Indigenous Communities, Empire, and Victorian Literature in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia

FAIN: FT-270771-20

Ryan Fong
Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo, MI 49006-3295)

Research and writing of a book chapter examining literary representations of early contact between Aboriginal Noongar communities and white settlers in Australia.

This book project develops an account of the wide range of Indigenous literatures that were produced across the British empire during the nineteenth century. Working across multiple colonial sites—including Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia—the book not only shows how Indigenous communities survived and persisted within the violent systems of colonial settlement, but also how they produced forms of writing and expression that resisted and rejected those oppressive structures. Throughout the book’s analyses, I center frameworks that developed within these Indigenous communities to inform a method of reading that decolonizes the approaches typically used within Victorian literary studies, which tend to prioritize Britain and works by white British and emigrant writers. In so doing, the book develops an understanding of literature and empire within the Victorian period that attends to those voices and perspectives most affected and marginalized by British colonialism.