“No Country Will Rise above Its Home, and No Home above Its Mother”: Gender, Memory, and Colonial Violence in Nineteenth-Century Texas

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-166
Author(s):  
Patrick T Troester
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Women ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Women's Labor ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
The Face ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Native Resistance

Abstract This article examines Anglo-American colonization in nineteenth-century Texas and the construction of its historical memory, highlighting the interwoven roles of kinship, women’s labor, and gendered ideology. Building upon social, economic, and cultural roots in the U.S. Southeast, settler colonialism in Texas was a multi-generational project structured heavily by kinship. Anglo-Texan women served as active colonial agents through their productive and reproductive labor, which bound them firmly to more overt forms of colonial violence by men and the emerging state. In the face of Native resistance, Anglo-Texans highlighted Indigenous acts of violence against White women and families in order to invert responsibility for colonial violence and to justify the dispossession and destruction of Native peoples. Beginning as early as the 1830s, direct Anglo participants, including many influential women, wrote the first histories of Texas colonization, interpreting that process and its violence from within the deeply gendered and personal framework of kinship. Their efforts have marked both popular memory and historical scholarship to the present day.

Conquest, Continuity, and Creation: Contesting Identities in Nineteenth-Century Natal

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.J. Tallie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Alcohol Production ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Personal Connections ◽  
British Colony ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the contested, competing notions of inhabitance and continuity in the British colony of Natal during the nineteenth century. Despite the dislocations and predations of settler colonialism, the history of Natal is often also a history of African survival and adaptation. Colonial power dynamics may have favored settlers, but Africans continued to see themselves as the rightful and permanent occupants of the land. Even after the umuzi (homestead) was no longer able, owing to colonial pressures, to serve as the major vehicle of social and economic reproduction, African people continued to rely upon such earlier concepts as ukukhonza (obligations of service) or the amabutho (Zulu military regiment) to articulate personal connections and obligations to one another. Ideas of chieftaincy or service thus could be reshaped by Africans beyond colonial contexts in pursuit of social survival in Natal. Christianity and marriage, as well as alcohol production and consumption, also offered an arena for African adaptation and cultural continuity in the face of colonial hegemony, as well as a stage on which settlers could make their own claims. The chapter then looks at recent historiography in colonial Natal and identity.

The Blue Flower and the Account Book

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Anne F. Hyde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
Blue Flower ◽  
Racial Category ◽  
North American West ◽  
Mixed Blood ◽  
Anglo American

This essay, a revised version of the August 2015 talk, examines the story of two mixed-blood women, indigenous and Anglo American, who lived in the fur trade North American West. The essay examines a racial category, mixed blood or “half-breed” and considers the challenges for people who lived in and used that category in the nineteenth century. The essay illuminates the challenges of using different kinds of personal records to understand how these nineteenth-century women might have thought about identity, a word they never would have used.

The Roman Aura in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carlos Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Classical Culture

Concentrating on Henry James’s Daisy Miller, this chapter reveals its author engaging in arguments over the decline and fall of the Roman Empire among nineteenth-century Anglo-American writers and over the best means of using Rome’s example as a warning to contemporaries. The novella’s Roman setting and frequent references to classical culture both extend Anglo-American Romantics’ emphasis on the Roman failure to develop a comprehensive democracy and allow James to pursue his own interest in post-Civil War America as an emerging global power. Departing from earlier interpretations of Rome’s importance within Daisy Miller, this chapter argues that James employs the character of Daisy to reconceive Rome’s relevance to central issues of class and gender. If James rejects aspects of contemporary American feminism embodied by such classically inspired artists as Harriet Hosmer and Maria Louisa Lander, he nevertheless makes his unsophisticated heroine, Daisy, into a means of expressing his democratic vision.

Law as Institution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Change ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American

Institutionalism is a theory that maintains that law is neither norm nor command but institution. It emerges in the late-nineteenth century primarily through the work of Hauriou in France and Romano in Italy. Their innovative studies are shaped by reflecting on the effects of social and economic change on law, which manifests itself primarily in the emergence of administrative law. In this chapter the importance of institutional jurisprudence is assessed by examining its historical context and offering reflections on its continuing significance. It argues that, partly because of the lack of English translations of its leading exponents, institutionalism has been relatively neglected in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and that it continues to offer acute insights into contemporary juristic controversies.

The Sino-Japanese War and the Collapse of the Qing and Confucian World Order in the Face of Japanese Imperialism and European Acquiescence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Sze-lok Leung ◽  
Bijun Xu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
East Asian ◽  
World Order ◽  
Foreign Minister ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) has been perceived as a sign of a new East Asian power order, but the legitimacy of the war has yet to be clarified. The Japanese foreign minister Mutsu’s Kenkenroku shows that the reasons claimed by Japan were only pretexts for its ambition to put Korea under its control. The 1885 Convention of Tianjin, which was used to justify the Japanese behaviour, needs to be reinterpreted. The Chinese reaction can be understood by exploration into Confucianism, which opposed wars between equal peers. Meanwhile, the Western powers which invented and developed international law were self-interested and did little to prevent the war. The incident shows that international law, empowered by the strong states, failed to maintain peace efficiently in the late nineteenth century.

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 002198942098201
Author(s):  
Sarah Comyn ◽  
Porscha Fermanis
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Methodological Position

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.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

Protecting the Empire's Humanity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoë Laidlaw
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
South Australia ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
British Colonialism

Rooted in the extraordinary archive of Quaker physician and humanitarian activist, Dr Thomas Hodgkin, this book explores the efforts of the Aborigines' Protection Society to expose Britain's hypocrisy and imperial crimes in the mid-nineteenth century. Hodgkin's correspondents stretched from Liberia to Lesotho, New Zealand to Texas, Jamaica to Ontario, and Bombay to South Australia; they included scientists, philanthropists, missionaries, systematic colonizers, politicians and indigenous peoples themselves. Debating the best way to protect and advance indigenous rights in an era of burgeoning settler colonialism, they looked back to the lessons and limitations of anti-slavery, lamented the imperial government's disavowal of responsibility for settler colonies, and laid out elaborate (and patronizing) plans for indigenous 'civilization'. Protecting the Empire's Humanity reminds us of the complexity, contradictions and capacious nature of British colonialism and metropolitan 'humanitarianism', illuminating the broad canvas of empire through a distinctive set of British and Indigenous campaigners.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Chow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Natural History ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
Environmental Survival ◽  
Theories Of Evolution

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Illegal Immigration ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
National Character ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Anglo American

American Immigration: A Very Short Introduction traces three massive waves of immigration from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and analyzes the nature of immigration as a purposeful, structured activity, attitudes supporting or hostile to immigration, policies and laws regulating immigration, and the nature of and prospects for assimilation. There have been some dramatic developments since 2011, including the crisis along the southwestern border and the intense conflict over illegal immigration. The population of the United States has diverse sources: territorial acquisition through conquest and colonialism, the slave trade, and voluntary immigration. Many Americans value the memory of immigrant ancestors, and are sentimentally inclined to immigrant strivings. Alongside this sits the perception that immigration destabilizes social order, cultural coherence, job markets, and political alignments. The nearly 250 years of American nationhood has been characterized by both support for openness to immigration and embrace of a cosmopolitan formulation of American identity and for restrictions and assertions of belief in a core Anglo-American national character.

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