- School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemMinds, bodies, machines: essays in the cultural and intellectual history of technologiesCOLEMAN, DEIRDRE ; Fraser, Hilary ( 2008)In 1989 Rodney Brooks, Director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT, predicted that America would soon be able to conduct inter-planetary exploration and colonisation with millions of tiny robots. Asserting that ‘biology and evolution were good models to follow’, Brooks designed his ‘gnat robots’ as insects, each with sensor-whiskers, six legs, and a sophisticated microchip. In terms of risk management and optimisation of resources, the superiority of ‘swarms’ of mass-produced, cheap and autonomous robots over a single large and expensive ground-controlled robot was obvious. In conclusion Brooks argued that, just as exploration of the Earth had ‘proceeded by many small spontaneous sorties into the unknown’, so ‘with imagination and verve we can invade the whole solar system’. Futuristic as this may sound, there is nothing new in the MIT Lab’s imaginative blurring of the boundaries between the organic (the insect) and the mechanical (the robot). In the seventeenth century, inspired by the new science of magnification, observers noted the startlingly close resemblance between insects and ‘Engines’. Insect interiors were, Richard Leigh declared, ‘Like living Watches, each of these conceals / A thousand Springs of Life, and moving Wheels’. For another observer, the ‘pretty Engines’ of ‘Insectile Automata’ housed ‘all the perfections of the largest Animals’, including the human machine.
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ItemEntertaining entomology: insect performers in the eighteenth centuryCOLEMAN, DEIRDRE ( 2006)Of the many issues raised by observation of insect societies, the one this paper focuses on concerns gender, sexuality, and reproduction, with a particular emphasis on the queen of the species, and the often unstable meaning of her queenliness, fluctuating as this sometimes did between an imperious regality and a more “everywoman” ordinariness. As feminist scholarship on the eighteenth century has shown, definitions and cultural assumptions about “femininity” and the nature and status of women were keenly debated as part of a wider redefinition of social categories and roles.
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ItemJanet Schaw and the Complexions of EmpireCOLEMAN, D (John Hopkins University Press, 2003)This essay considers the development of racial ideology in the eighteenth century in the context of a comparative colonial cultural history of the British West Indies and of North America. It focuses on the racialization of whiteness in the 1760s and 1770s and on the way in which this racialization of skin color relates to issues of gender. Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality(1774-6) is the principal text for this enquiry. The concluding section of the paper argues that mid-eighteenth-century discourses of whitening and whiteness form an important cultural context for understanding later abolitionist texts.
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Item'Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits': The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth CenturyCOLEMAN, D ; Lamont, C ; Rossington, M (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)The eye-catching conjunction of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’ occurs in William Cowper’s ‘The Winter Evening’, where the poet describes the arrival in his secluded village of newspapers from the great Babel of London — that ‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’. Amidst advertisements for ‘Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald’, Cowper lists, Aetherial journies, submarine exploits, And Katterfelto with his hair on end At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.
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ItemHenry Smeathman and the Natural Economy of SlaveryCOLEMAN, D ; Carey, B ; Kitson, P (Boydell & Brewer, 2007)
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ItemRomantic Colonization and British Anti-SlaveryCOLEMAN, D (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
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ItemIntroductionColeman, D ; Coleman, D (Routledge, 2006)
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ItemThe "Dog-Man": Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee's DisgraceColeman, D (HOFSTRA UNIV PRESS, 2009-01-01)
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ItemImagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in Mansfield ParkCOLEMAN, D ; Johnson, C ; Tuite, C (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009)
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ItemIntroduction: Minds, Bodies, MachinesCOLEMAN, D ; Fraser, H (University of London, 2008)This issue of 19 brings together a selection of essays from an interdisciplinary conference on 'Minds, Bodies, Machines' convened last year by Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, in partnership with the English programme, University of Melbourne and software developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI). The conference explored the relationship between minds, bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century, with a view to understanding the history of our technology-driven, post-human visions. It is in the nineteenth century that the relationship between the human and the machine under post-industrial capitalism becomes a pervasive theme. From Blake on the mills of the mind by which we are enslaved, to Carlyle's and Arnold's denunciation of the machinery of modern life, from Dickens's sooty fictional locomotive Mr Pancks, who 'snorted and sniffed and puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine', and 'shot out […]cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency', to the alienated historical body of the late-nineteenth-century factory worker under Taylorization, whose movements and gestures were timed, regulated and rationalised to maximize efficiency; we find a cultural preoccupation with the mechanisation of the nineteenth-century human body that uncannily resonates with modern dreams and anxieties around technologies of the human.