Keele Research Repository

Zoë Wicomb's short story ‘There's the Bird that Never Flew’ engages with one of Glasgow's most prominent pieces of public art. Unveiled as part of the 1888 Empire Exhibition, the Doulton Fountain commemorates Queen Victoria's colonial achievements with terracotta representations of Britain's overseas territories. Among these, is a depiction of South Africa featuring a white farmer, a girl of mixed race and an ostrich, a metonymic evocation that triggers Wicomb in an exploration of the relationships between Glasgow and South Africa. Her postcolonial revision of the fountain imbricates the colonial monument in a complex series of spatial, bodily, textual and temporal connections that destabilise the totalizing ambitions of the Empire. In approaching Wicomb's interspatial figuration of Doulton's work, we draw on archival material emerging from the exhibition and on Michael Foucault's concept of heterotopia and investigate Wicomb's challenge to the effacement of the body and the obliteration of voices endorsed by municipal Glasgow.