Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:23:32.382Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Shame of Not Belonging: Navigating Failure in the Colonial Petition, South Africa 1910–1961

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Will Jackson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay examines letters of petition sent by failed white settlers in South Africa to the British Governor General. These letters comprise a particular discursive genre that combine aspects of both private and public. The key to their success was controlled emotion: petitioners had to present their distress in such a way as to excite the exercise of compassion. Allowing subversive or stray emotions to enter a letter was bound to undermine a petitioner’s appeal. Reading this epistolary corpus critically allows us to understand the discursive strategies by which colonials claimed a sentimental attachment to Britain, the empire and, indeed, the Governor General himself.

Keywords

Colonial failurepetitionsubaltern biographyemotionpoor whites
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Special Issue 1: The Private Lives of Empire: Emotion, Intimacy, and Colonial Rule , April 2018 , pp. 85 - 101
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Will Jackson is an Associate Professor in Imperial History at the University of Leeds.

References

Anderson, Clare. Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, David. “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7:2 (1979): 104–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren, ed. Compassion: History and Politics of an Emotion. London: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Bonner, Philip. “South African Society and Culture, 1910–1948.” In The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 1885–1994, edited by Robert Ross, Anne Mager and Bill Nasson, 254–318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bottomley, Edward-John. Poor White. Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2012.Google Scholar
Buettner, Elizabeth. Empire Families: Britons and Later Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Cairnie, Julie. “Imperialists in Broken Boots”: Poor Whites and Philanthropy in Southern African Writing. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.Google Scholar
Christopher, Anthony J. “A South African Domesday Book: the first Union Census of 1911.” South African Geographical Journal 92:1 (2010): 22–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850. London: Pimlico, 2003.Google Scholar
Couzens, Timothy. Tramp Royal: The True Story of Trader Horn. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Davie, Grace. Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science, 1855–2005. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
De Costa, Ravi. “Identity, Authority and the Moral Worlds of Indigenous Petitions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48:3 (2006): 669–698.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De, Sarmistha. Marginal Europeans in Colonial India: 1860–1920. Thema: Kolkata, 2008.Google Scholar
Dixon, Thomas. Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Dubow, Saul. “How British was the ‘British World’? The Case of South Africa.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37:1 (2009): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ernst, Waltraud. Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800–1858. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Fischer-Tiné, Harald. “Hierarchies of Punishment in Colonial India: European Convicts and the Racial Dividend, 1860–1890.” In Empires and Boundaries: Rethinking Race, Class and Gender in Colonial Settings, edited by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Susanne Gerhmann, 41–65. Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Fischer-Tiné, Harald. Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class and “White Subalternity” in Colonial India. Delhi: Black Swan, 2009.Google Scholar
Gerber, Daniel A. “Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence.” Journal of Social History 39:2 (2005): 315–330.Google Scholar
Ishiguru, Laura. Relative Distances: Family and Empire between Britain, British Columbia and India, 1858–1901. PhD diss., University College, London, 2011.Google Scholar
Lamb, Jonathan, Smith, Vanessa and Thomas, Nicholas, eds. Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Moodie, T. Dunbar. The Rise of Afrikaner Nationalism: Power, Apartheid and the Afrikaner Civil Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Muller, Gregor. Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen”: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840–87. London: Routledge, 2006.Google Scholar
Paisley, Fiona and Reid, Kirsty, eds. Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below. London: Routledge, 2014.Google Scholar
Pearsall, Sarah M. S. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Peberdy, Sally. Selecting Immigrants: National Identity and South Africa’s Immigration Policies. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Posel, Deborah. “Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa.” African Studies Review 44:2 (2001): 87–114.Google Scholar
Ralston, Caroline. Grass Huts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth Century. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978.Google Scholar
Rappaport, Erika. “‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India.” Gender and History 16:2 (2003): 233–260.Google Scholar
Roos, Neil. “Work Colonies and South African Historiography.” Social History 36:1 (2011): 54–76.Google Scholar
Roskell, Arthur H. Six Years of a Tramp’s Life in South Africa. Cape Town: Townshend and Son, 1886.Google Scholar
Samuelson, M. “A Community of Letters on the Indian Ocean Rim: Friendship, Fraternity and (Af-Filial) Love.” English in Africa 35:1 (2008): 27–43.Google Scholar
Schler, Lynn. “‘The Facts Stated Do Not Seem to Be True’: The Contested Process of Repatriation in British Colonial Nigeria.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42:1 (2014): 134–152.Google Scholar
Seegers, Annette. “Towards an Understanding of the Afrikanerisation of the South African State.” Africa 63:4 (1993): 477–497.Google Scholar
Seekings, Jeremy. “Not a Single White Person Should Be Allowed to Go Under’: Swartgevaar and the Origins of South Africa’s Welfare State, 1924–1929.” Journal of African History 48:3 (2007): 375–394.Google Scholar
Smith, Kate. “Imperial Families: Women Writing Home in Georgian Britain.” Women’s History Review 24:6 (2015): 843–860.Google Scholar
Stanley, Liz. “Settler Colonialism and Migrant Letters: The Forbes Family and Letter-Writing in South Africa, 1850–1922.” The History of the Family 21:3 (2016): 398–428.Google Scholar
Swartz, Sally. Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the late Nineteenth Century. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Thomas, Nicholas and Eves, Richard. Bad Colonists: The South Seas Letters of Vernon Lee Walker and Louis Becke. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Van Sittert, Lance. “Begging Letters: Tin Trunk Diplomacy and the Empathy Economy of Tristan de Cunha, c. 1909–39.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44:2 (2016): 263–287.Google Scholar
Willoughby-Herard, Tiffany. Waste of a White Skin: The Carnegie Corporation and the Racial Logic of White Vulnerability. University of California Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Würgler, Andreas. “Voices from Among the “Silent Masses”: Humble Petitions and Social Conflicts in Early Modern Central Europe.” International Review of Social History 46:S9 (2001): 11–34.Google Scholar
Zaret, David. “Petitions and the ‘Invention’ of Public Opinion in the English Revolution.” American Journal of Sociology 101:6 (1996): 1497–1555.CrossRefGoogle Scholar