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Kevin Hutchings

Kevin Hutchings is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Northern British Columbia, where he holds a University Research Chair and chairs the Research Committee in the Faculty of Indigenous Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities. He is the author of Transatlantic Upper Canada: Portraits in Literature, Land, and British–Indigenous Relations (2020), Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World (2009) and Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics (2002). He is also co-editor of Transatlantic Literary Ecologies (with John Miller, 2017), Transatlantic Literary Exchanges (with Julia M. Wright, 2011) and Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture: The Indian Atlantic (with Tim Fulford, 2009); and he has published more than thirty-five journal articles and book chapters. Kevin is currently working on a monograph entitled The Life and Literary Adventures of Sir Francis Bond Head, which under contract at McGill–Queen’s University Press and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Article: Anti-Imperialism and Indigenous Culture in Francis Bond Head’s Argentine Travels

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10 May 2026

This article examines Sir Francis Bond Head’s Romantic representation of Argentine Gauchos and ‘Pampas Indians’ in his bestselling 1826 memoir Rough Notes Taken during Some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes, an account of the author’s travels as a businessman leading the Rio Plata Mining Association’s failed effort to exploit a series of gold and silver mines in South America. Focusing on the text’s critical responses to contemporary racial theory, the Columbian ‘doctrine of discovery’, and the European master narrative of progress, I highlight Head’s anti-colonial critical engagement, including his willingness to consider his own complicities with the oppressive colonial practices he otherwise criticizes. Ultimately, I argue, Head’s Argentine writings demonstrate a self-reflexive critical promise that he failed to enact during his subsequent tenure as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada (1836–1838). Continue reading →

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