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Transcript of CounterNetworks( of# Empire · support! their! movement! around! the! colonies. Crucially, they!...
Reading Unexpected Peoples in Unexpected Places
Convenors: Tracey Banivanua Mar and Nadia Rhook
Counter Networks of Empire
La Trobe University, Franklin St Campus 215 Franklin Street, Melbourne
Friday, 6 November, 2015 10:00 AM-‐5:30 PM
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Welcome to Country and Opening 10:00 – 10:30 AM
Keynote 10:30 AM-‐12:00 PM
Alan Lester Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography
Lunch 12:00-‐1:00 PM
Panel 1: Networking the past … 1:00-‐3:00 PM Chair: Samia Khatun
Penny Edmonds Collecting ‘evidence’ of empire: Quaker investigative tours, violent mobilities and counter networks in the antipodes
Liz Conor Colonial Flotsam: Racialised Children caught up in the Workings of Nets
Nadia Rhook Forming Indian Networks in early White Australia Melbourne.
Sophie Loy-‐Wilson Chinese-‐Indigenous Encounters and Chinese Mobility in Australia and the Pacific
Afternoon Tea 3:00-‐3:30 PM
Panel 2: …with the Present and Future 3:30-‐5:30 PM
Chair: Samia Khatun
Damon Salesa Remaking a Native Sea: Samoans and Other Islanders in a Colonial and Postcolonial Age
Tracey Banivanua Mar Decolonisation and the ‘Black’ Pacific: intelligence networks and the pursuit of consciousness
Keith L. Camacho Lover, Father, Killer: Samoan Masculinities and Criminal Trials in New Zealand, 1950-‐1980
Tony Birch ‘A counter network for the future': climate change, the Anthropocene and Aboriginal Knowledge
Program
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Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography Alan Lester, University of Sussex This paper suggests that the spaces of British settler colonialism and metropolitan science were interconnected, under-‐examined, grounds upon which both ethnography and colonial governance developed. Focusing on the governmental and ethnographic activities of Sir George Grey, governor of South Australia, New Zealand and the Cape Colony during the mid-‐nineteenth century it argues that the origins of ethnography and the specifically humanitarian governance of spaces invaded by settlers were co-‐constituted. Although anthropologists have long recognised the complicity of ethnography in modern colonialism, the relationship thus runs far deeper and extends far more broadly, than has been appreciated in even the most incisive critiques. That relationship was also located in violent settler colonial spaces that have been relatively neglected in the anthropological historiography. The article concludes that Grey’s governmental practices, and his representations of them, established the terms upon which cultural genocide could be posited as an humane alternative to racial extermination. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole, he thus reconciled settler colonialism and humanitarian governance. Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (Routledge 2001); co-‐editor with David Lambert of Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and co-‐author with Fae Dussart of Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Collecting ‘evidence’ of empire: Quaker investigative tours, violent mobilities and counter networks in the antipodes Penny Edmonds, University of Tasmania This paper traces the investigative tours of British Quakers ‘travelling under concern’ in the 1830s who sought to witness the treatment of those violently mobilised and dislocated in empire’s service: convicts, slaves, and Indigenous peoples. Examination of these tours, as both religious journeys as well as cross-‐cultural enquiries, highlights the contingent and enmeshed ways that travel,
Abstracts and Bios
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mobility and the violence of empire and could give rise to new networks and social relations. Imperial circuits were often based on military, scientific or humanitarian personal and political connections and patronage, and these Quakers used both multi-‐denominational humanitarian and scientific networks to support their movement around the colonies. Crucially, they were active correspondents within a now esteemed global network of influential British humanitarians, writing regularly to Elizabeth Fry and anti-‐slavery advocate Thomas Fowell Buxton, and in the Australian colonies supported in their endeavours by Governors Richard Bourke and George Arthur. This paper, however, seeks to foreground the interconnectedness of elite and subaltern or marginalised imperial networks, revealing the ways that Quakers both witnessed and intervened in new cross-‐cultural, social constellations parallel to and in the service of empire, and at other times contested and ran counter to established imperial networks. Associate Professor Penny Edmonds is Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. Penny’s research and teaching interests include colonial histories, postcolonialism and Indigenous histories, humanitarianism and human rights, Australian and Pacific-‐region contact and transnational histories, cultural heritage, and performance. Major publications include Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-‐Century Pacific Rim Cities (UBC Press, 2010), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity co-‐edited with Tracey Banivanua-‐Mar (Palgrave UK, 2010). Her recent edited collection is Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim, co-‐edited with Kate Darian-‐Smith (Routledge Series in Cultural History, 2015). Her forthcoming book is titled Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Palgrave, 2016). Colonial Flotsam: Racialised Children caught up in the Workings of Nets Liz Conor, La Trobe University In April 1852 the Spanish monk Rosendo Salvado took two Yued Noongar boys from Western Australia to a Daguerreotype studio in Naples and had their portraits taken. Salvado, the founder of the Benedictine New Norcia mission, commissioned an engraving after the two daguerreotypes from a little-‐known Roman copper engraver and etcher Giuseppe Mochetti. Salvado intended the engraving of the boys to appear in his memoir of the founding of the mission, which he subsequently published in Italian, Spanish and French, to distribute throughout the ecclesiastical networks of Europe. In another unpublished, personally bound edition of his memoir that Salvado had assembled years later, he places the boys’ portraits opposite two moving letters they wrote to him in Italian from the Monastery Cava where they were training as Benedictine postulants. Conachi, the younger of the two boys died in Rome in October 1853.
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Dirimera returned to his family but died soon after in August 1855. They were among five Yued Noongar children taken to Europe by clergy, none of whom survived.
These children were of interest to Europeans because of the ways their race and childhood hinged, opening toward a future of civilised natives. They embodied an indigeneity set on a pathway that was radically divergent from that of their parents and ancestors. Disinherited from their people’s traditions they were thereby unclaimant heirs to their homelands and therefore critical to the central colonial project of dispossession.
Their bodies and images thus harboured potent post-‐hoc consequence. Unlike the adults whose care they were entrusted to, they were not so much networkers but caught up in nets not of their making and carried along through these vast colonial circuitries; in this case steam travel, monastic instruction and ecclesiastical print. In this paper I chart the movement of these children within the context of the mobility of racialised childhood and its cultural renderings, from the engravings and letters of Conachi and Dirimera to the colloquial type, the ‘piccaninny’. Liz Conor is a senior research fellow at La Trobe University and last year’s Abbot Placid Spearritt Memorial Fellow at New Norcia. Her PhD was published as The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, by Indiana University Press in 2004. She has completed an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne from which she wrote Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women [UWAP forthcoming 2016]. She is editor of the scholarly journal Aboriginal History and former editor of Metro Magazine and Australian Screen Education. She edited A Cultural History of Women in the Modern Age and a special issue of
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Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies on Types and Typologies and she has published articles on colonial and modern visual and print history in the Journal of Australian Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Feminist Theory and Gender and History. Her freelance essays and editorials have appeared in The Age, The Drum, Crikey.com, Arena and she is a columnist at New Matilda. Her blog has been archived by the National Library of Australia. Forming Indian Networks in early White Australia Melbourne Nadia Rhook, La Trobe University ‘Counter’ has verbal and noun forms. To counter is to act or move in the contrary direction. A counter, on the other hand, is a long object that at once separates people in space and facilitates meetings, or in other words, encounters. In the last decade, historians of empire have demonstrated that networks have profoundly mattered in the global making of race, but have paid less attention to the grounded physical forms of such networks. With an eye to the position of counters and benches in buildings across a racialised settler colonial city, this paper asks: how did the Melbourne Indian community form in the early years of the White Australia Policy? And how was the community at once formed by the triangular imperial relationship between Britain, India and Australia, and by the street-‐level relationship between counters, work and racial power? Via tracing the urban lives of two prominent Indian leaders – shopkeeper Khooda Bux and masseur Teepoo Hall – I suggest that in early twentieth century Melbourne the space around shop counters and massage benches had political potential. They were safe if surveyed public spaces for Indians to meet and counter the consequences of the restrictive federal Immigration Restriction Act, designed to whiten the urban economy and the nation at large. Bio: Nadia Rhook is a Research Fellow at La Trobe University, currently embarking on a new project about the triangular relationship between French Vietnam, Australia and New Caledonia. Her PhD researched language, law and race in colonial Melbourne. From it she has published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies and developed a walking tour of Migration Melbourne. Chinese-‐Indigenous Encounters and Chinese Mobility in Australia and the Pacific Sophie Loy-‐Wilson, University of Sydney This paper traces storytelling around Chinese-‐Indigenous encounters in Australia and the Pacific through Chinese-‐language sources and interviews with Chinese Australian descendants and Chinese-‐Papua New Guinean descendants in Australia and PNG. In doing so it seeks to retrieve networks of Chinese traders and missionaries active in Australia and PNG in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Sophie Loy-‐Wilson is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Laureate Centre for International History at the University of Sydney. In 2016 she will take up a permanent position in the Department of History at the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in Australian History. Remaking a Native Sea: Samoans and Other Islanders in a Colonial and Postcolonial Age Damon Salesa, University of Auckland While colonialism dominates the storylines of the twentieth century in western Polynesia, continuing as before, and largely in parallel with this, were deep connections between different Pacific Islanders. Long existing connections within this ‘Native Sea’—the ancient Pacific network that joined Tonga, Samoa, Uvea, Futuna and Fiji—remained strong and continued to be influential. Despite these connections being deeply and openly challenged by colonial rule, which sought both to control and to truncate Indigenous mobility, Pacific Islanders remained tied to each other. Responding to new restrictions while, at the same time, seizing upon new opportunities to move, this ‘Native Sea’ was remade by Pacific peoples. One of the culminations of these developments was the forging of new networks and spaces within the complicated site of New Zealand, in a process that looks very different if we understand it within Indigenous developments, and not just as a migration story driven by the state, capital or global labour migration. Damon Salesa is University Director of Pacific Strategy and Engagement, Associate Professor and Head of Pacific Studies and Co-‐Head of Te Wānanga o Waipapa (The School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies) at the University of Auckland. He is editor and author of books and scholarly articles on the Pacific Islands, empire, and history. He is the author of Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage and the Early Victorian Empire (Oxford, 2011; paperback 2013), which won the Ernest Scott Prize in 2012 and jointly edited and authored Tangata o le Moana: New Zealand and the People of the Pacific (Te Papa Press, 2012). At present he is leading a research project on technological, environmental and cultural change in Samoa, funded by a three year Marsden Grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand. Decolonisation and the ‘Black’ Pacific: intelligence networks and the pursuit of consciousness Tracey Banivanua Mar, La Trobe University This paper tracks the mobility of the transformative word, ‘Black’, as it circulated the Pacific’s oceanic world during the 1960s and 70s. Carried in the minds, words and pamphlets of radically mobile Indigenous peoples it wove a web that linked Port Moresby, Melbourne, Port Vila and island communities to New York, Geneva, and Dar es Salaam. Its weavings eroded colonialism’s power to isolate and marginalise and confounded the covert circuits of colonial intelligence through
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which British and Australian governments sought to contain decolonisation’s ‘winds of change’. As these governments explicitly colluded to reconfigure decolonisation as the next stage of Imperialism, Indigenous peoples in and around the Pacific developed rich intellectual, political and cultural traditions of decolonisation. As this paper explores, the mobility of Blackness during this era, which was remarkable for its time, gives us insight into the ways Indigenous peoples in this era were connecting localised traditions of protest to the global ferment of the twentieth century. Associate Professor Tracey Banivanua Mar is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at La Trobe University. She is the author of Violence and Colonial Dialogue: the Australian-‐Pacific Indentured Labour Trade (Honolulu: UHP, 2007) and the forthcoming Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, 2016). She is also co-‐editor of Making Settler Colonial Space: perspectives on race, place and identity, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) with Penny Edmonds. Lover, Father, Killer: Samoan Masculinities and Criminal Trials in New Zealand, 1950-‐1980 Keith L. Camacho, University of California, Los Angeles What makes a Samoan man in New Zealand and the United States? If we turn to the historiography on militarism and sport, then we can assess the links between the martial acts of state warfare on the one hand and the martial-‐like acts of state competition on the other. In this respect, we can gauge the making and sanctioning of acceptable, valorised, and even memorialised masculinities in and between New Zealand and the United States. But what are we to make of the masculinities that are devalued by these respective states? In this talk, I focus on the New Zealand government and offer preliminary observations about its condemnation of Samoan masculinities from 1950 to 1980. By surveying criminal trials in the Auckland District Court during this period, I specifically seek to contextualise a network of racialised confinement that may have been tied to the then burgeoning prison industrial complex in the United States, now the largest detention system in the world. The goal is to analyse Samoan manhood in an era of national and transnational confinement. Keith L. Camacho is an associate professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also the senior editor of Amerasia Journal, the author of Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (2011), and the co-‐editor of Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (2010). Along with co-‐editors Victor Bascara and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, he recently published “A Call for Critical Militarisation Studies” (no. 37, March 2015), a special issue of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific.
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‘A counter network for the future': climate change, the Anthropocene and Aboriginal Knowledge Tony Birch, Victoria University Australia, in common with global nations and communities, faces immediate and future ecological and economic challenges due to multiple impacts of climate change; impacts that are already being experienced in Australia. Indigenous communities in Australia, many who presently live a precarious economic and social existence, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including severe weather events and the resultant cultural and social upheaval. Climate change is an historical as much as a current or future phenomenon. Indigenous communities hold a depth of knowledge in relation to country that could be beneficial to the wider community in initiating policies to deal with climate change in an increasingly warmer world. The challenge for non-‐Indigenous Australia is firstly to respect this knowledge; secondly, to facilitate alliances with Indigenous communities based on a formal recognition of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS); and thirdly, to work toward a relationships of mutual reciprocity that neither subordinates Indigenous knowledge nor commodifies it for the benefit of wealthier White Australia. Tony Birch is the author of five fiction books. He publishes poetry, commentary and essays. He is currently the Bruce McGuinness Research Fellow at Moondani Balluk Academic Unit at Victoria University in Melbourne.
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Counter Networks of Empire Symposium In the last decade, scholars have illuminated the ways Empires, particularly of the nineteenth century were founded on and maintained by networks of people, goods, and ideas. This symposium stretches, perhaps challenges, the ‘imperial networks’ framework. Participants are invited to shine a spotlight on networks that ran counter to the well-‐documented imperial ones established by settlers, planters, missionaries and government officials that spread across, within and around the Pacific world. These might include networks, for instance, between Indigenous peoples and people of colour, who may have been suppressed, ignored, or reviled by those who penned nineteenth century archives. Speakers will explore transoceanic, transborder or transcolonial alliances, lateral connections, solidarities, and resistance movements, variously formed out of sight, in the peripheral vision, or at times, in full-‐frontal view of imperial and colonial powers. How have counter networks formed, mobilised, and mattered in the imperial past and the ‘post’colonial present? What were the connections made by people in transit, and can we read into this any kind of lasting, fleeting or contingent impacts?
Thanks to: La Trobe University International Collaboration DVC Research fund Australian Research Council (DP120104928)
Contributors: Tracey Banivanua Mar, La Trobe University Tony Birch, Victoria University Keith L. Camacho, University of California, Los Angeles Liz Conor, La Trobe University Penny Edmonds, University of Tasmania Alan Lester, University of Sussex Sophie Loy Wilson, Sydney University Nadia Rhook, La Trobe University Damon Salesa, University of Auckland
Chair: Samia Khatun, University of Melbourne