Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa

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dc.contributor.advisorDriver, Dorothyen_ZA
dc.contributor.authorHanzimanolis, Margareten_ZA
dc.date.accessioned2014-10-20T07:40:38Z
dc.date.available2014-10-20T07:40:38Z
dc.date.issued2005en_ZA
dc.descriptionIncludes bibliographical references (p. 173-201).en_ZA
dc.description.abstractThis study examines how possessive interests have been encoded in southern African contact literature via the signing of gender, sexual violability and territoriality. Portuguese shipwreck survival accounts from the long sixteenth century, the first sustained narratives of contact between southern African peoples and Europeans, are examined in the first half of this study. British women’s travel writings from the nineteenth century are the topic of the second part of the study, as these later texts yield the first important female perspectives on contact. Both subgenres are crucial to formulating a feminist reading of the southern African contact zone. While the Portuguese shipwreck material suggests that exposed or abandoned white women provoked great cultural anxieties, British travel texts written by women move in a different direction. Many of these texts were pitched to assuage readers' fears about the fate of the self-itinerizing women in southern Africa. l first establish that neither the shipwreck material nor the British women's impressions of contact has been well integrated into the founding narratives of South Africa. I then focus on key episodes related to gender and hyper-vulnerability in the early accounts of overland shipwreck survivor treks, especially Leonor de Sa’s death in southern Africa in 1552, after the wreck of the St. John. The second part of the study surveys the earliest women's writings about southern Africa. Chapter Four concentrates on Anne Barnard’s letters and journals (written 1797-1801) and several other women travel writers. I find that these women downplay, or occlude entirely, the physical dangers in southern African spaces and emphasize, instead successfully transplanted tropes of domesticity and theatricality and the premature memorialization of the existing culture. The final chapter examines the artworks and writings of Marianne North, a traveling artist whose work combines some of the tensions evident in the earlier theatricalizing tropes, but with a displaced focus on botanical descriptions and flower painting. The chapter about South Africa in her autobiography and the exhibition of her paintings of South African flowers on display at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew provide insight into how some early cultural anxieties surrounding gender, empire, and sexuality can be found in botanical discourse and representations. My conclusions are twofold. In the first place, the expansion of the notion of contact narratives I propose in this study brings into the foreground the anxieties associated with the presence of European women in under-regulated contact and colonial spaces. Women's relationship to the land or landscape, evident in the discourses of the Portuguese mercantile empire as well as the British territorial empire, suggest that marooned or self-itinerizing women are in a position to signal, with their bodies, a graphos on the imperial map of the colonial or pre-colonial land.en_ZA
dc.identifier.apacitationHanzimanolis, M. (2005). <i>Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa</i>. (Thesis). University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8640en_ZA
dc.identifier.chicagocitationHanzimanolis, Margaret. <i>"Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa."</i> Thesis., University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8640en_ZA
dc.identifier.citationHanzimanolis, M. 2005. Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa. University of Cape Town.en_ZA
dc.identifier.ris TY - Thesis / Dissertation AU - Hanzimanolis, Margaret AB - This study examines how possessive interests have been encoded in southern African contact literature via the signing of gender, sexual violability and territoriality. Portuguese shipwreck survival accounts from the long sixteenth century, the first sustained narratives of contact between southern African peoples and Europeans, are examined in the first half of this study. British women’s travel writings from the nineteenth century are the topic of the second part of the study, as these later texts yield the first important female perspectives on contact. Both subgenres are crucial to formulating a feminist reading of the southern African contact zone. While the Portuguese shipwreck material suggests that exposed or abandoned white women provoked great cultural anxieties, British travel texts written by women move in a different direction. Many of these texts were pitched to assuage readers' fears about the fate of the self-itinerizing women in southern Africa. l first establish that neither the shipwreck material nor the British women's impressions of contact has been well integrated into the founding narratives of South Africa. I then focus on key episodes related to gender and hyper-vulnerability in the early accounts of overland shipwreck survivor treks, especially Leonor de Sa’s death in southern Africa in 1552, after the wreck of the St. John. The second part of the study surveys the earliest women's writings about southern Africa. Chapter Four concentrates on Anne Barnard’s letters and journals (written 1797-1801) and several other women travel writers. I find that these women downplay, or occlude entirely, the physical dangers in southern African spaces and emphasize, instead successfully transplanted tropes of domesticity and theatricality and the premature memorialization of the existing culture. The final chapter examines the artworks and writings of Marianne North, a traveling artist whose work combines some of the tensions evident in the earlier theatricalizing tropes, but with a displaced focus on botanical descriptions and flower painting. The chapter about South Africa in her autobiography and the exhibition of her paintings of South African flowers on display at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew provide insight into how some early cultural anxieties surrounding gender, empire, and sexuality can be found in botanical discourse and representations. My conclusions are twofold. In the first place, the expansion of the notion of contact narratives I propose in this study brings into the foreground the anxieties associated with the presence of European women in under-regulated contact and colonial spaces. Women's relationship to the land or landscape, evident in the discourses of the Portuguese mercantile empire as well as the British territorial empire, suggest that marooned or self-itinerizing women are in a position to signal, with their bodies, a graphos on the imperial map of the colonial or pre-colonial land. DA - 2005 DB - OpenUCT DP - University of Cape Town LK - https://open.uct.ac.za PB - University of Cape Town PY - 2005 T1 - Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa TI - Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8640 ER - en_ZA
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11427/8640
dc.identifier.vancouvercitationHanzimanolis M. Ultramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africa. [Thesis]. University of Cape Town ,Faculty of Humanities ,Department of English Language and Literature, 2005 [cited yyyy month dd]. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/8640en_ZA
dc.language.isoengen_ZA
dc.publisher.departmentDepartment of English Language and Literatureen_ZA
dc.publisher.facultyFaculty of Humanitiesen_ZA
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Cape Town
dc.subject.otherEnglish Language and Literatureen_ZA
dc.titleUltramarooned : gender, empire and narratives of travel in Southern Africaen_ZA
dc.typeDoctoral Thesis
dc.type.qualificationlevelDoctoral
dc.type.qualificationnamePhDen_ZA
uct.type.filetypeText
uct.type.filetypeImage
uct.type.publicationResearchen_ZA
uct.type.resourceThesisen_ZA
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