Teaching the Travail of Writing: Authority, Empire, and Racial Formation in the (Pre)modern | Watch the full talk

Presented by Nedda Mehdizadeh at Education: A RaceB4Race Symposium in 2021

Nedda Mehdizadeh unpacks how English travel writing not only mirrors imperial adventurism but participates in the formation of empire itself. Taking as a starting point Edward Said’s comments on “fictional realities” in Orientalism (1978), Mehdizadeh models pedagogical techniques which demonstrate how cartography is not a reflection of an external world but a constructed discipline, doing so through the Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300), the Mercator Projection (1569), and Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana (1154). Mehdizadeh then turns to Richard Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations (1589), a compendium of travelogues, and Robert Thorne’s Mappe or Carde of the World (1527) to illuminate the key role played by writing in processes of conquest and early capitalism. By attending to the power of composition, Mehdizadeh also highlights the ways in which teaching composition might empower students to work against and past today’s imperial universalisms.