Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SouthHem (Realigning British Romanticism: White Settler and Indigenous Writing in the British-Controlled Southern Hemisphere, 1783-1870)

Teaser

SouthHem is a five-year (2016-2021) comparative study of the literary outputs and mediating institutions produced by British settlers, Indigenous populations, non-European diasporas, and mixed-race peoples in the British southern hemisphere and Straits Settlements from...

Summary

SouthHem is a five-year (2016-2021) comparative study of the literary outputs and mediating institutions produced by British settlers, Indigenous populations, non-European diasporas, and mixed-race peoples in the British southern hemisphere and Straits Settlements from 1780-1870. The project focuses on three transnational zones: ‘Zone 1’ (Oceania): Australia and New Zealand; ‘Zone 2’ (Southern Africa): Cape Colony and Natal; and ‘Zone 3’ (Straits Settlements): Singapore, Penang, and Malacca. The literatures considered in this context include writing in English, translations into English, transcriptions, and writing in languages of origin.

The project is divided into four \'work packages\' or areas of research:
Work Package 1: \'Books and Readers\' (2016-2021) is a five-year book history and history of reading project, which traces the changing nature of colonial book holdings and reading habits through an analysis of library, auction, book-seller, and private catalogues.
Work Package 2: \'Settler Literary Culture\' (2016-2019) considers comparative case studies of white settler literary culture, looking at 1. literary institutions and associations; 2. literary productions and print cultures; and 3. the role of mediators.
Work Package 3: \'Translations\' (2019-2021) looks at indigenous and mixed-race writing mediated through English, either at the point of production or through translation or transcription.
Work Package 4: \'Encounters\' (2019-2021) focuses on literary encounters (in English or otherwise) between indigenous and white settler populations, including proximate encounters, distant or virtual encounters, and symbolic or imaginative encounters.

The project aims to answer the following research questions:
1. How did literary modernity (and its institutions, associations, and print cultures) emerge and develop outside of Europe and the northern hemisphere?
2. How did cultural capital, taste, and literary value accrue in the colonial southern hemisphere and Straits Settlements?
3. Was Romanticism a significant model of taste or did other standards of taste predominate?
4. How can we think about the relationship between settler and Indigenous literary cultures in ways that credit the long histories of aesthetic production among colonized populations?

Work performed

\"Work thus far (September 2016-February 2019) has focused on Work Packages 1 and 2. The main results achieved are set out below:

1. Digital Archive: Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere (BCCSH):

Nearly 500 book catalogues from the southern hemisphere have now been scanned and made available open access online: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/catalogue.html
Descriptions of each catalogue are ongoing but a sample description can be seen here: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/record.html#13
The editorial policy is available here: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/editorial_policy.html
Visualisations are in progress but will be significantly augmented in 2020: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/visualisations.html

The BCCSH Archive makes available to users book catalogues that are not available online elsewhere. The Archive offers an important insight into which books were available to readers in the southern hemisphere in the nineteenth century. This, in turn, offers unique insights into the development of colonial modernity and literary taste, value, and cultural capital in the southern hemisphere.


2. Team Journal Publications:

Lara Atkin, \'\"\"Conceive of a Tale of London Which a Negro, Fresh from Central Africa, Would Take Back to his Tribe\"\": Exploration and Time/Travel in H. G. Wells\'s \"\"The Time Machine\"\"\', in \'Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations and Empires\' ed. Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), 86-106.
Lara Atkin, \'The South African \"\"Children of the Mist\"\": The Bushman, the Highlander and the Making of Colonial Identities In Thomas Pringle\'s South African Poetry, 1825-1834\', Yearbook of English Studies 48 (2018), 199-215.
Sarah Comyn, \'Literary Sociability on the Goldfields: The Mechanics\' Institute in the Colony of Victoria, 1854-1870\', Journal of Victorian Culture, 23.4 (2018), 447-462.
Porscha Fermanis, \'British Cultures of Reading and Literary Appreciation in Nineteenth-Century Singapore\', in \'The Edinburgh History of Reading: A World Survey from Antiquity to the Present\', ed. Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019; forthcoming).
Porscha Fermanis, \'British Creoles: Nationhood, Identity, and Romantic Geo-Politics in Robert Southey’s \"\"History of Brazil\"\"\', Review of English Studies (forthcoming 2019).

3. Team Book Publications:

The SouthHem research team has an open access book in press with the \'New Directions in Book History\' series (Palgrave): Lara Atkin, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Nathan Garvey, \'Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the Colonial Southern Hemisphere\' (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2019): https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030204259

This book is an innovative comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Using transnational and \'networked\' approaches to empire, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders. It therefore showcases the ways in which library and book history can contribute to broader questions about gender, race\"

Final results

\"As the SouthHem project approaches its half-way point, it will focus on research relating to the literary productions and self-representations of Indigenous peoples and non-European diasporas; cross- or transcultural literary encounters between Indigenous populations, non-European diasporas, and British settlers (for example, via translations, transcriptions, and other forms of mediation); Indigenous knowledge and knowledge-brokerage; the ways in which Indigenous peoples shaped British literary culture; and the collection and curation of Indigenous literary cultures.

Two new team members have recently been hired to work on these aspects of the project from June and August 2019: Dr Megan Kuster\'s work on Māori knowledge-brokers and natural history collecting cultures will be informed by environmental humanities approaches, as well as by Indigenous studies approaches and those of translation studies. Dr Sarah Galletly will bring her years of experience in colonial periodical studies to the project, examining the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in numerous periodicals within the nineteenth-century southern hemisphere.

Prof. Porscha Fermanis is currently working on an edited collection on literary culture in the nineteenth-century southern hemisphere and a monograph entitled \'Southern Settler Fictions\', as well as on Malay and Straits Chinese Anglophone writing.

Work in progress:

Porscha Fermanis, \'Southern Settler Fictions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa\' (monograph in progress)
Porscha Fermanis, \'Mapping Imperial Subjects: Malay and Chinese Diasporas in the \"\"Straits Chinese Magazine\"\"\' (book chapter in progress)
Porscha Fermanis, \'Imperial Literacy: \"\"Romantic\"\" and \"\"Victorian\"\" Straits Chinese\' (journal article in progress)
Porscha Fermanis, \'Translation Zone: British Translations of Nineteenth-Century Malay Texts\' (journal article in progress)
Porscha Fermanis, \'\'Networks, Nodes, and Beacons: Literary Institutions in British Southeast Asia, 1823-1897\' (book chapter in progress)
Porscha Fermanis and Sarah Comyn (eds), \'Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Hemisphere\' (edited collection in progress)\"

Website & more info

More info: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/.