Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis's ambitious collection, Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies, testifies to the increasing attention being paid to British settler colonialism in English departments around the globe. Although settlement has traditionally been studied—and celebrated—within national literary categories, the contributions to Worlding the South collectively attest that it is now a live area of interest within Victorian studies, a disciplinary home amenable to transnational or comparative analysis even if it remains firmly centered on metropolitan writing. They also suggest that there is currently little common ground between such literary projects and recent historiography of the settler empire, whether the new imperial history's concerns with culture and identity or the economic and geopolitical focus of British world scholarship. This is not to say that the essays in Worlding the South are not historicized—many are carefully attuned to their local contexts—but they follow notably different routes from those of historians who ostensibly walk the same beat.
Comyn and Fermanis's introduction is an elaborate act of theoretical positioning. Noting the risks of reproducing imperial structures through adopting a settler colonial studies approach, they draw on Indigenous studies to foreground the idea of the “south” (a concept that is also discussed at length in Elleke Boehmer's nuanced afterword). Comyn and Fermanis seek to challenge “the privileged place of Britain in British world studies,” and instead highlight “affinities and parallels between the literatures and experiences of the peoples of the colonial south” (7). If Worlding the South's definition of the south remains unclear, its vagueness makes for a more interesting range of chapters. Although the title promises a narrow focus on “settler colonies”—and, indeed, the essays do focus largely on Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—this is soon widened to include “South America, the South Pacific Islands, and the Straits Settlements,” and chapters also focus on British Guiana and migrant ships (2). Worlding the South is also framed in terms of a long nineteenth century, spanning 1780 to 1920, without it ever being quite clear why those dates were chosen.
Despite the claim made by Comyn and Fermanis that its “primary focus is on . . . the experience of travelling, living, and being in the south,” one of the most valuable elements of Worlding the South is the range of contributions that directly address the complex movements of writers and texts between north and south (7). Some of these offer familiar forms of thematic analysis, albeit focused on less familiar archives, with chapters tracking mentions of antipodality, kangaroo hunting, and Robinson Crusoe. Some of the richest and most thought-provoking chapters dwell instead on how elements of literature and language change during their global transit from north to south. Clara Tuite upends ideas of colonial temporality by tracing a web of citational connections between the metropolitan literary world and Australian convict culture centered on “flash” language (78). Ingrid Horrocks and Matthew Shum each consider travel writers—respectively, Augustus Earle in New Zealand and William Burchell in South Africa—who challenge the “contact zone” model of narrativizing colonial encounter (121). A fascinating counterpoint is offered by Michelle Elleray, who explores what can be known about Kiro, who was brought from the Cook Islands to London in 1847 to help translate the Bible, but whose only surviving words are filtered through missionary interlocutors.
Worlding the South is also distinguished by several contributions that deploy intensely nuanced and reflexive scholarship in response to very localized kinds of writing of cultural encounter. In her account of the colonial linguistic archives assembled in Australia by two women, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop and Harriott Barlow, Anna Johnston considers the gendered spaces of their acquisition to gain “glimpses of how Indigenous knowledge holders engaged strategically and selectively with some settlers to communicate and continue their own long-standing knowledge traditions” (287). Likewise, in her discussion of Rēweti Kōhere's citations of Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, Nikki Hessell goes beyond simply presenting this as a typical example of Indigenous appropriation of metropolitan writing: she links it to the particularities of his education, to Māori practices of citation in whaikōrero (speechmaking), and to his fight for a specific piece of his family's land. In modeling how settler scholars might be accountable to local conditions and attentive both to power differentials and archival gaps, the authors of these chapters present an example and a challenge to scholars considering working on southern questions of how and why such work might be done.
Ultimately, the diverse array of scholarship assembled in Worlding the South raises the question of what literary culture is in a southern context. Comyn and Fermanis seem to have in mind a fairly traditional understanding, with its mentions of canons and novelistic genres. In practice, the essays focus on all manner of representations—maps, quotations, panoramas, petitions, language lists, paintings—and only a few take up those staples of literary analysis, fiction and verse. Overall, colonial writers and voices predominate, and thus Worlding the South inevitably falls short of its promised “rethinking of a shared and interregional literary history . . . from Indigenous and diasporic spaces” (7). Nevertheless, the broad range of representations brought into this conversation reflects an ongoing expansion of literary archives and methods that is part of a growing search for Indigenous voices. At the same time, the evidence of Worlding the South also suggests that it is still far from obvious how or why the most common forms of settler literature—the bad poems and novels that filled their newspapers and periodicals—might be reread in this moment.
