Nothing signalled the advent of globalisation in Britain more dramatically than the conversion of vast areas of east and south-east London into dockland. Dockland is an abstraction: solid ground dug out to create a network of lakes and canals walled off from the city but allowing easy access to the sea, that limitless space of circulation and interchange. One response to the hollowing out was an imaginative investment in a particular area of London’s East End which amounted to fetishization. Limehouse became synonymous with the opium den. The lecture will trace the development of an association made in literature (Dickens, Wilde) and quickly reinforced by popular genre fiction and film.

It will argue that this association was a lot more complex than might at first appear – which may be the reason why it proved in turn the catalyst for a different kind of internationalism. In 1919, the Jamaican poet and activist Claude McKay published in Sylvia Pankhurst’s staunchly Leninist paper The Workers’ Dreadnought a denunciation of the racism inflicted on Chinese dock-workers so incendiary that it very nearly led to his arrest, and helped to put her in jail.

David Trotter is an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of eight monographs and two collections of essays largely concerned with aspects of the history of modern literature, especially in its complicated relation to modern media. The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface, 1850-1950 appeared in 2020. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, and co-producer of the documentary film Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022). He is currently co-producing a film about women war artists.

Please register at: events.gbz@hu-berlin.de. When registering please state if you wish to attend in person or via Zoom.

This lecture is a co-operation between the Department of English and American Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Centre for British Studies