Dr Andrew Warnes BA, Lancaster; MA, PhD, Leeds
For a list of publications since 2001 click here
Research
On first glance, my research pursuits might look rather diverse, ranging as
they do from the chronicles of American conquest to the promotion of Indie
music
since 1980. Uniting these disparate interests, however, is a concern with the
ways in which Western cultures produce the idea of race and turn it into an
invisible or otherwise “normal” part of everyday life. This is
central to my first book, Hunger
Overcome: Food and Resistance in Twentieth Century African American Literature
(Georgia, 2004), which argues that Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright and Toni
Morrison are alert to the use of waste in American life, all of them presenting
hunger as an avoidable condition distributed to create feelings of want.
Richard Wright remains a major interest. My second book—Richard
Wright’s Native Son: A Critical Guide (Routledge, 2007)—places
that novel in a Transatlantic context, paying particular attention to the way
it mixes Blues tropes and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment together.
I suggest that Native Son knowingly rehearses an old storyline, reanimating
old myths to show how they acquire a racial complexion in American life. Later
articles on Caryl Phillips, Charles Johnson and The Smiths extend this interest
in the ways in which different forms of Transatlantic culture make the process
of racialization visible.
My third book, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture and the Invention of America’s
First Food (Georgia, forthcoming 2008), takes a more historical view. Savage
Barbecue surveys the colonial archive since 1492, paying particular attention
to English writings, to make a simple point: that the word barbecue
arose, not just from indigenous culture, but from European attempts to present
those cultures as well as their foods in a barbaric light. I suggest
that, rather as European cultures of conquest lifted canoa out of
its Caribbean context and made it refer to any “savage” boat found
anywhere In the world, so the invention of barbecue likewise helped to merge
myriad Indian cultures into a single, savage opposite. In developing this argument
Savage Barbecue discusses “English” Transatlanticists Edmund
Hickeringill, William Dampier and Aphra Behn as well as “American”
Transatlanticists Cotton Mather, William Byrd and John Lawson. I pay particular
attention to Ned Ward’s The Barbacue Feast: or, The Three Pigs of
Peckham, a fantastic but little-known report of 1707, which suggests that
Peckham Rye was one of the first places in the world to play host to a feast
in fact called barbecue.
Future projects are likely to pay more attention to the cultures of capitalism.
I am intrigued by the fact that Britain’s industrialization coincided
with its acquisition of empire, and by the way notions of racial mastery mark
ensuing cultures of mass consumption. As a focus for these interests, a monograph
on tobacco culture is planned for the near future. Beyond that, one day, and
perhaps to stave off a looming midlife crisis, I want to revisit my work on
popular music, producing a monograph on Gang of Four, PiL, De La Soul, My Bloody
Valentine, Patti Smith and Tricky.
I would be pleased to supervise research degrees in all of these areas. More
generally, I am always happy to hear from students interested in our MA in Race
and Resistance, an interdisciplinary degree that I run with colleagues in English
and History (see http://www.leeds.ac.uk/history/race.htm).
Teaching
Dr Warnes is on leave in semester 1 of 2007-8, in semester 2:
Undergraduate
Contemporary American Short Fiction
MA module
Islands,
Ghettos, Patches: Space and Freedom in Black Atlantic Prose, 1938—2000
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