White pastoral literature imposed Edenic biblical meaning onto harsh colonial landscapes

Evidence

J. M. Coetzee, the noted and now notably alienated South African Nobel novelist, insightfully identified a form of representation among European settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found especially in “white writing.” Coetzee characterizes this mode of representation as “white pastoral.” “White pastoral” is the representation of an idyllic, edenic landscape, the aesthetic articulation of European gardens if not of little England itself being lost to industrialization, quite at odds with the harshness of the actual environment. White pastoral resonates with theological significance too, biblical meaning inscribed on the landscape itself. Thus Cape Town’s landmark Table Mountain, shrouded by the southeasterly table cloth, is the imagined site of the Last Supper, biblically bookended on each side by magisterial mountainous peaks aptly named Devil’s Peak and the Twelve Apostles respectively. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1403

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Coetzee’s ‘white pastoral’ concept as Edenic misrepresentation of harsh colonial landscape.
• SEED: Article angle: how settlers literally name colonial landmarks after biblical geography — Table Mountain as site of the Last Supper — as a way of overwriting the existing place.
• FICTION: The Table Mountain / Last Supper / Twelve Apostles mapping is a vivid worldbuilding detail for a story about colonial cartography or sacred geography.
• XREF: connects to: Settlers represented colonized land as edenic European gardens in ‘white pastoral’ writing — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1403; Wilderness originally signified biblical places of moral peril and exile — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 9; The Old Testament’s wilderness image authorized Protestant dominion over nature and land. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 555 (+1 more)