The Next New Thing?

McMahon, Lynne

doi:10.1093/litimag/4.3.353

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In arguing for the extension of Bose's term (itself inspired by new Atlantic histories) from a particular Indian Ocean context to a wider southern regionalism that takes into account carceral geographies and sojourning populations, we draw on the insights of island and oceanic studies that contrast the terracentric mappable landmasses of the north with the "blue hemisphere" of the south and argue for the importance of considering oceanic studies as a "method" that can cut across regions and even oceans themselves (see e.g. Hofmeyr, 2010Hofmeyr, , 2012; see also Denning, 2004;McMahon, 2016;Samuelson and Lavery, 2019). 4 As J. G. A. Pocock noted years ago when he called for those "colonies established in the same nineteenth-century complex of oceans as Australia, New Zealand and […] South Africa" to "construct and write their own histories", the region is linked not just by oceanic worlds but by a complex of oceanic worlds that both enable connections and can do connecting work (1999: 499-500; see also Armitage and Bashford, 2014;Bashford, 2017).…”

Section: Rethinking the British World: South-south Hemispheric Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

Comyn

Fermanis

2021

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.

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