Department of English

• Thursday, February 20, 2025 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

CLALS Conference Room (McNeil 473)

ResVic, the Latinx Studies Working Group, and the Center for Latin American Studies Graduate Advisory Board will host Professor Jessie Reeder for her talk titled "Victorians in the River Plate."

Who were the “Victorians” of South America—the men and women who migrated from Britain to Montevideo and Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century? By examining locally published anglophone newspapers, Prof. Jessie Reeder shows that British migrants to the Rio de la Plata region trod a liminal ground marked by their narrow individual interests, the frameworks of British imperial influence, Latin American sovereignty, and the cultural pressures of emigration. Fraught coverage of the Uruguayan Civil War of the 1840s shows how these expatriates’ double loyalty to European liberal political principles and the Uruguayan state set them at odds with British gunboat diplomacy, Queen Victoria, and each other. Poetry published in Buenos Aires in the 1860s shows how this far southern corner of the Atlantic continued to stretch British notions of “home” at mid-century. Simultaneously members of a powerful foreign contingent and a small immigrant community in sovereign nations, both intensely British in identification and rapidly transculturating, at once loyal to the British crown and protective of local institutions they depended on, these migrants stretch critical accounts of the concepts “Victorian” and “imperial.” As case studies, Prof. Reeder argues that these Britons’ publishing history opens new ways to think about the intersection of imperialism and transnationalism.