Women went on expeditions. One of them was English-born Mary Elizabeth Barber (1818–99) who lived and travelled in the colonies of today’s South Africa. She experimented with the expedition journal genre and its potentials for self-description. She voiced her opinion on settler women’s place in society and used spatial descriptions and plant analogies to negotiate ethnic identity and British settler superiority. Her case shows that there was no distinct tradition of women’s writing about nature and that Cape flora were important for the construction of ethnic identity before Afrikaans republicanism. The chapter discusses how knowledge on nature was used to negotiate gender equality, class and ethnic difference, as well as to legitimize the colonization of nature.
...MoreBook Marianne Klemun; Ulrike Spring (2016) Expeditions as Experiments: Practising Observation and Documentation.
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