Join us for our latest Work in Progress session, to be delivered by Roisin Lang, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Durham.
Online, Dec 10th, from 3.30pm (GMT).
For zoom link, precirculated paper, and other details, contact us at indigenousstudies@kent.ac.uk
A Mother’s Offering to her Children (1841) is the first book for children published in Australia. As Jacqueline Rose has famously asked, however, what do we mean by that ‘for’? The racialized violence in A Mother’s Offering brings this question into clearer view. I focus on one mode of violence—decapitation—to ask: what is the colonial function of the idea that this text is for children?
I argue that describing the ‘savage’ decapitation of a child as ‘for children’ makes the ‘child’ both violable and violent; reflected both in the decapitated child, and in the violent ‘savage’. In other words, the depictions of ‘savagery’ in A Mother’s Offering reflect the ‘child’ this text is supposedly ‘for’.
Thus, as ‘children’s literature’, A Mother’s Offering reinforces an analogy between the ‘child’ and the ‘savage’. This analogy was so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century culture that its status as a metaphor was effaced; it seemed to reveal that central tenet of colonial ideology, the childishness of Indigenous peoples. The colonial function of the genre of A Mother’s Offering is that it perpetuates the idea of the ‘savage-child’, and thereby naturalizes the infantilization of Indigenous peoples.
About the speaker:
Roisín Laing is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow with Durham University’s English Studies department and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. Roisín completed her MA in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 2010, where she won a David Masson Scholarship to undertake an MScR which she completed in 2011. She was awarded a PGCE from the University of Nottingham in 2013. Following this, she accepted a Durham Doctoral Scholarship for PhD research into precocity in nineteenth-century literature and psychology, which she completed in 2016. In 2017, she took up a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney, before returning to Durham for her current fellowship, researching the infantilisation of Indigenous peoples in the literature and science of colonial Australia.