Liz Conor

Introduction: Classification and its Discontents

Categorical analysis pervades scholarly research. Yet types, and the typologies that catalogue them, have been unexamined frameworks in cultural histories. Types certainly pervade studies as types, yet the typologies they are nested within, as overarching and conjoined descriptive orders, remain largely unexamined outside the social sciences or histories of ideas. As such social kinds are rarely historicized or theorized beyond documenting their meaning, presence and less often, their recurrence. While it is widely accepted that categories and standards pervade knowledge and language systems, from comparative anatomy to linguistic etymology, colloquial typecasting is yet to be considered as a discursive practice. Yet since the voyages of exploration the arrangement of new botanical specimens into networked zoological categories was accompanied by the designation of racial kinds through typecasting, and these popular types were often transcribed into print, and very often credited with the empiricity of na...Categorical analysis pervades scholarly research. Yet types, and the typologies that catalogue them, have been unexamined frameworks in cultural histories. Types certainly pervade studies as types, yet the typologies they are nested within, as overarching and conjoined descriptive orders, remain largely unexamined outside the social sciences or histories of ideas. As such social kinds are rarely historicized or theorized beyond documenting their meaning, presence and less often, their recurrence. While it is widely accepted that categories and standards pervade knowledge and language systems, from comparative anatomy to linguistic etymology, colloquial typecasting is yet to be considered as a discursive practice. Yet since the voyages of exploration the arrangement of new botanical specimens into networked zoological categories was accompanied by the designation of racial kinds through typecasting, and these popular types were often transcribed into print, and very often credited with the empiricity of natural history. The purpose of this collection is understanding the operation of types and typologies in colonial thought and inaugurating theories of types that can account for the transferral of categories across knowledge registers. The ideas canvassed seek to account for the material basis of types in print, and their valencies across epochs, and the ways they impact on one another and how they interact with invaded cosmologies. The intention of this collection is to account for the classificatory tendencies, or taxonomic fields, which colonial types can be situated within and query whether the cultural tendency for typologies was intensified within colonial perceptual relations.

The ‘Piccaninny’: racialized childhood, disinheritance, acquisition and child beauty

The dissemination of the Piccaninny type critically depended on the print media whose development coincided with, and underpinned, colonial modernity. Racialized child types such as the Piccaninny were put to work in the colonial imagination to set down very distinct claims to land ownership, inheritance, dispossession and eradication. While a number of such child types reflect ideas of inheritance in colonial discourse, such as the Bush Baby, Wild Child, Street Urchin, Drovers Boy, Half-caste and Lost Child, this paper concentrates on the Piccaninny type, tracing its recurrence and meanings in Australian cultural forms. It accounts for the recurrence of this figure of childhood as a racialized type, and examines the ways Australia put images of Indigenous children to work in producing a mythology of national identity and tenure. The Piccaninny type encapsulated an acquisitive impulse over colonized children that brought about their disinheritance—either through their removal from their families or through the dispossession of their homelands. Within this setting black child beauty as a commodity form for white consumption, in imagery, ceramics, fabrics and popular ephemera, acted as a fetish which disavowed the injury of these childrens disinheritance and delimited their cultural presence to cute domestic and tourist bric-a-brac. The Piccaninny denoted racialized children and, this paper argues, was deployed in colonial discourse to outline the lineage of inheritance, particularly in land tenure.

“Strangely clad”: enclosure, exposure, and the cleavage of empire

Abstract This paper theorises a discourse of settler homelands in which a dichotomy of lived interior and exterior was transferred to ideas of racial difference. Settlers depended on a range of perceptual relations, of looking, documenting and publishing, to convey a notion of racial asymmetry through the divide of built and ‘undeveloped’ surrounds. Settlers carefully observed the ‘landmarks’, or spatially-grounded signs of difference, often blind, or unable to assimilate the marks of Indigenous habitation to their systems of knowledge. These perceived differences of dominion were central to legitimating a discourse of settler homelands and to discrediting Indigenous tenure.

Double take: reappraising the colonial archive

Abstract Conventional use of the colonial visual archive as evidence and historical illustration is undergoing a significant shift, giving way to creative interventions by Indigenous Australians. The ferment surrounding the “history wars” has led artists and scholars to rethink the colonial archive as a contested site productive of dynamic and archaic revisions. Departing from the memory ruts that have become entrenched in the national imaginary, these disruptions, reappraisals and refigurings importantly foreground Indigenous Australias relationship with the colonial archive.

This striking ornament of nature

Feminine beauty was implicated in colonial ways of seeing Indigenous peoples. The Australian ‘Native Belle’, as the feminine type of the noble savage, caught the European imagination at the time that European women such as Mary Wollstonecraft inaugurated a critique of feminine beauty as enslaving. Representations of the native belle were disseminated through new forms of communication and were implicated in prevailing discourses of Indigenous peoples such as ethnology. The native belle demonstrates a European longing for feminine beauty that was natural and unaffected. This type also demonstrates that ideas of visual identity as manifest in feminine beauty were important descriptors of racial difference.

Moveable Parts: Press and Loom in Colonial Typologies

Reynell Eveleigh Johns held various posts in the public service in central and northeastern Victoria. From 1858 to 1903 Johns maintained five scrapbook volumes, amassing some sixty-five articles and engravings from newspaper cuttings on Aborigines. Concurrently European and ‘native’ bodies were partitioned and aggregated into raced and gendered identities through clothing and adornment. The shift in textile manufacture from workshop to factory, and spinning frames to water-powered mechanized looms, coincided with the development of the steam-driven cylinder press, typefounding, typesetting and paper-making machinery. This essay is concerned with patterns of meaning, created by the assemblage of component parts, as inscripting topographies of racialized literacy. It argues that surfaces, either raised or recessed, tenured understanding to the economies of print and textile within colonial perception. The industrialization of print and textile overlapped chronologically with the exploration, settlement and expansion of frontiers in Australia, from 1780 to 1840. These technologies created distinct impressions and provided various forms of coverage. Their facility for reproduction and reiteration entrenched the colonial social matrix from which racial identities and their divisions emerged. By reiterative marks across various surfaces, the moveable parts of press and loom assembled social categories that were aggregated and imprinted, or woven, into the colonial imagination.

‘A species of rough gallantry’: bride capture and settler-colonial print on Australian Aboriginal gender relations

‘In hundreds of printed accounts that reflected on gender relations in the Australian Aboriginal society, settlers routinely characterised women as subject to ‘tyrannical’ men – whom they pilloried as ‘lords and masters’. The settler-colonial trope of Bride Capture reiterated well-worn meanings about Aboriginal gender relations in print culture. That the treatment of women in ‘native tribes’ became an indice of civilisation is well established in studies of colonial gender relations. This article examines the critical role of print in instating and entrenching those understandings through a tracery of reiterations of Bride Capture.

Race and the Modern Exotic: Three ‘Australian’ Women on Global Display

try) how psychoanalytic the psychology/psychiatry under discussion actually is/was. And psychoanalysis’s influence gets overblown: ‘scientific justifications for feelings of British superiority’ (Deborah Jenson) were well established by Darwin and others, and did not need psychoanalysis (which in any case was heavily indebted to such views). But just how globalised is the psychoanalytic self? Technology and finance can clearly be seen as global. Mobile phones find their way into virtually every corner of the globe, and hardly any part of the globe is not hooked into the global marketplace, but the self? How influenced by psychoanalysis is the sense of self through most of China? In adherents of Islam? Even in evangelical Christians? There is something almost imperialistic about the exaggeration of psychoanalysis’s proliferation that underpins much in this collection. Given that most of the contributors write from within the post-structuralist tradition, itself grounded in psychoanalysis, this exaggeration is perhaps inevitable. But while post-structuralism, like psychoanalysis, has furnished us with many valuable insights, it may be, in the second decade of the twentyfirst century, in need of a critical eye. That said, the collection remains an extremely important contribution to the understanding of the interaction of psychoanalysis and the colonial.

A ‘nation so ill-begotten’: racialized childhood and conceptions of national belonging in Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country and Baz Luhrmann's Australia

ABSTRACT Xavier Herberts classic Australian novels Poor Fellow My Country (1975) and Capricornia (1938) are acknowledged as directly influencing Baz Lurhmanns film Australia. Aboriginal children have a particular significance in white imaginings of a distinctly Australian race destiny. Moreover, the ‘creamy’ Aboriginal child has become a redemptive emblem of reconciliation in cultural imaginings. This article revisits Herberts Aboriginal child character, Prindy, in Poor Fellow My Country, to assess Herberts nationalist ambitions and how they were embodied by the mixed-descent child in his work. It situates this aspiration within an acquisitive impulse towards racialized children that characterized British colonialism, and that re-appears in Luhrmanns Australia.