This page was created by Collin Hardwick.
Author's Statement
Nazua Idris
MA, Literary Studies
Department of English, Washington State University
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues how 19th century British canonical authors have isolated the historical spaces of British Imperialism from their novels, although the fiction and colonial history are closely connected and cites Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as an example. As a die-hard Austen fan, who has never reflected beyond the beautiful descriptions of luxurious country life (depicted in Mansfield Park and re-created in the 1983 BBC television adaptation of this novel), my encounter with Said's argument was not an easy one. When I first read Said’s book in my undergraduate literary theory course, it worked as an eye-opener as I realized how the history of slavery and colonization has been silenced in British canonical narratives, and how this silencing is perpetuated by the subsequent adaptations (television, film, theatrical, and other media) of those works that keep the stories alive, while continue to erase their historical landscapes. The major adaptations of Mansfield Park (the 1983 BBC adaptation and Iain B. MacDonald’s 2007 adaptation) disregard the novel's integral connection with the history of British plantation colonies and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Only Patricia Rozema infuses some of these historical incidents in her film adaptation of Mansfield Park; however, in her version, the history of slave oppression still lies in the background and the wonderful love story of Fanny Price and Edward Bertram remains the central concern of the film.
Intrigued by Edward Said’s reading of Mansfield Park, I decided to design a Scalar edition of this novel. For this edition, I decided to annotate selected chapters from Mansfield Park with the history of British plantation in Antigua and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I was inspired by various digital projects, including Slavery’s Ephemera: The Contemporary Life of the Antebellum Plantation, Maps of Colonial Massacre, and Mapping Indigenous LA: Challenging Structures through Spatial Narrative. These projects exemplify how digital tools can be used to create alternative ways of re-framing history through immersive visual experience. In doing so, they create counter-narratives that challenge the representation of colonial history in dominant narratives.
Through my project Re-Mapping Mansfield Park, I want to engage the audience in an immersive experience of reading Mansfield Park in relation to the history of British slave-trade and British imperialism. This project creates a decolonial lens of studying Mansfield Park in a number of ways. First, this project re-centralizes the marginalized colonial history of the text. Second, it presents the novel from the perspective of the colonized other and visually illustrates the juxtaposition between the idyllic life of British country mansion and the horrors of slave oppression in plantation colonies that paid for the luxury and comfort of the plantation owners’ families in England. Finally, and more importantly, this project prioritizes visual content over linguistic content to make the scholarly conversations about the erasure and misrepresentation of colonial history more accessible to general readers.
