Imperial literacy and indigenous rights: Tracing transoceanic circuits of a modern discourse

Mind the Gap: Micro-mobility, counter networks and everyday resistance in the Northern Territory in 1951

“…44 The Alice Springs protest of 1951 drew on a body of knowledge that Tracey Banivanua Mar calls "imperial literacy," and a history of resistance with temporal and geographic roots spreading far beyond the artificial boundaries of settlers and administrators. 45 Much of this knowledge production, and evidence of networks which countered official channels, does not appear in the surviving archives. Nevertheless, the 1951 Gap protest is an example of what Tom Arne Midtrød describes a "the tip of a vast iceberg of social and political interaction hidden from contemporary European colonists and modern researchers alike."…”

Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods

“…Beginning with an examination of the dense set of intercolonial relations that emerged across southern settler colonial spaces, we subsequently provide an account of the methodological developments that inform our hemispheric approach to the literary cultures of the southern colonies. We gesture, too, towards the kind of shared themes and genres that closer attention to a “southern archive” of literary productions from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa can illuminate — an archive that includes, among other genres and forms, several hundred settler novels and several thousand works of serialized periodical fiction (Bode, 2018: 7, 11), ballads and bush poetry, drama and melodrama, travel writing, periodical writing, and diaries and correspondence, as well as a wide range of diasporic and Indigenous cultural productions, from traditional oral, performance, and material cultures, to imaginative writing such as poetry and hymns, to writing engaging with various forms of “imperial literacy” such as petitions, letters, and journalism (Banivanua Mar, 2013). Our aim in this instance is not to provide a general overview of literary scholarship on the nineteenth-century settler colonies or to outline in any detail the literary productions of various groups or national canons across time and space.…”

Tracey Banivanua Mar, 1974–2017

“…Tracey's 'Imperial Literacy' article provides a fine example of her approach and style. 8 She set her analysis in the years 1838 and 1840 and in three places, Tahiti, Narre Narre Warren in Melbourne, and Waitangi in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her exquisitely written narrative wove together Queen Pomare's attempt to secure Queen Victoria's consent for the British to offer her people 'protection', Billibellary's withdrawal of cooperation between Wurundjeri and British authorities, and a group of Maori chiefs' refusal to sign the Treaty of Waitangi.…”