Reformulating Identities: British Settlers in Early Nineteenth-Century South Africa

This paper examines the formation of a colonial identity among settlers from the British Isles who were relocated to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in 1820. It suggests that material aspirations united certain of the settlers in a political programme, and thus began the erosion of imported class (and other) divisions. However, it argues that their establishment as a capitalist colonial class is an insufficient explanation for their construction of a shared and emotive British settler identity. The settlers modified their inherited discourses of class, race, gender and nationality in order to forge solidarity, and the imperative for solidarity derived not so much from their mutual desire for accumulation, but from a corresponding collective insecurity. Not only were settlers afraid of Khoikhoi labour rebellion and Xhosa reprisals for land loss; they also feared abandonment by a seemingly unsympathetic metropole. Their aggressive capitalist endeavour, and collective fear of its destabilizing consequences, were two sides of the same coin, informing the development of a unifying social identity. The paper goes on to consider the mechanisms through which that identity was sustained, including acts of landscape representation, the textual generation of collective memory and the practice of communally binding, quotidian, gendered routines.     

Representative Ideas of the Deathwish in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

The extensiveness of Alfonso X’s Libro del saber de astrología created such a challenge that only one of the nine subsequent, variant copies attempted to copy it in its entirety: Vatican Library, Ms. Vat. lat. 8174. None of them, including this one, however, contains all of the original text. It is the intricacy of design of the first treatise, the Libro de las figuras de las estrellas fijas que son en el ochavo cielo, however, that posed the greatest challenge for copyists. The Vatican copy and Ms. 1197 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España approximated the design of text of the constellation to the left with a wheel diagram of the various stars to the right as found in the original. The way that Ms. 9-28-8 5707 of the Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia negotiated this arrangement by using two conjugate folios, placing the star wheel diagram across the interior two pages and the text on the first and fourth page, which left a considerable amount of blank space that invited over the years several kinds of writings—tallies, signatures, memorias (a record of transactions), and billet doux (essentially, love messages sent via a go-between). The billet doux form the greatest literary interest given their date, their content, and the name of the male protagonist—Felisardo, which aligns them with Lope de Vega’s work called Novelas a Marcia Leonarda, and in particular the one titled La desdicha por la honra—published in 1624.     

Dynamics of Social Complexity in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fur-Trade Posts

During the early nineteenth century, the Hudson's Bay and the North West Companies controlled much of western Canada. Both companies employed hierarchical command structures that influenced all elements of social life within the posts. Both companies confronted a significant level of interrank tension, and sought to reinforce authority figures using imported wealth items and privileges. However the enormous transportation costs made it prohibitively expensive to supply many of these status items to junior officers stationed at remote outposts. As a result, new informally derived means of symbolizing and defending social position were negotiated using techniques and commodities that were unaffected by transportation difficulties.     

Pastoral Power, Governmentality and Cultures of Order in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia

I deploy Michel Foucault's concepts of pastoral power and governmentality to investigate the material consequences of two very different visions of the governance of Native people in nineteenth-century British Columbia. This entails a consideration of these modalities of power, and of the usefulness of relocating them in a colonial context. But I also argue that the conceptions of order embedded within these two modalities of power bear the stamp of, and demonstrate, very distinctive cultural geographies.     

On the Relevance of Literature to Life: The Significance of the Act of Reading

What can literary education contribute to moral education? In this article the inherent practical, moral or political, relevance of literature and literary education is defended, which is opposed to a moralist approach to (children's) literature. A much debated danger in literature and the arts, viz. that it gives rise to a flight into a "promised land" instead of having relevance for real life and the real world, can be overcome by bringing to the fore the active part the reader plays in realizing the "world of the work." The classical idea of mimesis (i.e. of art mirroring reality) then makes room for a historicity of reading with an ongoing interplay of the (real) worlds of readers and the (fictive) world of the text. This idea is elaborated on from the point of view of Ricoeur's hermeneutics and from that of Iser's reception aesthetics, respectively. In realizing the world of the work the world of the reader is transcended and opened up towards the possible. In this reconfiguration lies the practical relevance of literature. Books, therefore, do not have to mirror the actual world in order to be morally or politically relevant. It is in the act of reading that the lasting significance of so-called classics is renewed time and time again.     

An Axis Jump: British Colonialism in the Oral Folk Narratives of Nineteenth-Century India

Women are the principal informants in the modern oral tradition of Hispanic balladry, th e romancero. This fact conditions the point of view, ideologies, and perceptions expressed in the ballads. Critics often state that the romancero contains a feminine voice, but the nature and characteristics of this voice have not been studied in any detail. The present paper attempts to reveal the ideas and beliefs that women express in their rendition of one such ballad, La Bastarda y el Segador , and show how their renditions differ from those of men.     

British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery: Creamware Marketing in Nineteenth-Century Northern Finland

In 1822, a devastating town fire sealed a large ceramic assemblage from a store in the town of Oulu in northern Finland. Excavations of the merchant’s stock recovered over a hundred kilograms of ceramics that was almost entirely composed of undecorated creamware, a ware and decorative type whose popularity had faded significantly by the 1820’s. The assemblage reveals the global complexities in the international ceramics trade in the early nineteenth century, provides insight into some of the mass-produced commodities reaching geographically peripheral markets, underscores distinctive European market influences, and illuminates marketing and social practices that shaped consumption in markets like Oulu.     

British Women Travellers and Constructions of Racial Difference Across the Nineteenth-Century American West

At a time coinciding historically with the height of the British Empire, the immigrants' rush to occupy American West lands and the wholesale removal of Native Americans onto reservations, encounters between Native peoples and British women travellers became emblematic of a whole range of socio-spatial relationships of domination, subordination and resistance. In this paper, I examine representations of western Native Americans in the travelogues of ten British women travellers to the late nineteenth-century American West, produced primarily during encounters at sites along the western rail lines. Constructions of racial and gender differences in the texts can be tied to British colonial discourses, as well as to the social relations inherent in the multiple contact zones within which the encounters took place.     

Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This article recovers the cultural significance of the sampler in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that this mainstay of female education models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpetually reworking herself without obvious linear progression. Though this article is situated against canonical works of Victorian fiction, it focuses primarily on actual samplers to argue that these pieces of childhood embroidery should be recognized as a form of life-writing. After establishing the conventions of the sampler, I turn to an apparently anomalous example that exemplifies the temporal and affective patterns ingrained by the pedagogical exercise of sampler sewing. My central artefact is an autobiographical sampler from the needle of a 17-year-old Sussex girl named Elizabeth Parker. Currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this textile from 1830 recounts Parker’s childhood experiences in service, and the horrors of physical abuse and sexual assault that led her to contemplate suicide, all compressed into 46 lines of cross-stitch. I argue that the sampler as a pedagogical tool resists the Bildungsroman’s model of the self as formed through temporal progression towards self-contained adult agency. Instead, the sampler materially and thematically enforces the recursive temporal dynamics of conversion.