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Atkin, Lara
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Atkin, Lara
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Atkin, Lara
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- PublicationEarly Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern HemisphereThis introduction outlines the primary arguments and methodologies of the book, including new imperial history models, networked conceptualisations of empire, and comparative and transnational history. It argues both for the existence of transnational institutional connections and reading audiences across the colonial southern hemisphere, and for the importance of local and regional variations in the reproduction of the British public library model. It concludes by outlining the book’s primary sources, as well as introducing its six case study libraries from colonial Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia.
711 - Publication'The South African “Children of the Mist”’: The Bushman, the Highlander and The Making of Colonial Identities in Thomas Pringle’s South African Poetry (1825-1834)This article examines the circulation of the first anglophone poem to be written in the voice of an indigenous southern African, Thomas Pringle’s ‘Song of the Wild Bushman’, in the newspapers and periodicals of Britain and the Cape Colony in the years preceding the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1834. In both the Cape and Britain, Pringle positioned the poem in dialogue with contemporaneous travel writing in order to reflect critically upon the relationship between colonists and indigenous peoples in Britain’s fledgling settler colonies. By placing the poem in the newspapers and popular periodicals of both Britain and the Cape, Pringle was able to disseminate to a range of colonial and metropolitan readers an image of a trans-imperial Britishness that could accommodate a range of national and colonial identities, including those of the European and indigenous subjects of the expanding British Empire.
256 - Publication“‘Conceive of a Tale of London Which a Negro, Fresh from Central Africa, Would Take Back To His Tribe!”: Exploration and Time/Travel in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine’In his late essay Geography and Some Explorers (1924), Conrad reflects back on the era of British high imperialism in the late–nineteenth century. He recalls his youthful valorisation of the explorers of the age, the ‘worthy, adventurous and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there.’ Having begun by praising what he termed the 'militant geography' of conquest that underpinned exploration in the age of high imperialism, Conrad's tone shifts abruptly towards the end of the essay. He goes on to register the disillusionment that he experienced after finally fulfilling his childhood fantasy of travelling to the heart of Africa, and realising that the British explorers of the fin de siècle were far from being the ‘worthy men’ of his childhood imagination. He describes how having travelled to ‘the last navigable reach of the Upper Congo’ ‘a great melancholy descended upon me’ as he realised there was ‘only the unholy recollection of a prosaic newspaper “stunt” and the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.’
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