Abstract: Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.

Abstract: Because of the wealth of quantitative information and editorial opinion they provide, those researching British migration have often turned to newspapers and other periodicals; the use of shipping notices, advertisements, original reportage and editorial commentaries has provided historians with contemporary descriptions of changes in population composition, whether by immigration, natural growth, increased mortality or out-migration. Although requiring corroboration, these sources provide excellent indications of when changes occurred and when these became worthy of comment. However, the precise nature of these commentaries, the mechanics of their creation, transmission and evolution, remains unclear. While recent work in newspaper and media history have begun to trace information networks present in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the lines of communication in the early empire remain unclear. Throughout the Georgian period, newspapers cited, borrowed and blatantly stole editorial content from other British and colonial papers. The question remains, however, whether this source material was manipulated by local editors to suit local prejudices or whether an uncritical inclusion of reprints shaped or utterly transformed local opinion. Since its official founding in 1787, the British colony of New South Wales had been home to a wide range of British immigrants including convicted prisoners, government and military personal, religious missionaries and free settlers. Nonetheless, this complex view of migration and settlement in Australia was not always appreciated by those who resided in sending communities within Britain. Rumours mixed with half-record fact to create an eclectic and fluctuating public conversation of Antipodean prospects. In recent years, historians have begun to rewrite imperial histories to better account for the fluctuating and multi-layered nature of identity within Britain’s “white” colonies, encompassing class, faith, nationality and provincial status. Yet, there remains a fundamental disconnect between the study of public spheres within the colonies themselves and that of Britain. While the study of individual newspaper titles has a long history and imperial historians have now begun to compare perceptions of identity and empire between disparate regions, there has yet to be a close study of the tangible connections between metropolitan, provincial and colonial public spheres. This implies that the two did not intersect or that the spread of identity was mono-directional in nature. This article therefore traces the editorial history of the printed conversations and proclamations found in British and Australian newspapers between 1803 and 1842, the years in which the Sydney Gazette, Australia’s most commonly cited periodical, was in operation. By examining Australia’s public portrayal of immigration, settlement and the demographic composition of New South Wales and by tracing these descriptions through the reprints, abridgements and commentaries of British newspapers, this article compares and contrasts public notions of identity and nationalism within Australia with those who remained or had returned to Great Britain. From this, this article demonstrates the extent to which the Sydney Gazette acted as the gatekeeper and envoy of Australian identity in the early nineteenth century.

The book is available here.

Description: In contemporary settler societies, reconciliation has emerged as a potent and alluring form of utopian politics. This book examines the performative life of reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is mobilized in the name of social transformation within a new global paradigm of reconciliation and the ‘age of apology’. In search of a new emancipatory politics, the book takes particular account of Indigenous-led refutations or reworkings of consensus politics in public culture that directly confront the ongoing structural legacy of colonial violence. Taking case studies from the USA, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand the book traces the prehistory of reconciliation’s present in settler states, a contested political process, which is especially salient where formal decolonization cannot occur. The dynamic process of drawing on the past to forge new alliances and imagined futures is a crucial aspect of the political realm – one that we are jointly acting out together; and it is worked out from the affective and overlapping spaces of heart and horror.

Excerpt: I begin this essay by unpacking what I mean by “enduring indigeneity” in my title and what that means to an understanding of settler colonialism. Here I use it in two senses: first, that indigeneity itself is enduring—that the operative logic of settler colonialism may be to “eliminate the native,” as the late English scholar Patrick Wolfe brilliantly theorized, but that indigenous peoples exist, resist, and persist; and second, that settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, as it holds out against it.

Wolfe’s essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” is often cited as the principal work representing the concept and theory of the settler colonial analytic. And although Wolfe insisted on making it clear time and again that he did not create the field of settler colonial studies—that Native scholars did—within the field of American Studies (as just one example), he tends to be most frequently cited as if he had. Indeed, this one article of his (although not his first writing on the subject, nor the last) also seems to be the most cited, perhaps because it offers so much in one piece by distinguishing settler colonialism from genocide, contrasting settler colonialism from franchise colonialism, and—through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the United States—showing how the logic of settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of indigenous peoples.

Abstract: I was driving south on the Peninsula Development Road (PDR) in the early afternoon of a dry season day when, ten kilometres north of the Archer River crossing, my four-wheel-drive went into a sidelong slide. Within a few seconds the car came to a shuddering halt, inverted in a ditch, its headlights now facing back towards the Lockhart River turnoff. What happened next escapes me, but some specifics remain: a plume of red dust entering the cabin through the driver’s side window; a line of blood travelling down my arm onto the right hand that held me up against the shattered windscreen; I told myself out loud to get out of the car. Crawling out of the vehicle, my foremost thought was that I had been the subject to a significant clerical error that could be set right through appeal to an unknown cosmic authority. But the accident was tenaciously real and within minutes a couple in a ute two teenagers in rugby shorts with working dogs stopped to inform me of as much. One helped me take photos and clean the dust off my face while the other salvaged my belongings out of the four-wheel-drive, now slowly pouring its twin gasoline tanks onto the clay verge. I spent the next hour squeezed between them, re-narrating the crash over booming country music, before parting in Coen, the closest township with a mechanic and a police station. The duty officer told me to come back tomorrow. A domestic violence complaint would take up his afternoon, he said, flicking his head towards a woman sitting behind him. In the meantime, he suggested I recover wreck towed before it was stripped for parts.

Description: From John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese to Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, some of the most famous works of American, English Canadian, and French Canadian literature belong to the genre of the farm novel. In this volume, Florian Freitag provides the first history of the genre in North America from its beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century to its apogee in French Canada around the middle of the twentieth. Through surveys and selected detailed analyses of a large number of farm novels written in French and English, Freitag examines how North American farm novels draw on the history of farming in nineteenth-century North America as well as on the national self-conceptions of the United States, English Canada, and French Canada, portraying farmers as national icons and the farm as a symbolic space of the American, English Canadian, and French Canadian nations. Turning away from traditional readings of farm novels within the frameworks of regionalism and pastoralism, Freitag takes a comparative look at a genre that helped to spatialize North American national dreams. Florian Freitag is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany.

Abstract: Genocide and settler colonialism are conceptually related ideas, although the specific relationship remains unclear. Whereas some scholars develop subcategories of “colonial genocide” or examine the historical origins of these concepts, I address the signification of “genocide” and “indigeneity.” I explore the system of meanings underlying each concept to suggest that both are paradoxically rooted in otherness. The category of indigeneity reveals a basic paradox: the colonizer and Indigenous other are separate from but, simultaneously, dependent upon one another. Likewise, with genocide the perpetrator and othered victim are separate but at the same time dependent on each other. Genocide and indigeneity are conceptually related so that one can consider them as two aspects of the same phenomenon. I propose conceptualizing the relationship between indigeneity and genocide as a two-stage process of erasure in settler societies, with imposition of the category of indigeneity as a preliminary genocide that precedes a formal act of genocide.

Abstract: In this essay, I aim to engage the growing body of scholarship that employs Indigenous feminist theories to understand and mobilize against the sexual and gendered violence committed against Native peoples. To accomplish this, I construct a Native feminist analysis of the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act. I posit that despite the overwhelmingly positive characterizations of the legislation as “historic” in its potential to address violence against Native women and reduce crime in Indian country, a Native feminist reading of the Tribal Law and Order Act illuminates the degree to which the Act emerges from, engages with, and advances settler colonial and heteropatriarchal logics that cause violence against Native women in the first place. I suggest that although the Act does contain measures that have the potential to alleviate the experience of violence in Native women’s lives, it also diminishes tribal sovereignty, perpetuates the ongoing encroachment of tribal jurisdiction, regulates the boundaries of Native identity, and limits our ability to envision and enact practices of decolonization. 

Abstract: Transitional justice is a complex form of political and legal intervention used by state governments to redress state-sanctioned and large-scale harms (Balint, Evans, & McMillan, 2014). The typical aims of this model include maintaining peace during times of political flux, installing rule-of law, creating new historical narratives, and reconciliation (Teitel, 2003). In both theory and practice, transitional justice usually concerns ‘fragile states’ or post-conflict states. Governments, academics and practitioners, however, are broadening transitional justice theory and practice to include harms to Indigenous peoples in settler states such as Canada. Notably, recent efforts seek to integrate ‘decolonization’ into transitional justice as a desired process or goal. This paper is a critical intervention into this trend. I demonstrate that Canada has two faces of transitional justice – one, internally focused on ‘reconciliation’ with Indigenous peoples and the other, externally focused on providing peace and security expertise to fragile states. I bring land-centered understandings of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence into conversation with this duality to argue that efforts to incorporate decolonization into transitional justice, without taking seriously its roots and the international transitional justice work with which Canada is engaged, does more to obscure and de-legitimize Indigenous nationhood and settler colonialism entirely.

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 its service. The exportation of characters at the end of a novel indisputably formed a convenient narrative solution that at once mirrored and exaggerated public policies about so-called ‘superfluous’ or ‘redundant’ parts of society. Yet the very convenience of such pat endings was increasingly called into question. New starts overseas might not be so easily realizable; emigration destinations failed to live up to the inflated promises of pro-emigration rhetoric; the ‘unwanted’ might make a surprising reappearance. Wagner juxtaposes representations of emigration in the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Frances Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge with Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian settler fiction by Elizabeth Murray, Clara Cheeseman, and Susanna Moodie, offering a new literary history not just of nineteenth-century migration, but also of transoceanic exchanges and genre formation.