New Book Release: From Colonial to Modern

My new co-authored book is now available from University of Toronto Press. It's been many years in the making with two wonderful colleagues, Kristine Moruzi and Clare Bradford (Deakin University), and focuses on dozens of novels and magazines from colonial Australia, Canada and New Zealand that have been largely excluded from studies of children's and national literatures to date.

Here's the book blurb:

Through a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand texts published between 1840 and 1940, From Colonial to Modern develops a new history of colonial girlhoods revealing how girlhood in each of these emerging nations reflects a unique political, social, and cultural context.

Print culture was central to the definition, and redefinition, of colonial girlhood during this period of rapid change. Models of girlhood are shared between settler colonies and contain many similar attitudes towards family, the natural world, education, employment, modernity, and race, yet, as the authors argue, these texts also reveal different attitudes that emerged out of distinct colonial experiences. Unlike the imperial model representing the British ideal, the transnational girl is an adaptation of British imperial femininity and holds, for example, a unique perception of Indigenous culture and imperialism. Drawing on fiction, girls’ magazines, and school magazine, the authors shine a light on neglected corners of the literary histories of these three nations and strengthen our knowledge of femininity in white settler colonies.

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference, 13-14 June 2012

The poster for the Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls conference is now finished. Kristine Moruzi and I are very excited to be hosting so many people from around the world whose work we admire in Melbourne in June.

Our keynote speakers are historian Professor Angela Woollacott from the Australian National University and English scholar Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta, Canada. Professor Devereux's lecture will be a free public lecture on the evening of the 14th of June from 6.00pm in Elisabeth Murdoch, Theatre A, at the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus. The talk is entitled "Fashioning the Colonial Girl: ‘Made in Britain’ Femininity in the Imperial Archive".

Registration is now open for the two conference days. We have a conference site ready with further details about the event and a link to our secure registration site.

The Girl Museum: The World's Only Museum About Girls

It's been heartening to see so much interest in girlhood lately. The 'Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls' conference call for papers had a massive response from scholars around the world to the point where the event will be larger than we anticipated, even when trying to restrain its size as much as we can. It will be intriguing to see what the blend of literature scholars, cultural historians, art historians, garden variety historians and even anthropologists will produce.

In the course of organising the conference, I was alerted to the existence of the Girl Museum, which will now contribute to an exciting (and, as yet, secret) event at the conference that will relate to our theme. The virtual museum resembles a traditional museum in that, alongside research, it focuses on preparing exhibitions. Visitors can browse exhibitions on Girlhood in Art (currently featuring Girl Saints and Across Time and Space, a collection of images of girlhood from the beginnings of civilisation) and the Art of Girlhood (which concentrates on material culture, and at present reveals the fascinating customs associated with Hina Matsuri- Girls' Day- in Japan).

These more traditional exhibitions are complemented with unique ways of representing contemporary girlhood. For instance, the Girl for Sale exhibit examines the disturbing subject of trafficking in girls, combining poetry, some written by survivors of trafficking, historical and contemporary art images, and resources for learning more about the facts of trafficking. In its collaborative, interactive spaces at the moment you will find the Heroines Quilt, composed of images of 31 diverse girlhood heroines submitted by members of the public (each was accompanied by a short essay on the Girl Museum's blog), and Becoming Girl, which collects together visual art by Chaya Avramov (complete with an article from the Museum curators that gives a Deleuzian perspective on the Museum and its work).

More news about the collaboration with this unique site soon!

Call for Papers: Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Conference
13-15 June 2012, The University of Melbourne, Australia
(PDF of Call for Papers poster)

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean, held out the possibility for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity. ‘Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls’ seeks to draw together international scholars for a multi-disciplinary examination of how colonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Colonial girls occupy an ambivalent and sometimes contested position in British and settler societies, They are sometimes seen as a destabilizing force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or as a disruption that can, and must, be contained. The emergent writings of British-born settlers about and for girls, which were usually published in England, contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between “home” and new dominions.

Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities, and Irish girls were frequently ‘hot-headed’ and untamed. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Crucially, the Empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s “imperial century”. The Empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of Empire and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and reading the intersections and synergies in these transformations will prove mutually illuminating

Scholars from Art History, English, Cultural Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Education and cognate fields are invited to submit proposals that engage with any aspect of the intersection of British colonialism and girlhood in the period 1815-1930. Papers may be inspired by, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:

• colonial girls as representative of British imperial ideals
• tensions between imperial and national/colonial identities
• the circulation of feminine ideals between colonies
• print culture and the development of gendered colonial ideals
• Indigenous girlhoods
• coming of age in the colonies
• colonial life as a threat to girlhood
• girlhoods and evolving nationalisms
• British representations of colonial femininity
• class and labour in the colonies
• the imagined role of colonial girls in the British Empire

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Dr Michelle Smith: msmith@unimelb.edu.au and Dr. Kristine Moruzi: moruzi@ualberta.ca by 15 September.