About

Through the creation of a Wiki-style database, Literary Mines, this four-year work package will establish a literary corpus of mineral extraction that moves beyond the British metropole. Supplementing and supporting WP 2-4, texts in the Literary Mines database will be organised to address the Challenges of: New Reading Methods; New Readers and Writers; and New Reading Geographies.
Texts will, therefore, be categorised according to their:

• Regime/s (commodities, labour, infrastructure)
• Region/s
• Genre/s
• Form.

Further subcategories will include historical labour events (such as mining strikes and disasters) and infrastructural projects (such as the construction of the Cape Government Railway).

The organisation of the corpus will therefore allow users to make commodity-comparative analyses of literature, conduct intercolonial studies of literatures of mineral extraction, consider the racial legacies of extractive labour and infrastructure regimes on settler colonial literatures, and reconsider the national paradigms framing the literature of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Drawing on the corpus and information established in WP1 and addressing Challenge 1 (New Reading Methods), this work package combines the formalist interventions of ecocriticism with those of literary studies of empire in order to conduct an analysis of the literary texts emerging out of the extractive mineral regimes of diamonds, gold, and copper. Undertaken by the Principal Investigator, this four-year work package asks:

• Is it possible to read mineral extraction as form and/or genre in the literary cultures of the British southern settler colonies?
• Do new forms and genres emerge out of these extractive industries that are marked by an ecological attentiveness?
• Do texts of the same extractive commodity correspond across different settler colonial sites and therefore challenge our understandings of national literatures?
• How did the wealth generated by these industries contribute, moreover, not only to the content of nineteenth-century settler colonial literatures, but their formal structures and material cultures?

Traditionally viewed as masculine environments, the growing populations of the mineral mining regions were, in fact, not only ethnically, culturally, and racially mixed, but also multi-classed. Drawing on WP1’s corpus and addressing Challenge 2 (New Readers and Writers), this four-year work package undertaken by the PhD Student, aims to revise gendered and racialised understandings of the extractive regions through a focus on periodical literature written for children.

• How does colonial children’s literature present labour structures to a young readership?
• How is the figure of the heroic masculine miner domesticated or queered?
• How does women’s labour contribute to the domestication of the extractivist landscape?
• How might the convict be redeemed by labouring in the minefields?

Attending to the children’s literature emerging from the gold rushes in Australia and New Zealand, this WP aims to provide new protagonists in the narratives of nineteenth-century literary histories, presenting new understandings of the participation of women, ethnic minorities, Indigenous peoples, and indentured labourers in the formation of settler colonial literatures.

Complementing WP3’s focus on the literatures of mining labour within the extractive regions and communities of the settler colonies, WP4 addresses Challenge 3 (New Reading Geographies) by analysing the infrastructure that developed in conjunction with and was essential to the industrial success of the settler colonial mining industries, such as rail and steamship networks, port cities, and the extractive zone’s arterial cities. Undertaken by the Postdoctoral Fellow, this 3-year work package uses WP1’s corpus to extend the analysis of nineteenth-century infrastructure studies to include those literary productions of the settler colonial industries and their infrastructural projects. This work package will closely examine racialised imperial and national narratives and the demarcation of a global colour line that characterises extractive infrastructures, their literatures, and their reading communities.

• Did miners travelling between different settler colonies, for example, bring influential literary cultures of extraction with them?
• How did the migrant labourers building the Cape Government Railways or the Great Northern Line, for example, shape settler colonial literatures of mineral extraction?

Through its geo-political focus, this work package argues that the co-constitutive histories of the colonial mineral industries, racial science, and capitalism, and the formation of the global colour line are crucial to understanding not only the literary cultures of the settler colonies and their emergent nationalisms, but also more broadly, nineteenth-century British cultural and political identities.