Charterland: Rhodesia in British Culture, 1889-1939
This application is for twelve months’ full-time research leave to enable the completion of a monograph titled Charterland: The Image of Rhodesia in British Culture, 1889–1939 and a research visit at the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University, UK. The monograph will establish the extraordinary influence of colonial-era Zimbabwe and Zambia on British culture between the formation of Rhodesia and the Second World War. In recovering this archive, this study will establish that the public image of Rhodesia was uniquely shaped by domestic British concerns, notably gender, class, and racial anxieties. Reconstruction of Rhodesia’s sprawling cultural presence, ranging from Scouting to million-selling women’s novels and popular cinema films, will additionally show how the territory was widely regarded as an embodiment of the British Empire despite its anomalous constitution as a chartered or private colony. Six thematic chapters examine the colony’s symbolic and political impact on selected fields of cultural production: visual culture and spectacle, periodical publication, literature, and non-fiction prose writing. In addition to making a major contribution to the scholarship on empire, this study provides a new historical context for current debates over the legacy of imperial relations in contemporary Britain.
Final report
The aim of this project has been to produce a history of early colonial Rhodesia across a range of fields of British culture prior to 1930, including novels, films, shows, plays, magazines, and ephemera and merchandizing. The project’s theoretical and methodological novelty lies in its focus on a single colonial entity and the consideration of individual genres of cultural production, which jointly offer a new model for analysing imperial cultural history. In recovering the breadth and complexity with which images of Rhodesia were disseminated, the project also sheds light on Rhodesia’s cultural legacy in contemporary Britain, where images of the colony and its founder have figured prominently in recent debates over cultural decolonization and historical restitution.
The project has three key findings, each of which offers a significant corrective to current historical scholarship on British imperial culture:
1. Press surveys and archival research confirm that Rhodesia had a unique status in British culture during this period by virtue of its disproportionate presence and the divergence of views that accompanied its reception. Reviewers of dramatic productions and literary works framed their responses to the portrayal of Rhodesia in relation to controversies specific to the colony itself, rather than the empire at large. Rhodesian-themed texts visibly had multiple, and sometimes ideologically incompatible, meanings as they were disseminated through national tours, newspaper syndication, and other forms of remediation.
2. Close analysis of individual cultural texts indicates that the cultural image of Rhodesia was above all defined by its modernity, particularly with regard to the use of technology and the colony’s economic basis in stock-market speculation. To a quite different degree than any other colonial territory of this period, the cultural representation of Rhodesia was shaped by issues of financing, political status, and projections of the colony’s viability.
3. Comparison of the performance and reception of Rhodesian cultural artefacts across the British Isles reveals that geography, class, and local cultural institutions were decisive factors in how contemporary audiences viewed the colony and its representatives. For the first decades of its existence, Rhodesia effectively constituted a discrete subfield of each of the cultural areas examined by the project. In responding to a succession of Rhodesian-themed shows, novels, and plays, contemporary audiences connected their subject matter to other representations of Rhodesia, rather than a more general conception of “empire” itself.
These findings and the case studies on which they are based have several wider implications for future research in British historiography and cultural history, particularly of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. At a methodological level, the project has established that Rhodesian-themed culture constituted a unique object of political and aesthetic identification, a conclusion that raises the question of how other individual colonial territories were conceptualized by the British public. This has both a national and an international dimension. The project’s recovery of the performance histories of a previously unknown African theatrical touring troupe in the 1890s, for example, invites a reassessment of imperialism in more local terms, including the hiring of local performers and the role played by provincial institutions. At the international level, the reframing of British cultural imperial history as multiple cultural histories of single territories such as Rhodesia opens promising avenues onto a new kind of transnational comparative analysis, for example, comparing the image of Rhodesia in British culture to that of Haiti in American culture of the same period.
The research collaboration with Leeds Beckett University, where I have been a visiting scholar during 2022, has more than met my expectations. Development and revision of the project’s overarching arguments has been made possible by regular conversations with colleagues at my host institution as well as by involvement in the larger research community in Leeds. Access to national repositories and archives in London and Oxford was able to take place after the lifting of lockdown restrictions, and I have been able to make invited presentations of the project’s findings at Leeds Beckett University and Oxford University as well as at the 2022 British Association of Victorian Studies Conference in Birmingham.
The project’s main output is a research monograph titled Charterland: The Image of Rhodesia in British Culture, 1889–1930. Several of its chapters have previously appeared in print in the form of essays and articles in journals, and the completed monograph is now intended for open-access publication with an international publisher. The book’s revised six-chapter structure—shows and military spectacles; the invention of literary Rhodesia; masculine adventure fiction; veldt romances; stage plays; and cinema films (including documentaries and industrial shorts)—has been designed with a view to increasing the book’s appeal to cultural historians working within each individual genre as well as to scholars of British imperial culture.
The project has three key findings, each of which offers a significant corrective to current historical scholarship on British imperial culture:
1. Press surveys and archival research confirm that Rhodesia had a unique status in British culture during this period by virtue of its disproportionate presence and the divergence of views that accompanied its reception. Reviewers of dramatic productions and literary works framed their responses to the portrayal of Rhodesia in relation to controversies specific to the colony itself, rather than the empire at large. Rhodesian-themed texts visibly had multiple, and sometimes ideologically incompatible, meanings as they were disseminated through national tours, newspaper syndication, and other forms of remediation.
2. Close analysis of individual cultural texts indicates that the cultural image of Rhodesia was above all defined by its modernity, particularly with regard to the use of technology and the colony’s economic basis in stock-market speculation. To a quite different degree than any other colonial territory of this period, the cultural representation of Rhodesia was shaped by issues of financing, political status, and projections of the colony’s viability.
3. Comparison of the performance and reception of Rhodesian cultural artefacts across the British Isles reveals that geography, class, and local cultural institutions were decisive factors in how contemporary audiences viewed the colony and its representatives. For the first decades of its existence, Rhodesia effectively constituted a discrete subfield of each of the cultural areas examined by the project. In responding to a succession of Rhodesian-themed shows, novels, and plays, contemporary audiences connected their subject matter to other representations of Rhodesia, rather than a more general conception of “empire” itself.
These findings and the case studies on which they are based have several wider implications for future research in British historiography and cultural history, particularly of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. At a methodological level, the project has established that Rhodesian-themed culture constituted a unique object of political and aesthetic identification, a conclusion that raises the question of how other individual colonial territories were conceptualized by the British public. This has both a national and an international dimension. The project’s recovery of the performance histories of a previously unknown African theatrical touring troupe in the 1890s, for example, invites a reassessment of imperialism in more local terms, including the hiring of local performers and the role played by provincial institutions. At the international level, the reframing of British cultural imperial history as multiple cultural histories of single territories such as Rhodesia opens promising avenues onto a new kind of transnational comparative analysis, for example, comparing the image of Rhodesia in British culture to that of Haiti in American culture of the same period.
The research collaboration with Leeds Beckett University, where I have been a visiting scholar during 2022, has more than met my expectations. Development and revision of the project’s overarching arguments has been made possible by regular conversations with colleagues at my host institution as well as by involvement in the larger research community in Leeds. Access to national repositories and archives in London and Oxford was able to take place after the lifting of lockdown restrictions, and I have been able to make invited presentations of the project’s findings at Leeds Beckett University and Oxford University as well as at the 2022 British Association of Victorian Studies Conference in Birmingham.
The project’s main output is a research monograph titled Charterland: The Image of Rhodesia in British Culture, 1889–1930. Several of its chapters have previously appeared in print in the form of essays and articles in journals, and the completed monograph is now intended for open-access publication with an international publisher. The book’s revised six-chapter structure—shows and military spectacles; the invention of literary Rhodesia; masculine adventure fiction; veldt romances; stage plays; and cinema films (including documentaries and industrial shorts)—has been designed with a view to increasing the book’s appeal to cultural historians working within each individual genre as well as to scholars of British imperial culture.