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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 August 2018
We gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions of the following people as we wrote this essay: Warwick Anderson, Michelle Coghlan, Kate Fullagar, Sarah Gleeson-White, Marilyn Lake, Christina Twomey, and members of the “Place, Nation, and Environment” research group at the University of East Anglia. Clare Corbould is also grateful to the Australian Research Council for its generous support of her research.
1 Foundational studies of the transatlantic such as Weisbuch's, Robert, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Bradbury's, Malcolm Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London: Penguin, 1996)Google Scholar, Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar pre-date early works in Pacific and Oceanic American studies such as Wilson's, Rob Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, whereas the majority of transpacific American studies publications coincided with the boom in transnational American Studies that occurred in the first decade of this century.
2 Wilson, ix.
3 Lyons, Paul, American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 8–10Google Scholar; Yoshihara, Mari, “Editor's Note,” in Lyons, Paul and Tengan, Ty P. Kawika, eds., Pacific Currents, special issue of American Quarterly, 67, 3 (2015), viiGoogle Scholar.
4 Huang, Yunte, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 8–9Google Scholar. McCoy, Alfred W. and Scarano, Francisco A., eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
5 Giles, Paul, “Introduction: Reorienting American Studies in the 21st Century,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, 33, 2 (2014), 1–20Google Scholar, 16. Shu, Yuan and Pease, Donald E., “Introduction: Transnational American Studies and the Transpacific Imaginary,” in Shu, and Pease, , eds., American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 1–35Google Scholar, 6, 8.
6 Hartman, Saidiya, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 6Google Scholar.
7 Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 203CrossRefGoogle Scholar n. 88.
8 Wolfe, Patrick, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review, 106, 3 (2001), 866–905CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 For critique of Wolfe's formulation as totalizing see Rowse, Tim, “Indigenous Heterogeneity,” Australian Historical Studies, 45, 3 (2014), 297–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For responses to Rowse see Lorenzo Veracini, “Defending Settler Colonial Studies,” ibid., 311–16; and Miranda Johnson, “Writing Indigenous Histories Now,” ibid., 317–30. For examples of the ways native peoples in America and Australasia were able to negotiate the legal and juridical structures of the settler state see the introduction and chapters in Ford, Lisa and Rowse, Tim, eds., Between Indigenous and Settler Governance (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.
10 Salesa, Damon Ireremia, “Opposite Footers,” in Fullagar, Kate, ed., The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 283–300Google Scholar. Mae M. Ngai's recent work demonstrates that placing the two arenas within one temporal frame can radically alter how we understand both; see “Chinese Gold Miners and the ‘Chinese Question’ in Nineteenth-Century California and Victoria,” Journal of American History, 101, 4 (2015), 1082–1105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 The list of scholars in each group is long, but exemplary recent examples of Pacific and Australian research in the latter field include Anderson, Clare, “After Emancipation: Empires and Imperial Formations,” in Hall, Catherine, Draper, Nicholas, and McClelland, Keith, eds., Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 113–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mar, Tracey Banivanua, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Banivanua-Mar, Tracey, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australia–Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Brown, Laurence, “‘A Most Irregular Traffic’: The Oceanic Passages of the Melanesian Labor Trade,” in Christopher, Emma, Pybus, Cassandra, and Rediker, Marcus, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184–203Google Scholar; Christopher, Emma, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2010)Google Scholar; Horne, Gerald, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Lydon, Jane, “The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-slavery in 1890s Australia,” Australian Historical Studies, 45, 1 (2014), 46–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martínez, Julia and Vickers, Adrian, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia's Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pybus, Cassandra, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Paisley, Fiona, “An Echo of Black Slavery: Emancipation, Forced Labour and Australia in 1933,” Australian Historical Studies, 45 (2014), 103–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Clare Anderson has made a parallel critique of “the conceptual myopia that separates the Australian colonies from the Indian Ocean”: “Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment, Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939,” Australian Historical Studies, 47, 3 (2016), 381–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 385. Transnational American studies scholarship is worth focussing on here given its influence in shaping the trajectories of the discipline; for example, Lowe's recent book has had over a dozen academic reviews in a short time, many of which are review essays. The editor of American Quarterly noted it as “much discussed.” Yoshihara, “Editor's Note.” Similarly, Wai Chee Dimock compilation American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (New York: Comumbia University Press: 2017)Google Scholar engages Asian American, “Pacific Rim” writers extensively but fails to include writers from Hawaii, Guam, or Samoa. The Pacific basin is covered by selections from Melville, Twain, and London.
12 Paul Giles’s Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U.S. Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18.
13 See, for instance, Anderson, Warwick, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016)Google Scholar. See also Anderson's consideration of responses to the model he proposed: “Simply a Hypothesis? Race and Ethnicity in the Global South,” Humanities Australia, 7 (2016), 55–62Google Scholar.
14 See, for example, Paul Lyon's discussion of Typee's significance in foundational works of American studies and the resultant association of the region with pre- or antimodernity. Lyons, American Pacificism, 40–45. Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon discuss the promise of the “South Seas” as an escape from “civilisation” in the interwar years: The South Seas: A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour (London: Lexington Books, 2015), 115–33Google Scholar. Giles, Antipodean America, 18.
15 The question whether the coerced labour in Australia of Indigenous people and Pacific Islanders was slavery has preoccupied scholars – and indeed those exploited – since the early nineteenth century. See, in addition to many of the studies cited above, Curthoys, Ann and Moore, Clive, “Working for the White People: An Historiographic Essay on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Labor,” Labour History, 69 (1995), 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Raymond, Fighting Words: Writing about Race (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Stephen Gray, Submission No. 11 to Legal and Constitution Affairs Committee, Parliament of Australia, Inquiry into Stolen Wages, 24 July 2006, at www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/137723/stolen-wages-sub.pdf, accessed 9 Feb. 2017; Gray, Stephen, “The Elephant in the Drawing Room: Slavery and the ‘Stolen Wages’ Debate,” Australian Indigenous Law Review, 11, 1 (2007), 30–53Google Scholar; Haskins, Victoria, “‘& So We Are “Slave Owners”!’ Employers and the NSW Aborigines Protection Board Trust Funds,” Labour History, 88 (2005), 147–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hetherington, Penelope, Settlers, Servants and Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-Century Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Holland, Alison, “Feminism, Colonialism and Aboriginal Workers: An Anti-slavery Crusade,” Labour History, 69 (1995), 52–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kidd, Rosalind, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs – The Untold Story (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997)Google Scholar; McGrath, Ann, “‘Modern Stone-Age Slavery’: Images of Aboriginal Labour and Sexuality,” Labour History, 69 (1995), 30–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Shirleene, Something Like Slavery? Queensland's Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842–1945 (North Melbourne, VIC: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008)Google Scholar; Walden, Inara, “‘That Was Slavery Days’: Aboriginal Domestic Servants in New South Wales in the Twentieth Century,” Labour History, 69 (1995), 196–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For accounts of white settlers’ ideas about Aboriginal people's labour see Coleman, Deirdre, Romantic Colonization and British Anti-slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Woollacott, Angela, Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 67–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For early instances of Aboriginal men and women likening their circumstances – or potentially worsening circumstances – to slavery see Toorn, Penny van, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), 119–22Google Scholar, 144–45, 178–79, 191–93.
16 Luciano, Dana, “Introduction: On Moving Ground,” in Luciano, Dana and Wilson, Ivy G., eds., Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014), 1–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 11, emphasis in original.
17 Brown, Vincent, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review, 114, 5 (2009), 1231–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1237.
18 Gillman, Susan, “Remembering Slavery, Again,” Caribbean Quarterly, 61, 4 (Dec. 2015), 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2. Indeed, from W. E. B. Du Bois in 1935, to the social historians of the late 1960s and 1970s, through to recent accounts of capital, governance and slavery, generations keep discovering the aftermath of American slavery. See, as a selection, Du Bois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998; first published 1935)Google Scholar; Litwack, Leon F., Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar; and most recently the essays in Downs, Gregory P. and Masur, Kate, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of “a new kind of consensus history [that] has re-established itself as a popular way of understanding the American past” of slavery, anti-slavery, and the Civil War see James Oakes, “The New Cult of Consensus,” Nonsite.org, 20 (25 Jan. 2017), at http://nonsite.org/feature/the-new-cult-of-consensus.
19 Brown, Laurence, “‘A Most Irregular Traffic’: The Oceanic Passages of the Melanesian Labor Trade,” in Christopher, Emma, Pybus, Cassandra and Rediker, Marcus, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184–203Google Scholar, 185. Giles, 257.
20 Twain, Mark, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (New York: Dover Publications, 1989; first published 1897), 81Google Scholar, 82.
21 Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Viking, 2007), 38–40Google Scholar.
22 Twain, 85.
23 Senior also provided illustrations for Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel with explicit links to Following the Equator in that each chapter of the latter begins with an aphorism from Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. As Stephen Railton notes, Senior's illustrations for Pudd'nhead reduce their subjects “to cartoon-size, keeping their antics and anguishes at great distance from the reader's sympathy,” a strategy that could equally be said of his illustrations of Islanders in Equator. See http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/wilson/pwillshp.html. See also Wonham's, Henry B. “The Minstrel and the Detective,” in Trombley, Laura E. Skandera and Kiskis, Michael J., eds., Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 122–38Google Scholar, 132.
24 Twain, 90.
25 Moore, C. R., “Queensland Sugar Industry from 1860 to 1900,” in Dalton, Brian J., ed., Lectures in North Queensland History (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1974), 29–46Google Scholar, has shown that Pacific labourers were paid at best one-tenth the wages of white workers on Queensland sugar plantations; as Twain, 83–84, claims, the sum total of these wages was barely more than the sum paid to the “recruiter” for the delivery of new workers.
26 On the way in which the timepiece itself was seen to give permanence to life events see Smith, Mark M., Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51Google Scholar. See also Morgan, Philip D., “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, I700 to 1880,” William and Mary Quarterly, 39, 2 (Oct. 1984), 563–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the “task system” and the ways in which this structure of labour allowed enslaved peoples to claim time beyond that taken to complete a given task as their own: in Morgan's words, as “sacrosanct.”
27 Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Paisley, “An Echo of Black Slavery.”
29 The short piece appeared under the title “Charges Slavery in Australia,” News-Press (Fort Myers, FL), 23 Dec. 1930, 5; Oakland Tribune, 28 May 1931, 17; Vernon Daily Record (Vernon, TX), 24 Dec. 1930, 9; Times Herald (Port Huron, MI), 12 Jan. 1931, 3; and in the African American newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, 7 Feb. 1931, 2. Another black newspaper used the title “Slavery in Australia, Says Union Worker,” Baltimore Afro-American, 18 April 1931, 13. Other titles were “Australians Accused of Enslaving Negroes,” News Journal (Wilmington, DE), 1 Jan. 1931, 4; and “Says Australians Enslaving Negroes,” Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, OH), 29 Dec. 1930, 15.
30 For black Americans’ views of Australian labour relations at this time see Clare Corbould, “Black Internationalism's Shifting Alliances: African American Newspapers, the White Australia Policy, and Indigenous Australians, 1919–1948,” History Compass, 15:e12366, at https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12366.
31 “Australian Prize Novel Worth While,” Sioux City Sunday Journal, 18 May 1930, n.p.; Grace M. Barber, “Aboriginal Life in Australia,” Detroit Free Press, 27 April 1930, Part Four, 8.
32 Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is the urtext of this genre. For foundational critical analyses of the way representations of the subjected black woman's body circulated and functioned in antebellum texts see Carby, Hazel V., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 20–39Google Scholar; and Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. For an analysis of the afterlives of such circulation and their role in constituting post-slavery subjectivities see Sharpe, Christina, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
33 “Fiction Affords Variety,” Los Angeles Times, 18 May 1930, part III, 16.
34 “Book Reviews,” Edwardsville Intelligencer (Edwardsville, IL), 30 April 1930, 9.
35 Grace M. Barber, “Aboriginal Life in Australia,” Detroit Free Press, 27 April 1930, Part Four, 8.
36 Maynard, John, “Vision, Voice and Influence: The Rise of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association,” Australian Historical Studies, 34, 121 (2003), 91–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 Ibid.
38 Curthoys, Ann, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002)Google Scholar; Maynard, John, “Marching to a Different Beat: The Influence of the International Black Diaspora on Aboriginal Australia,” in Carey, Jane and Lydon, Jane, eds., Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014), 262–72Google Scholar; Trotmetter, Alyssa L., “Malcolm X and the Aboriginal Black Power Movement in Australia, 1967–1972,” Journal of African American History, 100, 2 (Spring 2015), 226–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific.
39 For an argument about the distinctions between European colonizers’ ideal scenarios for dispossessed native people versus enslaved people see Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference.”
40 Ibid.
41 Bandler had been making this argument about the nature of her father's experience since at least 1950: ASIO file on Faith Bandler, CRS A6119/90, Item 2535, Vol. 1, Folio 9 (National Archives of Australia).
42 Bandler, Faith, Wacvie (Adelaide: Rigby Limited, 1977)Google Scholar. For discussion of such iconography see Wood, Marcus, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar. In another instance of transpacific circulation of images Ingpen was also the illustrator of the 2010 edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the centenary of Twain's death.
43 Bandler, Wacvie, 7.
44 Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 16, 137; Bandler, Wacvie, 24–25.
45 For an account of the reception of Roots in Australia see Corbould, Clare, “The Struggle for Land Rights Will Not Be Televised: Settler Colonialism and Roots Down Under,” Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, 122 (2017), 79–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 Davison, Graeme, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 80–109Google Scholar; Evans, Tanya, “Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History,” History Workshop Journal, 71 (2011), 49–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weil, François, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
47 Moore, Clive, “Australian South Sea Islanders’ Narrative of Belonging,” in Gounder, Farzana, ed., Narrative and Identity Construction in the Pacific Islands (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), 155–76Google Scholar, 168.
48 For details of the play's production history see Casey, Maryrose, Creating Frames: Contemporary Indigenous Theatre 1967–1997 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 100–6Google Scholar, 117–25.
49 For an example of the advertisement see Sydney Morning Herald, 21 May 1977, 41.
50 For example, Carolyn Martin, “Outback Reveals a Family Secret,” Chicago Tribune, Dec. 20, 1988, Section 5, 3; Joan Hinkemeyer, “Morgan, Sally: My Place,” Library Journal, 1 Oct. 1988, 83–84. The explicit link was in Janette Turner Hospital (an Australian-raised American resident), “‘The Whitefellas Don't Understand’: My Place,” New York Times, 19 Feb. 1989, BR13.
51 Huggins, Jackie, “Always Was Always Will Be,” Australian Historical Studies, 25 (1993), 459–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 463.
52 Without taking a position here, we can cite Clive Moore's categorical statement that they're not the same thing, but note that the term is reiterated across a range of recent texts: Steven MacGregor, Servant or Slave (aired on NITV, 30 Nov. 2016); Amie Batalibasi's short narrative film Blackbird (2016); ABC Overnights, Blackbirding: Slavery on Queensland's cane fields (aired 8 Oct. 2016; accessed 9 Feb. 2017).
53 For example, Alecia Simmonds, “Australia Needs to Own Up to Its Slave History,” Daily Life, 28 April 2015, at www.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/dl-opinion/australia-needs-to-own-up-to-its-slave-history-20150427-1muhg3.html, accessed 3 May 2016; “10 Things You Should Know about Slavery in Australia,” National Indigenous Television, 2 Dec. 2016, at www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2016/12/01/10-things-you-should-know-about-slavery-australia, accessed 9 Feb. 2017.
