Stage Irish and Boorish Boers

Abstract

Although Olive Schreiner features in most literary criticism as a champion of the disenfranchised, her portrayal of ethnic differences is inflected by transatlantic racial politics. The Irish and Boers in The Story of an African Farm conform to the Anglo-Saxon definitions of race and citizenship not only in southern Africa but also in the United States. Schreiner’s interest in Emerson and Carlyle, her dislike of rigid religious doctrines, and her vocal feminism account for the one-dimensionality of her Irish and Boer characters in her early work. This essay describes the enlarged geography of Bonaparte Blenkins – the influences that place the Irish–South African connections in Schreiner’s writing within, among other things, the context of racialization of the Irish in the late nineteenth-century United States.