Porscha Fermanis: Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere
Cover image: Dr Christian Thompson AO, ‘Invaded Dreams’, from the ‘We Bury Our Own’ series, 2012. C-type print on Fuji Pearl Metallic Paper, 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of Studio Dr Christian Thompson AO, Melbourne, Australian 2026.
Short-term or transient mobility has traditionally been understood as little more than incidental to the progressively nationalist thrust of nineteenth-century fiction. The default position is to view the novel as ‘the high cultural artefact of the Empire’, a symbolic form whose ideological work almost inevitably tends towards the promotion of bourgeois individualism and the homogeneous, empty time of the modern nation state. Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 posits that the settler novel, far from being a generic and belated version of metropolitan fiction, can assist us in understanding complex, transitionary modes of settler and migrant cultural identification across and between multiple settler colonial spaces. It therefore seeks to disrupt linear understandings of Angloworld migration as a one-way journey from Europe or America in favour of a broader heuristic grounded in the thickness of networks and interrelations, and in relations of entanglement, connection, proximity, and contiguity. The book takes seriously the ways in which different mobilities, diasporas, and process geographies shaped both the perception of the colonies and the subjectivities of colonial inhabitants of various kinds. The alternative cartography it maps out is one that takes its cue from the settler fiction it examines, which often depicts mobility or movement between places, and foregrounds the world-making and subject-producing qualities of literary space.
The book’s focus is on two themes: first, the ways in which settler fiction encodes regional spatial imaginaries, such as Australasia, Oceania, and the trans-Tasman world; and second, representations of imagined noncommunities, marginalised or precarious political subjects, and the historically punishable bodies of Indigenous and mixed-race peoples, indentured labourers, non-European diasporas, convicts, white paupers, and those considered eugenically unfit. The first part of the book, ‘Geofictions’, considers how settler fiction addresses and demarcates various forms of literary space, from pastoral, urban, and intimate frontiers to the deterritorialized spaces of capital transfers. The second part of the book, ‘Biofictions’, considers the interplay between the infrastructures of civil life and forms of life and death, shifting emphasis away from territorial ground and towards the exercise of sovereign power over human bodies. By focusing on minor transnationalisms and diasporic movement, the book challenges the preemptively privileged position of the nation state in the settler imaginary, and redresses the reification of the settler colonies as bounded, autonomously created units without shared social, political, and cultural histories. It also moves away from curiously static understandings of settler cultural history as the reproduction of modular British institutions, asking us to instead read settlerism against its own professed ideology of stability, permanence, and coherence.
Key features:
- Examines lesser-known or ‘minor’ settler novels that foreground mobility between settler spaces rather than foundational or canonical settler texts that naturalise settlement
- Approaches the southern hemisphere from a position of proximity rather than distance, and understands colonial literary history as multi-sited and multi-perspectival
- Considers the importance of local, regional, transnational, and transcolonial spatial imaginaries across the colonial southern hemisphere
- Focuses on representations of marginalised or precarious political subjects, such as white paupers, convicts, indentured labourers, non-European diasporas, mixed-race peoples, and the disabled or those considered eugenically unfit
Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere is available to order here
Porscha Fermanis (MRIA) is a professor of Romantic and nineteenth-century literature at University College Dublin. Her research interests lie in the fields of global nineteenth-century studies, British Romanticism, the philosophy of history, and book history, with a special interest in the literatures of the colonial southern hemisphere and Southeast Asia. From 2016-2021, Prof. Fermanis was principal investigator of the European Research Council Starter Grant SouthHem on the literary cultures of nineteenth-century Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, and Malaysia. From 2027, she will be the principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant PanAsia (2027-2032), which investigates cooperative cultural endeavours between different ethnic groups across Southeast Asia. Alongside Prof. Omar F. Miranda (U of San Francisco), Prof Fermanis is the general series editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series, The New Nineteenth Century. In 2026, she was the S. W. Brooks Visiting Fellow at the University of Queensland. Originally from Australia, Prof. Fermanis is a graduate of the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford. Her most recent book is Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 (OUP, 2026)