Geopolitics, Landscape, and Guilt in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Literature

Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca

doi:10.1057/9780230337930_9

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Young people's school assignments can be analyzed in the same way as the colonial literature examined by, for example, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. 33 The geographic voyages found in homework notebooks superimpose several of Buell's models of place-attachment: the first (concentric zones), the third (the historicity of places), and the fifth (imagined places). In "Voyage [from Montreal] to Rimouski," fifteen-year-old Anna Lavoie describes to her friend Alice the scenery she enjoys during her trip.…”

Section: From Global To Local: a Pedagogy Of Travelsmentioning

confidence: 95%

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Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism

Larochelle¹,

Twiss²

2023

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

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The imagination is also an invaluable aid in the study of geography. . . . Children are fascinated by travel narratives-witness the success of the works of Jules Verne. The instructor may therefore have the children read some details about the customs of different peoples; or he might even read them a few judiciously selected passages. But there is a danger that must be avoided. Sometimes children with lively imaginations, represent things to themselves in a rather fantastic light; therefore, if objects are not available, one must frequently use images and charts, for they must always have a precise idea of what they learn. 1 This is how, in 1913, the Quebec pedagogical periodical L'Enseignement primaire summarized the role of the imagination in the teaching of geography.A few years earlier, recounting an afternoon's pleasure-boating on the Rivière-aux-Chiens north of Montreal, some young men from the Collège Sainte-Thérèse invoked the fantastic universe of the popular French author: "On a spit of land two people reach out to us; they are waving something written at the end of a long pole, and they cry out to us in anguish: 'Have pity on two poor castaways.' Is it Robinson with Friday on his desert island? Hector Servadac with Ben-Zoof, transported through space on a piece of Algeria?" 2 The account confirms the slippage described by the pedagogues of L'Enseignement primaire in 1913. From the mid-nineteenth century until World War I, it is in this interstice between a "precise" geographic imagination-incorporating the imperial and colonial realities of the time-and a "fantastic" imagination-one evoking their dreams and aspirations-in which young people performed the geographic knowledge instilled in them at school.

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Section: From Global To Local: a Pedagogy Of Travelsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Colonial narratives help society manage its general feeling of guilt. 35 Numerous passages in school textbooks legitimate the possession of land.…”

Section: From Global To Local: a Pedagogy Of Travelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism

Larochelle¹,

Twiss²

2023

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

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“…But only occasionally in colonial literature was the question of lands stolen from Aborigines and the morality of dispossession raised as guilt-provoking in relation to mining. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2011: 124–125) cites the example of the novel, The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1876), by Henry Kingsley, where an otherwise positive story of colonization, that includes coal mining, is ruptured when the issue of morality is raised in connection with the European colonial’s sense of entitlement to own all the so-called unoccupied territories of the earth.…”

Section: Dispossession Of Aborigines As Social Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Black Diamonds of Sydney Harbour

Elias

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This article explores the case study of a coal mine that was first tunneled under Sydney Harbour in 1897 but closed in 1931. Specifically, it examines how the history of the mine intersects with aesthetics, race, colonialism, and Indigenous dispossession. Centered on the story of an English mining company that first sought a mine site in a pastoral area of the city, but under public pressure was forced to select instead a grimy working class suburb on the opposite harbor shore, the article argues that environmental aesthetics and tastes in beauty collaborated with extractivism. The argument emerges that economics, art, and aesthetics are inextricably linked in this history and further, that while the mine excited the industrial imagination through the aesthetic of the sublime, and associations with darkness and vastness, it conflicted with colonial settler tastes for the pastoral imagination defined by the aesthetics of the beautiful and its associations with light. The article discusses the context of a settler economy in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples, and how conceptualizations of the sublime and beautiful, as well as dark and light, were aligned with the racialization of the properties of coal and space above and below ground.

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An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner

Dam

2022

Neo-Victorian Things

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Geopolitics, Landscape, and Guilt in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Literature

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism

Empire, Colonialism, and Place-Attachment in Young Minds: Quebec Students' Imaginative Travels in the Age of the New Imperialism

The Black Diamonds of Sydney Harbour

An Instrumental Thing: Pianos Extending and Becoming Postcolonial Bodies in Jane Campion’s The Piano and Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner

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