Browsing by Subject "Colonial"

Dreams of a "tropical Canada" that included the West Indies occupied the thoughts of many Canadians over a period spanning nearly forty years. From the expansionist fever of the late nineteenth century to the redistribution of German territories immediately following the First World War, Canadians of varying backgrounds campaigned vigorously for Canada-West Indies union. Their efforts generated a transatlantic discourse that raised larger questions about Canada's national trajectory, imperial organization, and the state of Britain's Empire in the twentieth century.

This dissertation explores the key ideas, tensions, and contradictions that shaped the union discourse over time. Race, nation and empire were central to this discourse. Canadian expansionists' efforts to gain free access to tropical territory, consolidate British possessions in the Western hemisphere, and negotiate the terms under which West Indians of color would enter the Canadian federation reflected and perpetuated logics that were simultaneously racial, national, and imperial.

Canada-West Indies union campaigns raise important questions about the processes at work in the ideological and material formation of the Canadian "nation" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Employing a wide range of public and private manuscript material, diaries, travelogues and newspapers, this dissertation argues that Canadians' expansionist aspirations in the West Indies were inextricably connected to a national vision. To the campaign's advocates, acquiring colonial satellites - particularly in tropical regions - was a defining feature of nation-state formation.

On Christmas Day in 1788, on the eve of a year which was to see the entire Atlantic world once more convulsed with revolution and war, a struggling farmer and occasional fisherman from the village of Mousehole in western Cornwall turned his back on the sea. William Carvosso had never found maritime life to his liking, and for some time been looking for an opportunity to, in his words, support himself and his family "wholly on the land." So when that opportunity finally did arise Carvosso was quick to move his young family to a rented farm near the inland village of Ponsanooth. With a little capital and zealous stewardship Carvosso began to thrive in his new home. The move, which at first glance seemed to take the family from cosmopolitan littoral to parochial isolation, was actually the first step of an intergenerational journey that saw Carvosso's children and grandchildren witness convict hangings in Van Diemen's Land, the Tai-ping Rebellion in Shanghai, Blackfoot and Plains Cree horse raids on the Great Plains, and the trafficking of indentured labor from India to the Caribbean. The vehicle which transported the Carvossos about the globe - and which facilitated their rise as a family from the laboring classes to the lower reaches of respectability and beyond - was the Wesleyan Methodist Connexion and its ancillary Missionary Society. The following dissertation is concerned with the Carvossos' movements, and the ideology by which they encouraged, made sense of, and justified their imperial adventures.

The Carvossos left evidence of their activities scattered about the globe. The greatest concentration of material is in church and missionary collections in London, but they also have a presence in a wide range of provincial and colonial archives and newspapers. Their movement allows us to attend to not just the Empire and the Nation, but to the transnational and the local, the provincial and the metropolitan, and the mutual constitution of those various categories. They were never fixed in one site but travelled from their original home in the village of Mousehole, to Van Diemen's Land, New South Wales, Shanghai, Rupert's Land, British Columbia, Jamaica and frequently back to England. The Carvossos identified themselves by turn as Cornish, English, British, or Colonial, depending on their circumstances. Their active participation in transatlantic Methodism, global Evangelicalism, and Cornish Revivalism further complicated the issue of their various imperial identities, and helps reveal the complexities and contradictions of colonial life in the nineteenth-century British Empire.

"Utopian (Post)Colonies: Rewriting Race and Gender after the Haitian Revolution" examines the works of French women authors writing from just before the first abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1794 to those writing at the time of the second and final abolition in 1848. These women, each in different and evolving ways, challenged notions of race and gender that excluded French women from political debate and participation and kept Africans and their descendants in subordinated social positions. However, even after Haitian independence, French authors continued to understand the colony as a social and political enterprise to be remodeled and ameliorated rather than abandoned. These authors' rewritings of race and gender thus played a crucial role in a more general French engagement with the idea of the colony-as-utopia.

In 1791, at the very beginning of the Haitian Revolution--which was also the beginning of France's unexpected first postcolonial moment--colonial reform, abolitionism, and women's political participation were all passionately debated issues among French revolutionaries. These debates faded in intensity as the nineteenth century progressed. Slavery, though officially abolished in 1794, was reestablished in 1802. Divorce was again made illegal in 1816. Even in 1848, when all men were granted suffrage and slavery was definitively abolished in the French colonies, women were not given the right to vote. Yet, throughout the early nineteenth century, the notion of the colony-as-utopia continued to offer a space for French women authors to imagine gender equality and women's empowerment through their attempts to alter racial hierarchy.

My first chapter examines the development of abolitionism through theatre in the writings of Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793). At a time when performance was understood to have influential moral implications, de Gouges imagines a utopian colony to be possible through the power of performance to produce moral action. In my second chapter, I analyze how, during the slowly re-emerging abolitionist movements of the 1820s, Sophie Doin (1800-1846) and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859) expose the individual emotional suffering of slaves in an effort to make the violence of enslavement visible. In the process of making this violence visible, Doin's La Famille noire suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (1825-6) and Desbordes-Valmore's Sarah (1821), in contrast with Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823), mobilize respect for motherhood to bolster their abolitionist claims. My third chapter analyzes the colonial novels of Madame Charles Reybaud (1802-1870), a forgotten but once-popular novelist, who uses the idea of the colony to develop a feminist re-definition of marriage involving the emancipation of males from their own categories of enslavement. Influenced by the Saint-Simonian thought of the July Monarchy, Reybaud imagines a utopian colony organized by a feminized French humanitarianism that attempts to separate French racial identity from that of the "Creole" colonizer. My final chapter compares this French desire to yoke utopia to colony with nineteenth-century Haitian attempts to reveal the opposite synergy: the inseparability of the institutions of slavery and colonialism. Haiti's first novel, Stella (1859) by Émeric Bergeaud (1818-1858), opposes racial hierarchy and defends Haitian independence in the face of harsh discrimination from an international community whose economies still depended on colonialism and slavery. In contrast with the previous texts studied in this dissertation, Stella imagines Haiti to have the potential to become a utopian postcolony, a nation freed from the constraints of colonialism in such a way as to serve as a model for a future in which racial hierarchy has no power.