De Colonos laboriosos, gatunos e bêbados trapaceiros: Mundos do trabalho e colonialismo em At Home in the Transvaal (1884), de Mary Ann Carey-Hobson

Abstract

The article analyzes Mary Ann Carey-Hobson’s adventure novel At Home in the Transvaal (1884), observing the literary source from a theoretical-methodological perspective that emphasizes its relations with labor and colonialism in southern Africa, during the 1870s and 1880s. The analysis emphasizes the idealization of farmers and workers in the mining fields, noting Hobson's emphasis on a desirable type of settler: young, hardworking and enterprising, subservient and affectionately attached to their employers, symptomatic of racialist and paternalistic elements in Hobson's literary writing. In this way, the novel approaches the interests of the colonial elite and the white settlers in southern Africa, which, in that context, aimed to establish more effective ways of controlling black Africans’ labor and lands.without “moral vices”, such as alcoholism or gambling. Furthermore, Hobson draws distinctions between white and black workers, describing them as domestic servants,