Tim Watson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3698732 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tim Watson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tim |
| FAMILY NAME | Watson |
| SIGNATURE | WATSON T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Miami |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3841-3332 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Introduction
The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies. The pi…
Plant Infrastructure
This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with "Agricultural Explorer" D…
Disturbing the Neighbors
This essay is a response to Belinda Edmondson's Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which is an excellent history of literary and performative Creole in the anglophone Caribbean, tracing its roots back to the work songs of enslaved African laborers, to the transcriptions and parodies of White Caribbean elites, and to the increasing use in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Creole by Brown and Blac…
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads…
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920
Empire of neglect
Cultures in Contact
In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in Franc…
Culture Writing
Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists. As the British and French Empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to…
“Every Guy Has His Own Africa”
This chapter analyzes the writer Saul Bellow as an anthropological novelist, focusing on his African novel, Henderson the Rain King . Bellow incorporates ethnographic source material, including some from his erstwhile teacher Melville Herskovits, but Henderson is a bumbling caricature of the academic fieldworker. Nevertheless, the novel asks essential anthropological questions about how culture determines human behavior and thought and how cultur…
“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”
This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-h…
Caribbean
As Weber states in his chapter on "Bureaucracy" in Economy and Society, the bureaucratic official is "set for a 'career' within [a] hierarchical order. . . . He expects to move from the lower, less important and less well paid, to the higher position. The average official naturally desires a mechanical fixing of the conditions of promotion" (963). 5
Working the Edges of the Nineteenth‐Century British Empire
In this essay, I pay attention to some of the edges, margins, and middle spaces of the nineteenth‐century empire and suggest that the movements, people, and cultural practices of the edges of empire were crucially important for the construction of empire itself. I tell the stories of two imperial middlemen, people who worked from the edges of the nineteenth‐century British imperial world, in Jamaica, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Britain, who worked …
Miami
To write a history of Miami is to enter a treacherous swamp ... The goals that Anthony Maingot announces for Miami: A Cultural History are actually bolder than they might appear: 'To avoid flippant critiques, odious comparisons, and exuberant boosterism' (p. xxi)
Mobile obeah
The five fine essays published in this special issue of Atlantic Studies contribute, individually and collectively, to the growing consensus among historians and literary critics that an analysis o
Commonwealth of Letters
Peter Kalliney's fine book combines a subtle historical sociology of literature with skillful close readings of literary texts to provide a new mapping of the period of late literary modernism and early postcolonial literature.Modernism and postcolonial literature have too rarely been studied together; Commonwealth of Letters makes that critical neglect even more startling by showing that each field was inextricably bound up with the other.Buildi…
Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (review)
Reviewed by: Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms Tim Watson Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. By Anita Patterson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Anita Patterson's book is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on transnational, transatlantic modernisms. Along with critics such as Jahan Ramazani, Matthew Hart, and the contributors to Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel's anthology G…
Introduction
(2003). Introduction: Critical infrastructures after 9/11. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 109-111
An American Empire
An American Studies Dilemma
Comrade Gramsci's Progeny
Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, May 1993
Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars
Research Article| October 01 1966 Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars: Attempts to Blend Two Cultures O. W. Furley; O. W. Furley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google T. Watson T. Watson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1966) 65 (4): 471–490. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-65-4-471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Sit…
Working the Edges of the Nineteenth‐Century British Empire
In this essay, I pay attention to some of the edges, margins, and middle spaces of the nineteenth‐century empire and suggest that the movements, people, and cultural practices of the edges of empire were crucially important for the construction of empire itself. I tell the stories of two imperial middlemen, people who worked from the edges of the nineteenth‐century British imperial world, in Jamaica, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Britain, who worked …
Introduction
(2003). Introduction: Critical infrastructures after 9/11. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 109-111
Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars
Research Article| October 01 1966 Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars: Attempts to Blend Two Cultures O. W. Furley; O. W. Furley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google T. Watson T. Watson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1966) 65 (4): 471–490. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-65-4-471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Sit…
Empire of neglect
An American Studies Dilemma
Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars
Research Article| October 01 1966 Education in Tanganyika Between the Wars: Attempts to Blend Two Cultures O. W. Furley; O. W. Furley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google T. Watson T. Watson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1966) 65 (4): 471–490. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-65-4-471 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Sit…
Comrade Gramsci's Progeny
Postmodern Culture - Volume 3, Number 3, May 1993
An American Studies Dilemma
An American Empire
Introduction
(2003). Introduction: Critical infrastructures after 9/11. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 109-111
Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms (review)
Reviewed by: Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms Tim Watson Race, American Literature and Transnational Modernisms. By Anita Patterson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Anita Patterson's book is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on transnational, transatlantic modernisms. Along with critics such as Jahan Ramazani, Matthew Hart, and the contributors to Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel's anthology G…
Mobile obeah
The five fine essays published in this special issue of Atlantic Studies contribute, individually and collectively, to the growing consensus among historians and literary critics that an analysis o
Commonwealth of Letters
Peter Kalliney's fine book combines a subtle historical sociology of literature with skillful close readings of literary texts to provide a new mapping of the period of late literary modernism and early postcolonial literature.Modernism and postcolonial literature have too rarely been studied together; Commonwealth of Letters makes that critical neglect even more startling by showing that each field was inextricably bound up with the other.Buildi…
Working the Edges of the Nineteenth‐Century British Empire
In this essay, I pay attention to some of the edges, margins, and middle spaces of the nineteenth‐century empire and suggest that the movements, people, and cultural practices of the edges of empire were crucially important for the construction of empire itself. I tell the stories of two imperial middlemen, people who worked from the edges of the nineteenth‐century British imperial world, in Jamaica, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and Britain, who worked …
Miami
To write a history of Miami is to enter a treacherous swamp ... The goals that Anthony Maingot announces for Miami: A Cultural History are actually bolder than they might appear: 'To avoid flippant critiques, odious comparisons, and exuberant boosterism' (p. xxi)
Cultures in Contact
In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in Franc…
Culture Writing
Focusing on the 1950s and early 1960s, Culture Writing argues that the period of decolonization in Britain, the United States, France, and the Caribbean was characterized by dynamic exchanges between literary writers and anthropologists. As the British and French Empires collapsed and the United States rose to global power, and as intellectuals from the decolonizing world challenged the cultural hegemony of the West, some anthropologists began to…
“Every Guy Has His Own Africa”
This chapter analyzes the writer Saul Bellow as an anthropological novelist, focusing on his African novel, Henderson the Rain King . Bellow incorporates ethnographic source material, including some from his erstwhile teacher Melville Herskovits, but Henderson is a bumbling caricature of the academic fieldworker. Nevertheless, the novel asks essential anthropological questions about how culture determines human behavior and thought and how cultur…
“Jumble Sales Are the Same the World Over”
This chapter analyzes the novels of the British writer Barbara Pym, which are often read as cozy tales of English middle-class postwar life but which, I argue, are profoundly influenced by the work Pym carried out as an editor of the journal Africa at the International African Institute in London, where she worked for decades. She used ethnographic techniques to represent social change in a postwar, decolonizing, non-normative Britain of female-h…
Caribbean
As Weber states in his chapter on "Bureaucracy" in Economy and Society, the bureaucratic official is "set for a 'career' within [a] hierarchical order. . . . He expects to move from the lower, less important and less well paid, to the higher position. The average official naturally desires a mechanical fixing of the conditions of promotion" (963). 5
Empire of neglect
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800-1920
Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1800–1920
This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads…
Disturbing the Neighbors
This essay is a response to Belinda Edmondson's Creole Noise: Early Caribbean Dialect Literature and Performance (2022), which is an excellent history of literary and performative Creole in the anglophone Caribbean, tracing its roots back to the work songs of enslaved African laborers, to the transcriptions and parodies of White Caribbean elites, and to the increasing use in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Creole by Brown and Blac…
Introduction
The nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission and distribution of ideas, people, and goods were, on one hand, established and standardized and, on the other, contested and transformed in practice. We argue that literary and cultural scholars of the nineteenth century can make major contributions to the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies. The pi…
Plant Infrastructure
This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with "Agricultural Explorer" D…
History (14 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · History (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Ancient history (4 works) · Anthropology (4 works)