Despite the manifold, fruitfully intersecting work here, these strands have not been connected. There are many scholars working on the relations of British mathematics, imperial realities, and cultural forms, but there has not been a venue considering this as a shared field of inquiry. As a step in that direction, this panel primarily seeks to discuss how mathematical forms and practices connect with literary texts and how this connection is mediated through their links to British colonialism. One major hypothesized point of connection was that the practice of mathematics was highly scribal. Even as forms of calculation differentiated into specialized modes of writing, no generic wall is impermeable, and so mathematical writings shaped (and were shaped by) how other texts were written. What happens when we reconsider mathematics as, first and foremost, a specific mode of writing, and then ask how it relates to the other forms of writing that emerged with the British empire?

The panel will move in roughly chronological order across a range of colonial geographies. Alex Sherman will analyze navigation manuals to understand how the bodily sensations of individual mariners, collectives aboard ships, and dispersed scientific communities came together across spatial and class divides to create a foundational colonial space, the navigable oceans. He will argue that these texts use a pedagogical “I” to mediate between the embodied “you” of the working mariner and the abstract vantage of globally-dispersed yet metropole-centric science. Cristobal Silva will discuss numeracy and affect in Briton Hammon’s Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1760) and Venture Smith’s Narrative of the Life and Adventures (1798). Silva will analyze their precise tracking of time and money, in places where we might expect expressions of fear, love, grief, and joy, showing the centrality of mathematics in the affective registers of Early Black Atlantic literature. Jessica Sherrill will examine mnemonics and slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, centered around her invocation of the Haitian plantation concept of the zombie. She will expand on the relationship between the history of computing and the global history of abolition, which has become a key dimension of both fields. Finally, Andrea Henderson will draw out how, in Percival Lowell’s 1885 Chosön, we see how the binary thinking of Orientalism segues into the polar oppositions used to theorize the physics and optics of photography: light / dark, negative / positive. Lowell’s description of Korea in these mathematizing terms, as “a photographic negative of our own civilization,” paves the way for the modernist infatuation with East Asian art. Jessica Monaco will chair, bringing her expertise on digital humanities and the British novel. Each talk will last for 12-15 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for unstructured discussion. Besides the topic of the panel calling attention to the world beyond Britain and to the material and cultural history of colonialism, it geographically diversifies British studies by tracing connections to the Caribbean, Korea, and North America, as well as the world’s oceans, including via Black Anglophone literature. The panelists and chair are from a range of academic ranks, including a graduate student.