The Stories Outside the African Farm: Indigeneity, Orality, and Unsettling the Victorian

This article turns to the context of what has come to be known as South Africa in order to examine how Victorian literary studies could engage more fully and responsibly with the Indigenous literatures of the British Empire. Drawing on the frameworks and methods developed within Indigenous studies and in recent work by Khoisan scholars, the essay develops a reading practice that works to recuperate traces of Khoisan oral traditions from the colonial archive by centering Khoisan ways of knowing and forms of expression. The article ends by using this apparatus and approach to briefly analyze Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883). In so doing, it identifies points of critical entry for both disrupting the novel's glancing and deeply racist treatment of its few Khoisan characters and for registering how these characters showcase forms of Khoisan knowledge, cultural survival, and aesthetic prowess.