The Valparaiso Review: Victorian press on the moveر
Jennifer Hayward, Michelle Prain-Brice
ABSTRACT
Among the periodicals published in Chile in the late 19th century, The Valparaiso Review stands out as a monthly magazine published in English. Produced by the British colony of Valparaíso, the Review covered the colony’s economic, political, social, sporting, literary and cultural events between 1894 and 1896. In analyzing the foreign-language press, the choice of language is never neutral but rather reveals a desire on the part of the editors to communicate in an alternative discourse with a defined audience, both inside and outside the country of publication (Deschamps 25). In this essay, we analyse the ways that English literature becomes, as Terry Eagleton explains, a vehicle for transmitting an ideologically-charged discourse in order to promote sympathy and brotherhood to bond disparate classes in the larger service of British imperialism (Eagleton 21-22). Even as The Valparaiso Review intervened in the local cultural scene of Valparaíso and promoted the circulation of ideas from Britain, however, we argue that this first English-language magazine in Chile also assumed the role of cultural mediator, thereby contributing to the cultural hybridisation of foreigners in Valparaiso. To trace the complex cultural role played by The Valparaiso Review in Chile, we follow Jude Piesse’s model of the circulation of Anglophone texts in Empire: Piesse argues that such texts serve as simultaneously stabilizing and destabilizing forces (forces of fixity and forces of flow), a model that illuminates the complex and sometimes contradictory positions adopted by this “alternative voice” in Chile.
Keywords: The Valparaiso Review; Victorian culture; foreign language press; cultural mediations; Chilean anglophone press
Keywords:
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1Transfopress, red internacional de investigadores y académicos, ha llevado adelante el estudio de la prensa en lengua foránea (foreign language press), escrita en una lengua distinta a la que predomina en el lugar donde se produce.
2N del E.: Todas las traducciones en este artículo son de las autoras. El original dice: “We Englishmen abroad” y “We hope to count amongst our readers many Chilian friends”.
3“British Settler Emigration in Print identifies two distinct modes of periodical emigration literature that reconfigure our understanding of the culture of the nineteenth-century British empire” (Piesse 4).
4“The first of these models is what I term a “mainstream” literary engagement, which flourished across a range of often highly popular, predominantly middle class periodicals . . . .these widely read texts combine overlapping models of home, nation and settlement with variously nuanced temporalities of a similarly cohesive character in order to absorb the mobility of settlerism . . . . It can ultimately be viewed as a literature of cohesion that struggled to contain an uneasiness about the destabilizing, unruly, and emotionally disorienting acts of migration with which it engaged. No less importantly, however, the present study also brings to light a feminist and radical periodical emigration literature that often draws upon mainstreams representations of emigration in order to challenge their dominant formations and configure alternative mobilities” (Piesse 4).
5Piesse toma las nociones de “fixity” y de “flow” del del geógrafo cultural Tim Cresswell, en su obra On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London: Routledge, 2006).
6Cooper-Richet, “En el comienzo de la institucionalización de las disciplinas: revistas, editores y lectores, actores de la circulación de los saberes y de las prácticas científicas (Francia, Reino Unido, América Latina), en el siglo XIX” (21-22).
7Maria Graham, Maria Graham to John Murray II. Letter No, 46, 17 Sept. 1824 (Río de Janeiro). John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh, U.K.). Traducción nuestra; el original dice: “I enclose this letter in the Admiral’s bag & hope it will reach you safely - I should be much obliged to you if you would send me the Quarterly Review regularly & if addressed to John May Esq. 16 George Street Mansion house, I should receive it”.
8“We hope to make the Review fill a long felt want”; “many Englishmen living in Chile have felt the need of a paper giving in a compact form a general account of Chilian national and local politics and finance”; “that this section may be useful to many living in Europe whose previous experience or present business interests make it desirable that they should know something of what is passing in Chile”.
9“...open a field for literary effort, which at present receives so little encouragement in Chile. We Englishmen abroad are too much inclined to neglect matters of purely intellectual interests, and if this paper should in any degree awaken dormant literary powers a great end will be gained”.
10“ Assim, independentemente da língua materna de quem financia e do lugar em que são publicadas, algumas revistas optam pelo francês, pelo inglês, pelo espanhol ou pelo árabe com a intenção de veicular conteúdos específicos pelo mundo todo nos domínios diplomático, político, econômico e científico. A escolha do idioma nunca é, de fato, algo anódino; antes, revela um desejo dos redatores por transmitir um discurso alternativo ou de endereçá-lo a um público definido, ao mesmo tempo dentro e fora dos países de publicação” (Deschamps 26).
11...“to count amongst our readers many Chilian friends, and we beg them to accept our assurances that all we write about Chilian affairs will be written in the spirit of the warmest friendliness”.
12“As religion progressively ceases to provide the social ‘cement,’ affective values and basic mythologies by which a turbulent class-society can be welded together, ‘English’ is constructed as a subject to carry this ideological burden from the Victorian period onwards” (Eagleton 21).
13“Literature was in several ways a suitable candidate for this ideological enterprise […] English, as a Victorian handbook for English teachers put it, helps ‘promote sympathy and fellow feeling among all classes [and . . .] would give them a pride in their national language and literature’” (Eagleton 22).
14“Epic poet of England”.
15“For two centuries the English tongue had had no interpreter […] Suddenly with a rush of a Summer in northern latitudes [...] the speech, which for generations seemed destined only for the uses of household’s needs, flowered into a luxuriance whose parallel has to be sought in the ages of antiquity. The greatest name in Literature has dwarfed with its mighty fame others which open under its shade. But in the little space of a generation the English language had become the greatest living organ of every mode of expression to which human thought can give utterance”.
16“…his character had been of that reproachlessness and purity [...] In combined intellectual accomplishment and magnanimity, and in the dower of genius the young student of Christ Church […] had no living peer in his native land, we may almost add in the whole European commonwealth”.
17“…so familiarly on the planes of noblest accomplishment and breathe so pure an empyrean […] And yet we should remember that they too [great authors] are of kinship with us”.
18“…the old controversy respecting the relationship between art and morals”.
19“The temptation to pass judgment, is of course, great, but in view of the fact that we do not know what was done and attempted in that initial step which joined the courses of their lives, a wise suspense of judgment is probably the most fitting attitude to adopt, although this need not make one repress the desire, which probably most of her admirers share, that some other solution of the difficulty might have avoided even the suspicion of having in her own life contradicted the most impressive ethical conception contained in her writings”.
20“One rises from a perusal of her works with the feeling of having been in communion with a high and commanding intellect that has devoted itself to a great end […] If we do not find in her works that which will nourish our boundless hopes, there is much that will strengthen and brace us for the ordinary claims and duties of life”.
21“The question was decided in favour of ‘Brains’ by a vote of 18 to 12”; “a great number of members present abstained from voting altogether”.
22“One of the most picturesque and instructive walks in Valparaiso, is along the “Malecon” about eight o'clock in the morning. One see all sorts and conditions of men, and the variety of merchandise shipped from day to day, especially for the North, would astonish a stranger”.
23“An artist might find many a picturesque model amongst them in their brightly coloured shirts and scarves, their short pants and sleeves rolled back disclosing sinewy limbs and as head gear generally a sack, point upwards or round turban fashion, another tied round the waist as apron”.
24“The men would be gathered round a fiery leader haranguing them with many gestures, or grouped round some ‘compañero’ who, having engaged the advantages of school, is spelling out the “Union” to them”.
25Para este tema, consultar nuestro ensayo “La ‘Cuestión de la mujer’ ha surgido en Chile”: La prensa británico-chilena en Valparaíso," en el libro Figuras de lo común. Formas y disensos en los estudios literarios (Valparaíso: Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaíso PUCV / Colección Dársena), que será publicado dentro del 2020.
26“At 16 or 17 they leave school prepared for what? Can they be said to be equipped for their life´s struggle. Certainly there is nothing in what they have learned to prevent their becoming good wives and mothers, but there is nothing to help them”.
27If I lived in Utopia, I would have a higher school for the daughters of the poorer classes where I should mix with the intellectual work a great deal of technical instruction [...] My girls should besides be trained in the art of teaching, and the management of children […] Above all, the bent of each girl´s mind, her particular taste should be carefully studied and cultivated as much as possible; so that she might have some aim to follow, and some way in which she would feel sure of earning her living with pleasure and satisfaction.
28“Sendo ao mesmo tempo a força centrípeta e a força centrífuga que permitem aos imigrantes cultivar suas diferenças, favorecendo uma transição na direção do modelo nacional do país de chegada, a imprensa étnica tem sido estudada muitas vezes por sua função asimiladora […] O papel que ela assume no processo de aculturação das populações de origem estrangeira não deve, contudo, ocultar sua especificidade, nem a originalidade de uma parte de suas posições. Não é raro que ela ofereça um ponto de vista alternativo, que permite ampliar os debates nacionais, apresentando opiniões ditas minoritárias, mas necessárias à reflexão mais ampla sobre o país […] Porém, se essas publicações ainda são dinâmicas, certamente isso ocorre porque seu conteúdo e/ou sua abordagem se distinguem da imprensa nacional “dominante.” O fato de elas pertencerem cada vez mais a redes de informações transnacionais lhes garante um público mais amplo e contribui para que se mantenham como uma voz diferente” (50).
Received: March 02, 2020; Revised: June 11, 2020; Accepted: November 20, 2020
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