| "Mixed Humanity" argues that British dramas of labor and industry---acted out in the English governess novel of the nineteenth-century, in pastoral verse of the period, or, at the turn-of-the-century, in silent cinema---all came to be restaged in the South African colony. South African literature and film import the Victorian crisis of work. While most surveys of South African history suggest that a crisis of labor, partly generated from Europe, served to construct something of the country's predicament, how this same crisis emerged as a unique interface for literary and cinematic development has received far less treatment. "Mixed Humanity" addresses this scholarly gap. Framed through conversational pairings of Victorian and South African writers, as well as a more varied cast of film spectators, (comparisons, for instance, between Thomas Pringle and William Wordsworth, Olive Schreiner and William Thackeray, Solomon Plaatje and Sir Walter Scott, and, in the wider framework of the early twentieth-century, between Ezekiel Mphahlele and Rudyard Kipling), the project aims to strategically rethink, in both South African and British arenas, transnational dramas of work. What makes representing imaginary relations of labor especially rich here has to do with the tumultuous period of labor history and imperial formation the project takes on: 1830 to 1930, from roughly the end of slavery in the British colonies to the rise of apartheid---bookends of oppressively settled representations of employment. Radically departing from the idea of these "imagined communities," or from any myth which cultivates a singular feeling for nationhood, the project reframes representations of labor, staged between abolition and apartheid, through a profoundly border-breaking lens. States of labor depicted in literature and film, from 1830 to 1930, appear decidedly mixed, hybrid, international, multiethnic, modern. Postcolonial readings often concentrate, for good reason, on the struggle for the division of labor dramatized in non-European lands---the Manichean division forged between master and slave, between Prosperos and Calibans. My contention, however, is that this seemingly circumscribed war over work, dramatized in the colony, also speaks, through cultural translations abroad, to a labor crisis of another home, beyond the constraints of South African borders. |
