This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
About the Project
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was first published in 1814. Even though, previously, the British Slave Trade Act 1807 declared slave-trade illegal in theory, slave-trade continued to thrive in practice. A close reading of Sir Thomas Bertram's frequent voyages to Antigua, one of the most successful plantation colonies of Britain, reveals the ongoing socio-economic tensions regarding the abolition act, since many of the estate owners’ income largely relied on slave trade and plantation colonies. While these tensions form the historical landscape of post-abolition act 19th century British society and Mansfield Park is inextricably linked with that background through Sir Thomas Betram's direct involvement in the slave-trade and plantation, Jane Austen leaves this historical landscape unexplored and Sir Thomas Bertram, an oppressor in the colonies, turns into the moral authority in this novel. Re-mapping Mansfield Park: In Search of the Silenced Spaces of Slave History re-frames Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park by foregrounding the distant geographical spaces and events associated with both the history of British plantation in Antigua and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In doing so it thus develops an alternative story universe that juxtaposes Austen’s primary narrative with a parallel historical narrative of oppression and violence against the Afrodiasporic people.
Research Questions
Using Mansfield Park as an example, the project seeks to answer a number of broader questions regarding the critical and pedagogical possibilities of incorporating digital visualization tools in literary studies:
- How do the affordances of digital publishing platforms and visualization tools allow us to form new ways of re-centralizing silenced historical spaces and narratives in the works of nineteenth-century novelists?
- How can these extratextual features influence both the academic and the general readership of those canonical authors and their works?
- How do the changing perceptions among academic and general readership help us reconfigure the ways historical and epistemological structures are created and dispersed by nineteenth-century British fiction?
- How do these alternative ways of interacting with texts and literary criticism inform our understanding of praxis-based decolonial pedagogy in literature classrooms?
Future Iterations
This is an on-going project. I'm writing my MA thesis based on the first section of this project. In future, I would like to incorporate some other novels by nineteenth-century canonical authors, including Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. I will incorporate snippets from different adaptations of these novels so that the readers can compare and juxtapose the texts and their adaptations while navigating the project. This comparison will help them identify the similar process of historical erasure in the canonical texts and their adaptations and understand how the creation and dispersion of colonial history operate in favor of the colonizing territories.
Even though at present the target audiences of my project are students and non-academic readers, but I am also planning to extend the scope of this project for academic readers, as I continue working on this project after my MA. I would like to add more historical documents related to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, middle passage, and British empire. In addition, once the project is complete, I will open this project for the audience, so that they can leave their comments and feedback. Thus, the future version of this project will work as a pedagogical tool for classroom use as well as a repository of diverse range of resources that will help the scholars interested in studying and teaching canonical literature from decolonial lens.
