Description: In her study of the unsuccessful nineteenth-century emigrant, Tamara S. Wagner argues that failed emigration and return drive nineteenth-century writing in English in unexpected, culturally revealing ways. Wagner highlights the hitherto unexplored subgenre of anti-emigration writing that emerged as an important counter-current to a pervasive emigration propaganda machine that was pressing popular fiction into […]

Abstract: In an era concerned with the survival of Indigenous languages, language as a general phenomenon needs to be thought of as thoroughly connected to one’s worldview. In this article, I propose a different conception of language that sides more with what I call ‘the worlding of things’ than linguistics. To foreshadow my speculations on […]

Excerpt: For the first time, this Special Issue brings to the attention of Wasafiri‘s readers two poetry communities with which many will be unfamiliar: those of South Africa and Australia. These might be regarded as literary micro-climates, which the prevailing winds of postcolonial and world literature often sweep past. Each has its peculiar dynamic specific […]

Abstract: Purpose: This article offers an example of a comprehensive mid-nineteenth century branding strategy in practice. Design/methodology/approach: The article follows an historical research methodology using archival resources and secondary sources within a conceptual framework of present-day branding theory (Bastos and Levy) and communication theory (Perloff). It interrogates visual and material data to construct a production-led […]

Decription: The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. […]

Abstract: Focusing on the particular context of Canadian settler colonialism, this paper examines the use of museums and material culture histories to support Indigenous peoples’ political movements towards decolonisation. This paper focuses on two forms of protest; one accessible to the public and the second less so. The first example is the 1988 exhibition The […]

Abstract: Fascism’s success in building communities and structures of conviviality was for many years avoided by the critical scholarship on Italian fascism. More recently, however, fascist land reclamation has become a favored topic in Italian historiographical revisionism: it has become an argument for the regime’s “revolutionary” aspects. This article argues that “land reclamation” was a […]

Abstract: The interest of F. Macfarlane Burnet in host–parasite interactions grew through the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in his book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease (1940), often regarded as the founding text of disease ecology. Our knowledge of the influences on Burnet’s ecological thinking is still incomplete. Burnet later attributed much of his conceptual development […]

Abstract: While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and […]

Abstract: A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia’s colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at […]