Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

This book offers an innovative new framework for reading British and settler representations of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Taking the representation of the Southern African San as its case study, it uses methodologies drawn from critical anthropology, imperial history and literary studies to show the role that literary representations of Indigenous peoples played in popularising the hierarchical view of racial difference. The study identifies an 'ethnographic poetics' in which the claims of scientific discourse blend with a consciously literary preference for metaphor and analogy. This created a set of mobile figures that could be disseminated to different reading publics in both Britain and the colonies through a variety of literary genres and textual media. It advances research on race and imperial history by focusing on the importance of literature - from newspapers and periodicals to popular novels - in shaping discourses of national and racial belonging in Britain and the Cape Colony. Lara Atkin is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent, UK. After graduating with a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University of London in 2017, she worked as an ERC-funded postdoctoral resarch fellow on the project 'SouthHem' based in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. She is co-author of Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (Palgrave, 2019, with Sarah Comyn et al) Acknowledgements Contents About the Author Chapter 1: Literature and Ethnology: Towards a Theory of “Ethnographic Poetics” Writing the Cultures of the British Empire Chapter 2: Representing the Khoisan c. 1600–1800 Early Representations of the Khoekhoe Peter Kolb, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Making of the “Noble Savage” The Modern Wild Man: Peter Kolb’s Descriptions of the San Anders Sparrman and the Development of Humanitarian Racial Discourse Chapter 3: Better to Be Naked and Free than to Wear Clothes and Be Oppressed: Indigenous Uses of Humanitarian Discourse Representing the San in British Humanitarian Narratives Griqua Uses of Humanitarian Discourse Chapter 4: “The South African ‘Children of the Mist’”: The Bushman, the Highlander, and the Making of Colonial Identity in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry Humanitarianism, Ethnography, and Antiquarianism: The Making of Thomas Pringle’s “Ethnographic Poetics” Exile and Settlement in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry South Africa’s “Truest Natives”? Indigenous Representation and Authenticity Ethnography as Antiquarian Enquiry Chapter 5: The “Bushboy” in Children’s Literature: Missionary Ethnography and Imperial Adventure Fiction John Campbell, Religious Tract Fiction, and Colonial Ideology John Campbell’s Life of Kaboo (1830) as “Ethnographic Spiritual Autobiography” The San Child in Marryat’s The Mission; or Scenes in Africa (1844) Chapter 6: Encountering Southern Africa: The Display of Khoisan Peoples in London Sarah Baartman and the Cultural Politics of Ethnographic Display “Race Is Everything”: Robert Knox’s Racial Historiography Race, Class, and Encounter Beyond the Exhibition Space Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Colonial Encounter and Identity Formation Bibliography Index