Worlding the South : nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies

This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a latitudinal challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by proposing a new literary history of the region that is predicated less on metropolitan turning points and more on southern cultural perspectives in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. With a focus on southern orientations, southern audiences, and southern modes of addressivity, Worlding the south foregrounds marginal, minor, and neglected writers and texts across a hemispheric complex of southern oceans and terrains. Drawing on an ontological tradition that tests the dominance of networked theories of globalisation, the collection also asks how we can better understand the dialectical relationship between the ‘real’ world in which a literary text or art object exists and the symbolic or conceptual world it shows or creates. By examining the literary processes of ‘worlding’, it demonstrates how art objects make legible homogenising imperial and colonial narratives, inequalities of linguistic power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. With contributions from leading scholars in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, the collection revises literary histories of the ‘British world’ by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, settler, and other southern perspectives. Front matter 1 Contents 6 Figures 8 Contributors 11 Acknowledgements 16 Letter 18 Introduction: southern worlds, globes, and spheres 20 Part I: World/Globe 56 Making, mapping, and unmaking worlds: globes, panoramas, fictions, and oceans 58 Southern doubles: antipodean life as a comparative exercise 77 Lag fever, flash men, and late fashionable worlds 97 Spatial synchronicities: settler emigration, the voyage out, and shipboard literary production 122 Augustus Earle’s pedestrian tour in New Zealand: or, get off the beach 139 Australia to Paraguay: race, class, and poetry in a South American colony 158 Part II: Acculturation/Transculturation 178 ‘The renowned Crusoe in the native costume of our adopted country’: reading Robinson Crusoe in colonial New Zealand 180 The transnational kangaroo hunt 196 ‘Then came the high unpromising forests, and miles of loneliness’: Louisa Atkinson’s recasting of the Australian landscape 215 Mapping the way forward: Thomas Baines on expedition to the coronation of Cetshwayo kaMpande, Z ululand, 1873 234 ‘Wild, desert and lawless countries’: William Burchell’s Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa 255 Short stories of the southern seas: the island as collective in the works of Louis Becke 272 Part III: Indigenous/Diasporic 290 ‘That’s white fellow’s talk you know, missis’: wordlists, songs, and knowledge production on the colonial Australian frontier 292 Kiro’s thoughts about England: an unexpected text in an unexpected place 313 Mokena and Macaulay: cultural geographies of poetry in colonial Aotearoa 331 Vigilance: petitions, politics, and the African Christian converts of the nineteenth century 346 Reading indigeneity in nineteenth-century British Guiana 365 ‘Some Genuine Chinese Authors’: literary appreciation, comparatism, and universalism in the Straits Chinese Magazine 377 The south in the world 397 Bibliography of secondary sources 411 Index 440 This collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. Drawing on hemispheric studies, Indigenous studies, and southern theory to decentre British and other European metropoles, the collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. Worlding the south examines the dialectics of literary worldedness in ways that recognise inequalities of power, textual and material violence, and literary and cultural resistance. The collection revises current literary histories of the 'British world' by arguing for the distinctiveness of settler colonialism in the southern hemisphere, and by incorporating Indigenous, diasporic, and south-south perspectives Prioritising south-south networks and relations, this collection brings together for the first time literary studies of British colonies in nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific Islands. It argues for the importance of a new literary history of the southern colonies that accounts for Indigenous, diasporic, and southern perspectives.