English Literature Research Seminar Series: Porscha Fermanis In brief Guest Speaker - Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin) Title - Biofictions: Settler Colonialism and Heteronormativity in Australasian Settler Fiction Abstract by Porscha Fermanis Drawing on scholarship on colonial biopolitics and queer Indigenous studies by Mark Rifkin, Giorgio Agamben, Ann Laura Stoler, and others, this paper examines the connections in settler fiction between heteronormativity and Indigenous dispossession via what the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called ‘deep colonizing’, a process that aims to undermine the possibility of Indigenous self-determination through interracial marriage, missionary conversion, and a whole suite of other biocultural assimilations. Using as its central case study Sygurd Wiśniowski’s novel Tikera, or Children of the Queen of Oceania (1877), it examines how nineteenth-century settler fiction from Australia and New Zealand positions Indigenous, mixed-race, and minority peoples as queer to heteronormative settler-colonial regimes: first, by entangling Indigenous and non-European sexuality with discourses relating to ethnographic primitivity; second, by framing ethnic minorities and mixed-race and Indigenous peoples as queer populations ‘marked for death’; and third, by regulating and replacing non-European sexual, gender, and kinship norms with the sexual modernity of European settler subjects, in particular, with western European understandings of heteronormative couplehood and privatised intimacy. About the speaker Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. Her most recent books are "Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere" (with Lara Atkin et al., 2019) and "Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies" (ed. with Sarah Comyn, 2021). A monograph, "Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850", is in press and forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2022. Prof Fermanis is currently the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project ‘SouthHem’ and is working on a book entitled "Southern Settler Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890." Are you interested in a PhD in English Literature? We offer two PhDs: one in English Literature; and one in Creative Writing. Working with colleagues in LLC and across the wider University, we are able to support research which crosses boundaries between disciplines and/or languages. Find out more about PhD study in English Literature with us Dec 10 2021 16.00 - 17.00 English Literature Research Seminar Series: Porscha Fermanis Join us on Zoom for a free seminar by Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin) entitled “Biofictions: Settler Colonialism and Heteronormativity in Australasian Settler Fiction.” Online on Zoom
English Literature Research Seminar Series: Porscha Fermanis In brief Guest Speaker - Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin) Title - Biofictions: Settler Colonialism and Heteronormativity in Australasian Settler Fiction Abstract by Porscha Fermanis Drawing on scholarship on colonial biopolitics and queer Indigenous studies by Mark Rifkin, Giorgio Agamben, Ann Laura Stoler, and others, this paper examines the connections in settler fiction between heteronormativity and Indigenous dispossession via what the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called ‘deep colonizing’, a process that aims to undermine the possibility of Indigenous self-determination through interracial marriage, missionary conversion, and a whole suite of other biocultural assimilations. Using as its central case study Sygurd Wiśniowski’s novel Tikera, or Children of the Queen of Oceania (1877), it examines how nineteenth-century settler fiction from Australia and New Zealand positions Indigenous, mixed-race, and minority peoples as queer to heteronormative settler-colonial regimes: first, by entangling Indigenous and non-European sexuality with discourses relating to ethnographic primitivity; second, by framing ethnic minorities and mixed-race and Indigenous peoples as queer populations ‘marked for death’; and third, by regulating and replacing non-European sexual, gender, and kinship norms with the sexual modernity of European settler subjects, in particular, with western European understandings of heteronormative couplehood and privatised intimacy. About the speaker Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Romantic Literature at University College Dublin. Her most recent books are "Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere" (with Lara Atkin et al., 2019) and "Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies" (ed. with Sarah Comyn, 2021). A monograph, "Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850", is in press and forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2022. Prof Fermanis is currently the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project ‘SouthHem’ and is working on a book entitled "Southern Settler Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890." Are you interested in a PhD in English Literature? We offer two PhDs: one in English Literature; and one in Creative Writing. Working with colleagues in LLC and across the wider University, we are able to support research which crosses boundaries between disciplines and/or languages. Find out more about PhD study in English Literature with us Dec 10 2021 16.00 - 17.00 English Literature Research Seminar Series: Porscha Fermanis Join us on Zoom for a free seminar by Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin) entitled “Biofictions: Settler Colonialism and Heteronormativity in Australasian Settler Fiction.” Online on Zoom
Dec 10 2021 16.00 - 17.00 English Literature Research Seminar Series: Porscha Fermanis Join us on Zoom for a free seminar by Professor Porscha Fermanis (University College Dublin) entitled “Biofictions: Settler Colonialism and Heteronormativity in Australasian Settler Fiction.”
