Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses

by Lara Atkin

Overview

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 racialbelonging in Britain and the Cape Colony.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030862282
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/30/2021
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Literature and Ethnology: Towards a Theory of “Ethnographic Poetics”.- Chapter 2: Representing the Khoisan c. 1600–1800.- Chapter 3: Better to Be Naked and Free than to Wear Clothes and Be Oppressed: Indigenous 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.- Chapter 5: The “Bushboy” in Children’s Literature: Missionary Ethnography and Imperial Adventure Fiction.- Chapter 6: Encountering Southern Africa: The Display of Khoisan Peoples in London.- Chapter 7: Conclusion: The Colonial Encounter and Identity Formation.