Books by Lara Atkin
Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere, 2019
This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nine... more This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. Drawing on networked conceptualisations of empire, transnational frameworks, and ‘new imperial history’ paradigms that privilege imbricated colonial and metropolitan ‘intercultures’, it looks at the neglected role of public libraries in shaping a programme of Anglophone civic education, scientific knowledge creation, and modernisation in the British southern hemisphere. The book’s six chapters analyse institutional models and precedents, reading publics and types, book holdings and catalogues, and regional scientific networks in order to demonstrate the significance of these libraries for the construction of colonial identity, citizenship, and national self-government as well as charting their influence in shaping perceptions of social class, gender, and race. Using primary source material from the recently completed ‘Book Catalogues of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ digital archive, the book argues that public libraries played a formative role in colonial public discourse, contributing to broader debates on imperial citizenship and nation-statehood across different geographic, cultural, and linguistic borders.
Papers by Lara Atkin
Writing the South African San, 2021
Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere
As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early... more As a vital field of scholarship, book history has now reached a stage of maturity where its early work can be reassessed and built upon. That is the goal of New Directions in Book History. This series will publish monographs in English that employ advanced methods and open up new frontiers in research, written by younger, mid-career, and senior scholars. Its scope is global, extending to the Western and non-Western worlds and to all historical periods from antiquity to the 21st century, including studies of script, print, and post-print cultures. New Directions in Book History, then, will be broadly inclusive but always in the vanguard. It will experiment with inventive methodologies, explore unexplored archives, debate overlooked issues, challenge prevailing theories, study neglected subjects, and demonstrate the relevance of book history to other academic fields. Every title in this series will address the evolution of the historiography of the book, and every one will point to new directions in book scholarship. New Directions in Book History will be published in three formats: singleauthor monographs; edited collections of essays in single or multiple volumes; and shorter works produced through Palgrave's e-book (EPUB2) 'Pivot' stream. Book proposals should emphasize the innovative aspects of the work, and should be sent to either of the two series editors.
Journal of Victorian Culture
e Yearbook of English Studies, 2018
is article examines the circulation of the first anglophone poem to be written in the voice of a... more is article examines the circulation of the first anglophone poem to be written in the voice of an indigenous southern African, omas 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.
Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu, eds., Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations, Empires (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018) pp.86-106., 2018
Safundi:The Journal of South African and American Studies, May 7, 2015
This article examines the controversy surrounding the London run of Brett Bailey's ethnographic d... more This article examines the controversy surrounding the London run of Brett Bailey's ethnographic display 'Exhibit B'. By placing responses to Exhibit B from critics, audience members and actors in dialogue with nineteenth‑century responses to ethnographic shows by Khoisan peoples, I will argue that ethnographic performance has always engendered an intimacy between actor and audience. Bailey’s use of ethnographic performance to narrate the history of colonial encounter in Africa far from reinscribing regimes of looking which represent the African body as the abject object against which the white spectator defines his positionality, enables him to offer spectators and actors an emancipation from predetermined regimes of looking and a space in which the intimacy of encounter enables a more active engagement with both the colonial past represented and its legacy in the present.
Talks by Lara Atkin
This paper examines how ethnographic tropes for the representations of South African indigenous ... more This paper examines how ethnographic tropes for the representations of South African indigenous peoples were produced and disseminated to British readers by and through the evangelical children's literature of the early-mid nineteenth century.
This paper charts the migration of tropes utilised in ethnographic representations of southern Af... more This paper charts the migration of tropes utilised in ethnographic representations of southern African San 'Bushmen' in the nineteenth century into the popular children's literature of the period. In doing so, it reveals both the role these texts played in the development of the boy's adventure novel and their function in shaping and disseminating an Evangelical imperial fantasy that was to influence the formation and spread of the ideology of the 'civilising mission' during the early-to-mid nineteenth century.
This paper concerns a party of five southern African San people who were exhibited in London in t... more This paper concerns a party of five southern African San people who were exhibited in London in the summer of 1847, and seeks to examine the nature of the interactions between the San and their English audience.
Much critical attention has been paid to the manner in which ethnographic displays aesthetisise the bodies of the performers.1 Critics often view displays as spectacles. They comment primarily on their function as means of staging and exaggerating cultural difference through the presentation of the African body as a deviation from the anatomical norm.
Yet an examination of the lectures and press coverage accompanying the 1847 exhibition reveals that the display of the San people fed into a number of key political concerns in the 1840s. Firstly, they provided ethnologists such as Robert Knox and James Cowles Prichard with living ‘evidence’ to support their increasingly racialist scientific theories. Secondly, due to the emphasis in the press on their alleged societal as well as physical characteristics, the presence of the San enabled large sections of the British public to simultaneously reflect on the position of their society relative to the ‘savages’ before them, and engage in debates over the nature of Britain’s role in colonial southern Africa. Finally, by recovering informal encounters between the San and large swaths of the British public, this paper reveals a counter-narrative to that which claims innate racial and cultural supremacy for the British, one which suggests that racial identity during this period was still fluid and open to contestation.
Book Reviews by Lara Atkin
Journal of Victorian Culture, Mar 2014
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Books by Lara Atkin
Papers by Lara Atkin
Talks by Lara Atkin
Much critical attention has been paid to the manner in which ethnographic displays aesthetisise the bodies of the performers.1 Critics often view displays as spectacles. They comment primarily on their function as means of staging and exaggerating cultural difference through the presentation of the African body as a deviation from the anatomical norm.
Yet an examination of the lectures and press coverage accompanying the 1847 exhibition reveals that the display of the San people fed into a number of key political concerns in the 1840s. Firstly, they provided ethnologists such as Robert Knox and James Cowles Prichard with living ‘evidence’ to support their increasingly racialist scientific theories. Secondly, due to the emphasis in the press on their alleged societal as well as physical characteristics, the presence of the San enabled large sections of the British public to simultaneously reflect on the position of their society relative to the ‘savages’ before them, and engage in debates over the nature of Britain’s role in colonial southern Africa. Finally, by recovering informal encounters between the San and large swaths of the British public, this paper reveals a counter-narrative to that which claims innate racial and cultural supremacy for the British, one which suggests that racial identity during this period was still fluid and open to contestation.
Book Reviews by Lara Atkin
Much critical attention has been paid to the manner in which ethnographic displays aesthetisise the bodies of the performers.1 Critics often view displays as spectacles. They comment primarily on their function as means of staging and exaggerating cultural difference through the presentation of the African body as a deviation from the anatomical norm.
Yet an examination of the lectures and press coverage accompanying the 1847 exhibition reveals that the display of the San people fed into a number of key political concerns in the 1840s. Firstly, they provided ethnologists such as Robert Knox and James Cowles Prichard with living ‘evidence’ to support their increasingly racialist scientific theories. Secondly, due to the emphasis in the press on their alleged societal as well as physical characteristics, the presence of the San enabled large sections of the British public to simultaneously reflect on the position of their society relative to the ‘savages’ before them, and engage in debates over the nature of Britain’s role in colonial southern Africa. Finally, by recovering informal encounters between the San and large swaths of the British public, this paper reveals a counter-narrative to that which claims innate racial and cultural supremacy for the British, one which suggests that racial identity during this period was still fluid and open to contestation.