Research

Southern Settler Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890

Image: ‘Going to Sea’ by Oswald M. Brierly, 1883. Watercolour. Courtesy of the State Library of NSW.

Prof Porscha Fermanis (UCD)

This book project posits that the nineteenth-century settler novel, far from being a generic and belated version of metropolitan fiction, can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler-colonial spaces, thereby disrupting understandings of Angloworld migration as a single long ship voyage from Europe or America. Within the wider field of colonial letters, it examines the kind of ‘mobile fiction’ that depicts transient and short-term movement, primarily between colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa but also between India, Africa, China, and Southeast Asia. Its central premise is that novels that foreground border-crossing or mobility between states can enable us to think about how national writing has marginalized mobile communities and naturalized the nation-state itself. My focus in the book is therefore on two themes: first, the ways in which settler novels encode specifically regional spatial imaginaries (‘Australasia’, ‘Trans-Tasman’, ‘Oceania’ etc), which have been called ‘repressed memories’ in nineteenth-century cultural history; and second, representations in settler fiction of imagined noncommunities, failed diasporas, marginalised or precarious political subjects, and the historically punishable bodies of convicts, indentured labourers, servants, non-European diasporas, Indigenous peoples, mixed-race peoples, children, prostitutes, white paupers, and the ‘eugenically unfit’.

Publications and Presentations:

• Fermanis, Porscha, ‘Pedestrian Touring, Racial Violence, and Bad Feeling in Trans-Tasman Settler Fiction’, in The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts and ‘Southern Circulations’, ed. Tony Ballantyne (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022, in press).
• Fermanis, Porscha, ‘Queering the Imperial Romance: Settler Colonialism, Heteronormativity, and Interracial Intimacy in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s Tikera’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 17.3 (2021).
• Fermanis, Porscha, ‘Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia’, Historical Reflections 47.2 (2021): 91-104.
• Fermanis, Porscha, ‘Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon’, Journal of Victorian Culture 25.3 (2020): 424-42.