Worlding the South: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies.

Abstract

In 1847, Pacific Islander Kiro arrived in London to help the London Missionary Society with a translation of the Bible into Cook Islands Māori. As Kiro disembarked from the missionary ship onto the West India Docks, his status suddenly changed from a fellow Christian and facilitator of the missionary efforts in the South Pacific to a potential thief, an object of surveillance and suspicion. Michelle Elleray’s chapter on Kiro’s experiences in Worlding the south: Nineteenth-century literary culture and the southern settler colonies challenges our orientation toward colonial and Indigenous identity. Kiro exposes the challenges in reading not only Christian Pacific Islander experience, but in the problem of framing and accessing such experiences through British sites and archives.