School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 15
-
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.
-
ItemVoyaging in the Pacific(Oxford University Press, 2024)This chapter examines three major works published over a span of almost five decades: John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the voyages . . . for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), and Dr John Martin’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (1817). The ‘authors’ named here were not authors but editors, professional literary men who edited, rearranged, compiled, and often embellished the journals, logbooks, and charts of the original travellers. My aim is to see how each of these editors produced the experience of travel textually for Romantic metropolitan audiences. Hawkesworth, the best known, edited the first of James Cook’s three voyages, drawing principally on the journals of Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks. Keate, a friend of Voltaire, shaped the thirteen- week encounter between a shipwrecked British crew and the people of Palau, and Martin took charge of William Mariner’s tale of his four years on Tonga.
-
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).
-
Item[Review of the book Making Entomologists: How Periodicals Shaped Scientific Communities in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Matthew Wale](The University of Chicago Press, 2023-09)Rich in detailed archival research, Matthew Wale’s important book conducts a lively survey of a wide selection of very dissimilar periodicals, all devoted to the single science of entomology.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
-
Item'Aetherial Journies, Submarine Exploits': The Debatable Worlds of Natural History in the Late Eighteenth Century(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)The eye-catching conjunction of ‘Aetherial journies, submarine exploits’ occurs in William Cowper’s ‘The Winter Evening’, where the poet describes the arrival in his secluded village of newspapers from the great Babel of London — that ‘wilderness of strange / But gay confusion’. Amidst advertisements for ‘Teeth for the toothless, ringlets for the bald’, Cowper lists, Aetherial journies, submarine exploits, And Katterfelto with his hair on end At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.
-
ItemHenry Smeathman and the Natural Economy of Slavery(Boydell & Brewer, 2007)
-
ItemWomen Writers and Abolition(Palgrave Macmillan, 2010-01-01)The years 1787–88 mark the high tide of popular abolitionism. What had begun as a small-scale protest, with Quakers submitting their first public petition to Parliament in 1783, was soon to culminate in a sudden and widespread outburst of humanitarian revulsion against the ‘abominable’ and ‘indefensible’ trade. There have been many attempts to explain the speed and breadth of the national mobilization against the slave trade. In a recent contribution Seymour Drescher dismisses arguments that attribute the new popularity to ‘chastened anxiety or national humiliation’ at the loss of the North American colonies. Nor does Drescher see abolitionism’s coming of age as a response to heightened internal class conflict, or to an economic decline in the value of the British slave trade. Without offering much explanation himself, apart from the great expansion of print media in this period, what Drescher does note is that popular abolitionism emerged at one of the most shining moments in British history, when the nation revelled in its ‘prosperity, security and power’.1 This means that, while abolitionists might express strong sentiments of outrage, the underlying premise of their protest involved a degree of complacency. As Drescher puts it, ‘how could the world’s most secure, free, religious, just, prosperous and moral nation allow itself to remain the premier perpetrator of the world’s most deadly, brutal, unjust and immoral offences to humanity? How could its people, once fully informed of its inhumanity, hope to continue to be blessed with peace, prosperity and power?