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image copyright © Matt Kenyon |
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‘Occidentalism, Orientalism, and the idea of a postsecular Europe.’
Friday 30 October, 2009
Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Margret Fetzer
"Beyond the textual line: Walter Scott's postponing and post-scripting of authentic Scottishness" (abstract)
Whereas Paul Gilroy's earlier work focussed predominantly on black British culture and the black Atlantic (1987, 1993), later publications make a point of establishing parallels between racism against blacks and anti-semitism (2000, 2004). Gilroy hence widens the applicability of his ideas to relations of intercultural domination in general – such as are central also to Scott's Waverley and Rob Roy, which debate the colonisation of Britain's northern part. If Scott's writing is frequently considered coextensive with the idea of Scotland, this metonymy is particularly apt as concerns the hesitant and faltering beginnings of both Scott's discourse and the story of his Scotland: his paratextual deferral of the 'real text' is symptomatic of the deferral also of 'authentic' Scottishness. As Scott's numerous preliminaries and appendices discursively question not only the hierarchy of paratext over primary text and vice versa, but also the relation of English colonising subjects and Scottish colonial objects, they refuse "to celebrate incommensurability and cheerlead for absolute identity" (Gilroy, 2000: 6-7).
