Lecture | COGLOSS lecture
Four San Performers in Victorian Britain at a Time of Death: A Global Microhistory between Britain and South Africa
- Date
- Wednesday 9 April 2025
- Time
- Serie
- COGLOSS seminars 2024-2025
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Abstract
This paper takes at its starting point the ten-year sojourn in mid-Victorian Britain of four San performers, advertised as 'the Bosjesmans', who were exhibited in Britain and France at a time of the ongoing killing of hunter gatherers in southern Africa. The paper asks what the multi-faceted reception of this group, and the material surrounding them, suggests about ways in which child trafficking and the killing of hunters on settler frontiers were debated, normalized and ignored in the empire. I also ask how hunting and hunters were imagined in Britain, and, finally, how far it might be possible to reconstruct aspects of the group’s experiences.
About the speaker
Dr. Elizabeth Elbourne is a historian from the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. She is specialised in histories of empire and settler colonialism and how to move between the local and the global within those contexts. She has published her works in various journals and publishing houses. Her earlier book, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 (2002 with Mcgill-Queen's University Press, was awarded with several awards. Her recent book, Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (2022 with Cambridge University Press), examines the relations between violence and kinship on British settler colonial frontiers and how they related to struggles over indigenous claims to land and humanity. From October 2024 to April 2025, she is a Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, based at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her current interests and project concern debates on the human rights and sovereignty claims of hunter gatherers by focusing on British-San interaction in Southern Africa and Victorian Britain during the nineteenth century, which also takes the display of San people in Britain into consideration.