral or marginal South African landscape.’ He clarifies: ‘I’m talking about an imperialcontext here.’ Despite expressing uneasiness with the term ‘postcolonial’, throughout ourdiscussion Davies exhibits a passion for thinking about empire, past and present. ‘In my work, Ifocus on writers who are writing with the cultural hegemony of the period. My aim of readingthose writers, colonial writers, is to find the margins of their cultural or ideological horizonwithin the formal margins of their work, to find the edges.’

Surprisingly perhaps, these authors do not include Conrad – who, ‘especially here atOxford is the writer everyone’s meant to read’ – but ‘other colonial writers that have beendismissed for their politics in many ways, essentially complicit with imperial hegemonies.’ Theseinclude: ‘Rider Haggard, John Buchan, who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) which wasmade famous by Hitchcock, a woman called Flora Annie Steel who writes from India, andEdward Thompson (father of E.P. Thompson), and then also I have slightly more subversivewriters like Schreiner and EM Forster as well.’

Taking Steel as a case study, he explains that ‘she’s writing at a time when there’s astrong humanitarian ideology to do with imperialism in India, that was one of the mainjustifications for the British Empire. They’re there to help Indians who without them would bestarving: the British are bringing famine relief. So they see themselves as a benevolent force.’ It’shere that the materialist and anti-capitalist politics of Davies’ research becomes apparent:‘actually the economic mechanisms and infrastructures they’re putting in place are gearedtowards facilitating capitalist exploitation of the subcontinent. So there’s this tension betweenimperialism as a benevolent force and imperialism as an exploitative force.’

If this sounds like a political project, Davies also makes clear the centrality of literature.‘Steel, very much buys into the ideology of ‘yes, we’re here to save the Indians’, but she’s also onthe ground seeing that perhaps this is not actually happening. When she writes creatively thiscomes through at a formal level; she’s trying to propagate humanitarian ideology, butoccasionally she rubs up against the socioeconomic reality of what’s actually going on and thatmanifests as a kind of textual crisis. The narrative can no longer resolve the tension she’s

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grappling with. You can see this occur in terms of fragmentation at the level of the hyphen, thelevel of the ellipsis. Suddenly the narrative just disintegrates into a silence, what Macherey [theFrench Marxist literary theorist] would call ‘an eloquent silence’: this moment when we see theideology through the form of the text and the gaps in it, the absences. So we can begin to chartthe margins, or the contours, of ideology – imperial ideology, humanitarian ideology, we start tosee where it fails, its hypocrisy, its paradoxes.’

For Davies, these ideologies and their literary deconstruction are not historical butpressingly current. ‘I don’t think people realise quite how astonishingly rooted the currenthumanitarian discourse is in these imperial narratives around benevolence. But also how it’sgrown into a much more severe situation […] displaced people are in desperate need ofhumanitarian aid, there’s no denying that, but humanitarian aid actually sutures them into theglobal capitalist system undemocratically. If you’re in a refugee camp you don’t have the vote, youdon’t have any kind of political organisation – it’s all top down, you have no say in whatinfrastructures you get or where the aid is spent. So you end up with these huge marginal spacesall over the earth which are full of people with no political agency.’

It is these political convictions that have led Davies towards a further research project.‘I’ve really enjoyed my time as a PhD student and now I want to look at the way infrastructuresare represented and the way urban space is reproduced in contemporary literature. I want tothink about marginal forms, if you like, such as the graphic novel and other literary forms thatperhaps don’t fit with our notion of what literature is – in particular the South African graphicnovel.’

Finally I ask if he’s got any advice for other early career researchers looking to make asimilar move to postdoc: ‘I would encourage any PhD student to relish the first two or threeyears. Doing the same project for four years can be quite a monotonous thing and it’s imperative,I’d say, to publish articles, to write reviews, to get some editing experience, to organiseconferences, to go to conferences, to speak at conferences – you’re more likely to get a postdoc ifyou’ve published and you have this wide-ranging experience.’

And what about the viva? ‘In both my own experience and that of others that I havespoken to, it's important to take some time away from the thesis immediately after you'vesubmitted, not only for your own sanity, but also because then when you return to it you see itwith relatively fresh eyes. This means you perhaps spot certain mistakes or issues more easily,and can think about these as you prepare for the various questions that might come up in the

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viva.

Having said this, I think the rule that the main questions you will get in the viva are theones that you didn't expect, is largely true. Fortunately, my examiners told me that I had passedat the beginning of the viva, which put me at ease, though it's worth saying that this is oftennot the case and that if you aren't told straight away there is no need to panic. And despite thisopening revelation, the questions that followed were really tough and seemed, to me at least, tobe really important! It's important to remember that you, as the author of the thesis, will knowthe primary material much better than your examiners, and so the questions often tend towardsthe methodological and theoretical dimensions of it. My advice would be to deal with theseissues, which are often complex and somewhat abstract, by responding with examples from yourprimary research. The key is simply to know your thesis inside out, which, by the time you'vesubmitted, you will do anyway, and reading it through a couple of times in preparation for theviva will solidify this intimate knowledge for you.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that since I submitted and passed my viva, I've been luckyenough to receive a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship here at the University of Oxford,which will give me the opportunity to begin a new research project over the next three years.My advice would be, in the final months before you submit, to keep an eye on variouspostdoctoral positions that are coming up, and even use the application processes for these as awelcome break from your thesis—it's always good to have something else to turn your mind to,as the final writing up stage can become very monotonous! And apply to everything that yousee, the more applications you write the easier they become, and even if you don't get anythingfirst time round, the experience of these processes will be invaluable as you continue to apply toother jobs and positions, be they academic or not, in the future.’