Saree Makdisi - Romanticism and Primitive Accumulation

Inaugural Lecture in the Ross and Marion Woodman Speaker Series in Romanticism

Romanticism and Primitive Accumulation

In the 1700s and 1800s a series of Enclosure Acts granted landowners legal rights over areas of common land, thus making public space into private property, and introducing an ethos of capital accumulation. The Romantic poet John Clare, often called England’s greatest labouring-class poet, spent much of his adult life observing the ‘outside’ world from within asylums, at once alienated from ‘common’ life and a witness to displacement in a world blind to its effects. Taking up the prescient pathos of Clare’s work as an allegory of our own damaged and damaging society, Saree Makdisi explores both Clare's response to the economic and social disruptions of his time and its resonance today in the context of continuing colonial enclosures and erasures.

About Dr. Saree Makdisi

Dr. Saree Makdisi is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the author of four monographs on Romantic literature: Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge UP, 1998), William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, 2003), Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago, 2014), and Reading William Blake (Cambridge UP, 2015). In addition, Dr. Makdisi is the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008), and Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022).

He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has also contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.