Conferences, Symposia and Public Lectures
Conference
Colonial Girlhood * Colonial Girls
Date: 13 - 14 June 2012
Hosted by the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls is a multi-disciplinary two-day conference that will examine the intersections of gender and colonialism. Parallel conference sessions will include speakers from disciplines including English, cultural studies, history, art history, cinema and education from nations such as New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and the United States.
Keynote speakers
- Professor Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National University
- Associate Professor Cecily Devereux, Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, Canada
The conference includes the launch of the exhibition Home & Away: Portrait Photographs of Colonial Girls (hosted and curated by the Girl Museum).
For further information and to register visit the conference page on the Australasian Victorian Studies Association website. Early-bird registration for the conference is $150 ($100 for students/underemployed) if paid by 15 May.
Enquiries:
Bronwyn Lowe
Public Lecture
Fashioning the Colonial Girl: 'Made in Britain' Femininity in the Imperial Archive
Date: 13 June 2012
Time: 6.00 - 7.30pm
Venue: Elisabeth Murdoch, Theatre A
Speaker: Associate Professor Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta, Canada
Download the Public Lecture flyer
If woman, as Simone de Beauvoir has famously suggested, is not born but made, the work of construction is arguably more rarely more evident than in the making of the colonial New Girl of the British Empire. Impetuous, adventurous, naturally inclined to mothering, nursing, teaching, and problem solving, plucky, chaste, and rosily Anglo-Saxon, the colonial New Girl sprang from the pages of novels, stories, magazines, catalogues, and Anglo-imperial emigrationist propaganda at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Signifying in the context of a surge of migration from Britain from the 1880s on, the colonial New Girl simultaneously indexes thousands of young women circulating in colonial space and represents a cluster of ideas of femininity, race, class, and nation that go into her formation on and in paper. On the one hand a crucial part of what Thomas Richards has described as the imperial archive, a "paper empire … built on a series of flimsy pretexts that were always becoming texts", her representation on paper is also an archive of process - not only of always becoming texts but, as Michelle J. Smith has demonstrated, of becoming "girl". In fiction and across cultural representations, the colonial New Girl was fashioned as a figure for young women to embody, her image and the ideology she staged in the things she did and the stuff she wore circulating in and through the paper that carried her around the empire. "Made in Britain", the colonial girl on the move is an agent of empire, an advertisement for and consumer of its products and technologies, and an imperial commodity in circulation in and through the mobilizing of her representation in print. This paper considers the ways in which the colonial girl is made and mobilized in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century print culture, focusing in particular on fictional narratives of becoming through fashion and on the expanding imperial consumer culture that both opened and controlled the making of femininity by "girls" themselves.
Biography
Associate Professor Cecily Devereux is a specialist in English-Canadian literature and women's writing. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on imperial feminism, maternalism, white slavery, and eugenics. Her books include Growing a Race: Nellie L. McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (MQUP 2005) and, as editor, Women and Empire, 1750-1939 (Routledge 2009) and Women Writing Home, 1700-1920 (Pickering and Chatto 2005).