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Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses

Atkin, Lars (2021) Writing the South African San: Colonial Ethnographic Discourses. Palgrave Studies In Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, 212 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-86225-1. E-ISBN 978-3-030-86226-8. (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:93294)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
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https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-8...

Abstract

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.

Item Type: Book
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/978-3-030-86226-8
Projects: Southhem
Uncontrolled keywords: Khoisan; South Africa; Bushmen; Ethnography; European colonialism; Settler culture;, British Empire; Newspapers; Periodical; Popular novels; Travel writing; Racial difference; Romantic literature; Anglophone world literature
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of English
Funders: European Research Council (https://ror.org/0472cxd90)
Depositing User: Lars Atkin
Date Deposited: 23 Feb 2022 11:38 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Oct 2023 11:40 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/93294 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

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