School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemRobert Louis Stevenson and German Sāmoa(Taylor & Francis, 2024)This study revisits the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson on German Sāmoa as a valuable archive for understanding the impact of Western colonialism on the Pacific. It examines Stevenson’s anti-colonial perspectives in writings such as A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), his series of letters to The Times in London (1889–1894), and his private correspondence. Stevenson’s analysis of the impact of the Germans’ militarism and meddlesome officialdom, together with their extensive plantation system and use of unfree labour, also provides an important context for reading contemporary Oceanian writers and artists. The varied creative practices of recovery and remediation deployed by Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, Yuki Kihara, Michel Tuffery and Tony Brunt, are often inspired by cultural memories of German Sāmoa.
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Item“Embronzed with the African Tint”: Racial Color-coding and Intergenerational Inheritance in Jamaica, St. Domingo and England in the Age of Abolition(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024)In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person’s identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCreole Identity in the Enlightenment(WILEY, 2022-06)Abstract Susanna Gale (1749‐1823) was born in St Andrew, Jamaica, a member of the spectacularly wealthy Gale clan which at one point owned in excess of 1000 enslaved people on the island. This article takes Joshua Reynolds's portrait of her as a so‐called ‘English rose’ as the starting point for an examination of the discourses surrounding White West Indian creole identity in the Enlightenment. More images are then introduced to explore issues of sameness and difference within constructions of racial, class and gender identities, especially in cousin, sister and mistress–servant relationships. The article ends with reflections on Kehinde Wiley's portrait, After Sir Joshua Reynolds' ‘Miss Susanna Gale’ (2009).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGeorge Lyell and Frederick Parkhurst Dodd: authority and expertise in nineteenth-century Australian entomology(Museums Victoria, 2021)This article focuses on the correspondence and careers of two lepidopterists, George Lyell and F. P. Dodd. Drawing on Dodd’s unpublished letters to Lyell during the late nineteenth-century rage for butterflying, it examines how private acquisition gave way to the professional activity of collecting and, in Lyell’s case, the eventual gifting of a large and significant collection of moths and butterflies to the National Museum of Victoria from 1932 through to 1946. The article also examines how issues of authority and expertise were measured and contested among collectors in this period.
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ItemMinds, bodies, machines: essays in the cultural and intellectual history of technologies( 2008)In 1989 Rodney Brooks, Director of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at MIT, predicted that America would soon be able to conduct inter-planetary exploration and colonisation with millions of tiny robots. Asserting that ‘biology and evolution were good models to follow’, Brooks designed his ‘gnat robots’ as insects, each with sensor-whiskers, six legs, and a sophisticated microchip. In terms of risk management and optimisation of resources, the superiority of ‘swarms’ of mass-produced, cheap and autonomous robots over a single large and expensive ground-controlled robot was obvious. In conclusion Brooks argued that, just as exploration of the Earth had ‘proceeded by many small spontaneous sorties into the unknown’, so ‘with imagination and verve we can invade the whole solar system’. Futuristic as this may sound, there is nothing new in the MIT Lab’s imaginative blurring of the boundaries between the organic (the insect) and the mechanical (the robot). In the seventeenth century, inspired by the new science of magnification, observers noted the startlingly close resemblance between insects and ‘Engines’. Insect interiors were, Richard Leigh declared, ‘Like living Watches, each of these conceals / A thousand Springs of Life, and moving Wheels’. For another observer, the ‘pretty Engines’ of ‘Insectile Automata’ housed ‘all the perfections of the largest Animals’, including the human machine.
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ItemEntertaining entomology: insect performers in the eighteenth century( 2006)Of the many issues raised by observation of insect societies, the one this paper focuses on concerns gender, sexuality, and reproduction, with a particular emphasis on the queen of the species, and the often unstable meaning of her queenliness, fluctuating as this sometimes did between an imperious regality and a more “everywoman” ordinariness. As feminist scholarship on the eighteenth century has shown, definitions and cultural assumptions about “femininity” and the nature and status of women were keenly debated as part of a wider redefinition of social categories and roles.
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ItemConspicuous consumption: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing in the 1790s(John Hopkins University Press, 1994)In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women’s protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with some critics arguing that a relatively benign & “cultural racism”; in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism. Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, characterizes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more “positive” and “open-minded” about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolutionary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science; in his view, the Victorians must bear responsibility for inventing the myth of Africa as the Dark Continent. But while abolitionism may have taken its roots in philanthropy and a new-found enthusiasm for the universal rights of man, the many tracts it spawned contradict such a clear-cut distinction between the earlier and later periods. In its luridness and violence, late eighteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric points directly, for instance, to the systematic colonization of Africa; it is also rich in the sorts of phobias and bogeys more commonly associated with the later nineteenth century, such as miscegenation, cannibalism, and an essentialist stereotyping of sex and race, such as the perception of white woman’s sexuality as a form of degenerate black sexuality.
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ItemJanet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire(John Hopkins University Press, 2003)This essay considers the development of racial ideology in the eighteenth century in the context of a comparative colonial cultural history of the British West Indies and of North America. It focuses on the racialization of whiteness in the 1760s and 1770s and on the way in which this racialization of skin color relates to issues of gender. Janet Schaw's Journal of a Lady of Quality(1774-6) is the principal text for this enquiry. The concluding section of the paper argues that mid-eighteenth-century discourses of whitening and whiteness form an important cultural context for understanding later abolitionist texts.
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ItemThe "Dog-Man": Race, Sex, Species, and Lineage in Coetzee's Disgrace(HOFSTRA UNIV PRESS, 2009-01-01)
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ItemIntroduction: Minds, Bodies, Machines(University of London, 2008)This issue of 19 brings together a selection of essays from an interdisciplinary conference on 'Minds, Bodies, Machines' convened last year by Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, University of London, in partnership with the English programme, University of Melbourne and software developers Constraint Technologies International (CTI). The conference explored the relationship between minds, bodies and machines in the long nineteenth century, with a view to understanding the history of our technology-driven, post-human visions. It is in the nineteenth century that the relationship between the human and the machine under post-industrial capitalism becomes a pervasive theme. From Blake on the mills of the mind by which we are enslaved, to Carlyle's and Arnold's denunciation of the machinery of modern life, from Dickens's sooty fictional locomotive Mr Pancks, who 'snorted and sniffed and puffed and blew, like a little labouring steam-engine', and 'shot out […]cinders of principles, as if it were done by mechanical revolvency', to the alienated historical body of the late-nineteenth-century factory worker under Taylorization, whose movements and gestures were timed, regulated and rationalised to maximize efficiency; we find a cultural preoccupation with the mechanisation of the nineteenth-century human body that uncannily resonates with modern dreams and anxieties around technologies of the human.