Manly Pursuits: Rhodes, queer Victorian manliness and the homosocial politics of settler colonialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ann Harries’ surfacing of Cecil John Rhodes’s homosexuality in Manly Pursuits (1999), a neo-Victorian biofictional rendering of his decline after the failed Jameson Raid (1895), is integral to her portrayal of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism as an essentially male homosocial endeavour. In this paper, I argue that Harries’ ironic, self-reflexive use of the entangled discourses of literature and history instantiates multiple, shifting intertextual significations that draw past and present into a perpetual, mutually constitutive dialogue, which is, as Linda Hutcheon points out, definitive of historiographic metafiction’s ‘critical reworking’ of the past. Historical fictions such as these register and engage current concerns pertinent to settler colonial studies and I view them as an essential body of work for consideration within this field. The foregrounding of gender and sexuality in Manly Pursuits is a salient example of what I propose as their strategic presentism and its articulation with settler colonial studies.