Unsettlement: Destabilizing Development in Southern Africa's Settler Fiction

Abstract

Abstract:In the midst of a turbulent decade, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) registered the uncertain future of British colonialism in southern Africa by endowing their white protagonists with alternative possible selves whose pluralism complements the alternative possible instantiations of the settler colony. Forking, parallel, and recursive developmental trajectories lead these novels' characters toward multiple, sometimes contradictory, future states. What results is a dynamic, antiteleological model of Bildung that conceives of the self as a pluralized assortment of potential subjects.