{"id":557,"date":"2015-02-02T16:05:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T16:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=557"},"modified":"2015-02-02T16:05:29","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T16:05:29","slug":"five-questions-siobhan-carroll-on-an-empire-of-air-and-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=557","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Siobhan Carroll on An Empire of Air and Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Siobhan<\/a><\/p>\n

Siobhan Carroll is an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware<\/a>, specialising in British literature from 1750 to 1850 and in modern fantasy and science fiction.\u00a0 In the past couple of years, she has published articles on Mary Shelley in the European Romantic Review <\/em>and on Neil Gaiman in Extrapolations<\/em>, but her larger project has been a wide-ranging examination of the relationship between literature, science and exploration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, paying particular attention to the ways in which the geographies of extreme spaces have been configured and imagined.\u00a0 The culmination of this project is her new monograph, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850<\/em><\/a>, which will be published this month by the University of Pennsylvania Press and which we discuss below.\u00a0 The introduction can be read here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in atopias (defined in your introduction as ‘”real” natural regions falling within the theoretical scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as “place.”‘)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It emerged from a chance remark I made to Pat Brantlinger<\/a> at Indiana University.\u00a0 We were discussing how the British narrated imperial history.<\/p>\n

Thinking of the Shackleton and Scott stories I\u2019d consumed as a child I said, \u201cOf course, to the Brits the North & South Poles were the ultimate imperial spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cReally? Why?\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where this project began \u2013 in an attempt to answer that question.<\/p>\n

I soon noticed my primary sources grouping together the poles with other unusual spaces. Poems like Byron\u2019s The Island<\/em> would make sure to establish a captain\u2019s polar ambitions before turning to the ocean and to caverns.\u00a0 Newspapers and geographical textbooks would pay tribute to the poles, caverns, the ocean and the atmosphere before turning to the English countryside.\u00a0 I felt I was starting to get a handle on the poles \u2013 Jen Hill\u2019s and Adriana Craciun\u2019s work proved very helpful in thinking through the way polar space constructed British imperial character \u2013 but I wanted to know how the poles related to these other geographies.\u00a0 What brought them together in the British imagination?\u00a0 And what kind of cultural work were they performing?<\/p>\n

For me, the answer began to turn on the issue of habitation.\u00a0 I learned that none of these geographies \u2013 including caves \u2013 were considered permanently habitable.\u00a0 At best, they could serve as temporary refuges when your nation cast you out, but sooner or later you would have to return to green, arable land in order to build a home.\u00a0 Edward Said famously said that discussions of imperialism are discussions of habitation.\u00a0 But I was looking at evidence that spaces imagined as not only uninhabited but as *forever* uninhabited \u2013 spaces that would permanently resist the empire\u2019s colonizing projects \u2013 were playing important roles in defining the British Empire.<\/p>\n

Eventually I started using the term \u201catopia\u201d to discuss these regions \u2013 geographies that could never be converted into dwellings.\u00a0 Essentially, I argue that Britons used these sites to define the empire: to set its limits, to establish their national character, and to \u201cprove\u201d their right to dominate more hospitable geographies and peoples.\u00a0 At the same time, in imagining a site as an atopia, Britons were also telling themselves that (to borrow a phrase from Rosalind Williams\u2019s new book) the \u201ctriumph of human empire\u201d was impossible.\u00a0 Our twenty-first century attempts to comprehend climate change and ocean acidification struggle against this cultural conceit.<\/p>\n

2) An Empire of Air and Water<\/em> examines the poles, the sea, the air and underworlds, with a conclusion on the unknown spaces of the labyrinthine nineteenth-century city.\u00a0 What lead you to select these particular foci, and were there other types of space, such as wildernesses, deserts or mountains, which you considered including?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I looked at each of them.\u00a0 \u201cWilderness\u201d I dismissed because (in most discourses) it\u2019s not atopic.\u00a0 Yes, it\u2019s an extreme space, and yes, you can die in it, but it is improvable.\u00a0 Turner\u2019s frontier will advance, this hostile line of trees will be cleared, and you\u2019ll build yourself a nice little town on the spot where a bear once ate your parents.<\/p>\n

Mountains and deserts were trickier.\u00a0 I found the habitable\/uninhabitable lines harder draw with those spaces, and they were often treated differently in my primary sources.\u00a0 Mountains, for example, were imagined as known and mapped even if nobody had ever climbed them \u2013 because they performed the political function of serving as \u201cnatural borders\u201d between nations.\u00a0 Deserts I would have liked to have tackled had I had more time, but my sense is that they became more important to the British imperial imagination in the later nineteenth century.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got an article on the backburner about deserts in the Siege of Khartoum that may well turn a postscript for this project.<\/p>\n

2) Your book focuses on the Romantic Century (1750-1850). How did you come to decide that this span would be the most suitable for your study, as opposed to one extending earlier or later or one which covered a smaller or larger chronological range?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The book does engage with texts and topics falling outside that date range: it\u2019s hard to describe the cultural operations of these spaces without mentioning works like Dickens\u2019s The Frozen Deep<\/em> or Conrad\u2019s Heart of Darkness<\/em>!\u00a0 But in conceptualizing the project as a whole, the \u201cRomantic Century\u201d seemed to truly capture a period of intense transformations in how people thought about the globe.\u00a0 D\u2019Anville\u2019s 1749 map of Africa<\/a> popularizes the idea that there are \u201cblank spaces\u201d that European empires should probably do something about, while the Great Exhibition of 1851 asserts the British Empire\u2019s ability to not only know but also to spatially organize the diverse circulations of the world.<\/p>\n

4) Which primary and secondary texts proved the most crucial for you in shaping your research on uncolonisable spaces?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> and The Last Man<\/em> both proved enormously important for me \u2013 Frankenstein<\/em> because it marks a definitive break in the tradition in polar narratives up until that point, and The Last Man<\/em> because it\u2019s uncannily prescient in imagining the human race facing a global environmental disaster that might be of its own making.\u00a0 I might go so far as to call it the first novel of the Anthropocene<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As for secondary texts \u2013 there were so many inspiring scholars whose work I read and whose arguments helped shape my own.\u00a0 Edward Said, Henri Lefebvre, Benedict Anderson, and Marc Aug\u00e9 proved essential touchstones for me in formulating my arguments.\u00a0 In British scholarship, the work of scholars like Tim Fulford, Alan Bewell, and Saree Makdisi provided an important foundation for the way I was thinking about exploration in the Romantic Century.\u00a0 And then there are scholars like Margaret Cohen, Sam Baker, Lauren Benton, and Adriana Craciun, who published works that helped me solve particular problems in the later stages of this project.<\/p>\n

5) What new projects are you currently working on?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In researching An Empire of Air and Water<\/em> I came across a lot of material on nineteenth-century geo-engineering projects that proposed doing things like attacking the poles in order to change the global climate.\u00a0 One 1860s American proposal suggested reversing the current of the Gulf Stream in order to destroy the British Empire.\u00a0 (That\u2019ll teach them!)\u00a0 My next project takes these schemes of \u201cextreme improvement\u201d as a starting place for its investigation into how Britons and Americans conceptualized human agency in relation to air, water, and plant circulations.\u00a0 It\u2019s tentatively titled Circulating Natures: Planetary Politics in the Transatlantic Imagination<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Siobhan Carroll is an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware, specialising in British literature from 1750 to 1850 and in modern fantasy and science fiction.\u00a0 In the past couple… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=557"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}