Realigning British Romanticism: White Settler and Indigenous Writing in the British-Controlled Southern Hemisphere, 1783-1870

Project Information

SouthHem

Grant agreement ID: 679436

DOI

10.3030/679436

Project closed

EC signature date 22 January 2016

Start date 1 September 2016

End date 31 August 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 487 938,00

EU contribution

€ 1 487 938,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SouthHem (Realigning British Romanticism: White Settler and Indigenous Writing in the British-Controlled Southern Hemisphere, 1783-1870)

Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The SouthHem project undertook a comparative analysis of the literary outputs and mediating institutions of European settlers, non-European diasporas, and Indigenous and mixed-race peoples in three transnational zones: “Zone 1” (Oceania): Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific; “Zone 2” (Southern Africa): the Cape Colony and Natal; and “Zone 3” (South-East Asia): Singapore, Penang, and Malacca.

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

To answer these questions, the project focused on four areas of research:
1: "Books and Readers" (2016-2022) was a book history project that traced colonial book holdings and reading habits through an analysis of library, auction, bookseller, and private catalogues.
2: "Settler Literary Culture" (2016-2019) considered comparative case studies of settler literary culture, looking at 1. literary institutions and associations; and 2. literary productions and print cultures.
3: "Translations" (2019-2022) looked at Indigenous and mixed-race writing mediated through English, either at the point of production or through translation or transcription.
4: "Encounters" (2019-2022) focused on transcultural encounters between Indigenous and white settler populations, including proximate encounters, distant or virtual encounters, and symbolic or imaginative encounters.

The SouthHem project has produced a fuller picture of (a) the extent to which colonial literary culture was innovative rather than simply importing or reproducing modular institutions from Europe; (b) the ways in which colonial societies understood questions of literary prestige and value; and (c) the ways in which increasingly racialised settler societies both repudiated and appropriated Indigenous and non-European literary cultures. By radically expanding the type, provenance, and sample size of texts typically considered in literary studies, the project has produced a geographic, temporal, and conceptual realignment of nineteenth-century literary culture. More specifically, it has rebalanced the Eurocentric, metropolitan, and northern locus of such studies by giving southern hemisphere literary production a much more central role in defining the period. As such, the project will facilitate further synthetic and cross-imperial studies of the Indigenous, diasporic, and settler literatures of the region.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work Package 1

a) Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere (BCCSH)
WP1 resulted in the production of a digital archive of nearly 500 book catalogues, which have now been scanned and made freely available online: http://www.ucd.ie/southhem/catalogue.html
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

The BCCSH archive makes available 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 literary taste, value, and cultural capital in the region.

b) "Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Drawing on primary material from the BCCSH digital archive, the SouthHem research team published a gold open access study of six colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. The book examines the important role of these libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the southern hemisphere: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030204259

c) Project website and blog:
https://www.ucd.ie/southhem/
https://southhem.org

Work Packages 2-4

a) "Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies" (Manchester UP, 2021)
This gold open access edited 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. The collection offers a groundbreaking challenge to national paradigms and traditional literary periodisations and canons by prioritising southern cultural networks in multiple regional centres, and by examining instances of transculturation between settler, Indigenous, and diaspora peoples: https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526152886/

b) The project has produced several important articles on Indigenous contributions to nineteenth-century literary and scientific culture. See, e.g. Megan Kuster, "Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value: William Colenso, Natural History Collecting and Indigenous Labour", Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 22.2 (2021).

c) "Southern Setter Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890"
Extending already published articles on settler fiction (2020, 2021, 2022), this forthcoming monograph posits that the nineteenth-century settler novel can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler-colonial spaces. It focuses on two themes: 1. the ways in which settler novels encode distinctively regional spatial imaginaries (Australasia, trans-Tasman, Oceania etc); and 2. representations of marginalised or precarious political subjects such as indentured labours, convicts, and mixed-race peoples.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SouthHem has advanced the field beyond the state of the art by reassessing conventional notions of literary periodicity, redressing northern and Eurocentic biases, and foregrounding south-south exchanges and perspectives. SouthHem is one of the first large-scale projects to empirically investigate nineteenth-century southern hemisphere literary culture across and beyond national borders. By using comparative, transcolonial, and hemispheric approaches, it has significantly expanded the scope and scale of nineteenth-century literary studies, as well as foregrounding southern literary networks and regional centres from Cape Town to Dunedin. The project's application of transcolonial methodologies across three multi-sited zones has opened up new ways of overcoming notions of national exceptionalism and nation-centred understandings of literary history, as well as questioning the efficacy of "British world" studies in explaining regional distinctiveness. The project's approach has challenged the traditional geographic boundaries and periodisations encoded in terms such as "Romanticism" and "Victorianism", allowing for the emergence of important new geographical and chronological turning points. SouthHem has also developed a more geographically and racially inclusive model of nineteenth-century literary culture, one that foregrounds the contributions of Indigenous and non-European cultures.

Robert Dowling, 'Early Effort - Art in Australia', c. 1860, National Gallery of Victoria