SouthHem is a five-year (2016-2021) comparative study of the literary outputs and mediating institutions produced by British settlers, indigenous populations, and mixed-race peoples in the British-controlled 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.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679436 – SouthHem).
Research Questions
How did literary modernity (and its institutions, associations, and print cultures) emerge and develop outside of Europe and the northern hemisphere?
Beyond settler nationalism, how did cultural capital and literary value accrue transnationally or across colonies in the southern hemisphere?
Was Romanticism a significant model of literary taste or did other standards of taste predominate? How were Romantic aesthetics produced, received, and/or disseminated in the southern colonies?
How can we think about the relationship between settler, Indigenous, and diasporic literary cultures in ways that credit the long histories of aesthetic production among colonised peoples?
Work Packages
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. See the Document Library page for the project’s archive of book 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 literary and institutional mediators. See the Research and Publications pages for the project’s engagement with this work package.
Work Package 3
“Translations” (2019-2021) looks at Indigenous, mixed-race, and diasporic writing mediated through English, either at the point of production or through translation or transcription. See the Research and Publications pages for the project’s engagement with this work package.
Work Package 4
“Encounters” (2019-2021) focuses on literary encounters (in English or otherwise) between Indigenous, mixed-race, diasporic, and white settler peoples, including proximate encounters, distant or virtual encounters, symbolic or imaginative encounters, and non-encounters. See the Research and Publications pages for the project’s engagement with this work package.
‘Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere’. T. G. Bradford. A Comprehensive Atlas. New York: Wiley & Long, 1838. Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection: www.davidrumsey.com
Undated Letter’. ‘John White’ or Chief Karetai’s to Te Raki c1860. Octavius Harwood Papers. Courtesy of the Hocken Collections, University of Otago, MS-0438/163: https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/thehockenblog/2011/07/07/some-sources-for-southern-maori-dialect