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E-book Shaping Natural History and Settler Society : Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape

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Penilaian

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Ghosts ‘are a haunting reminder of an ignored past’, Banu Subramaniam, professor and chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, asserts in her exploration of the politics of science. It is our duty as historians to render these ghosts visible by ‘confront[ing] the past, or [else] the dead never go away, history never sleeps, the truth can never be erased, forgotten, or foreclosed’.1Shaping Natural History and Settler Society: Mary Elizabeth Barber and the Nineteenth-Century Cape addresses a number of interconnected ‘ghosts’, or ‘ignored pasts’, specifically women’s contributions to science, the involvement of the South in global knowledge networks and the role of knowledge production in colonial dispossession.This is a demythologisation of the male-dominated practices of Victorian science and of ‘colonial knowledge’. It is a reconstruction of the scientific work of British-born and Cape-raised scientist Mary Elizabeth Barber (née Bowker) and her associates. Barber serves as a prism to explore Victorian natural history and to demonstrate the ways it changed throughout the course of her career from the 1840s to the late 1880s. It is an exploration of her compatriots’ and metropolitan col-leagues’ negotiations and interrelations of gender, race and class in sci-ence. The British historian of science, Jim Endersby, has reconsidered three themes which dominate the understanding of Victorian science: the reception of Darwinism, the spread of colonialism and the birth of sci-ence as a profession.2 This study adds gender, settler colonialism and South-North engagement in the making of modern science to the explo-ration. It illuminates the social, political and economic circumstances which shaped Barber’s career and determines the nature of the impact which Darwin’s books, on the one hand, and the theories and practices forged at the Cape, on the other, had on natural history and society. It correlates these to topics which have generally been studied in isolation from each other: the historical reception of natural history and science in Europe, the British Empire and beyond.It contributes to the history of science in Southern Africa and the his-torical reception of Darwinism at the Cape.3 By focusing on an early bota-nist, ornithologist and entomologist, this book wishes to contribute to a dynamic recent literature on the role of women scholars as collectors, illus-trators and authors in the field sciences in Southern Africa.4 Despite devel-oping a strong interest in animal and plant studies and environmental humanities, this study follows an understanding of history as the study of human beings within their temporal and spatial contexts.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

960 HAM s

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2019

Deskripsi Fisik

374 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783030226398

Klasifikasi

960

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

History of Africa

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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