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Current Projects
Benevolence Project: this long term research project
considers the foundations, nature and legacies of benevolent
individuals, societies, administrations and practices as they
have impacted on the territories/cultures colonised by the
British Empire from the nineteenth century to the present. It
examines the ways in which texts have been crucial in
articulating and supporting benevolent practices in both
colonial and imperial locations. In particular, we hope to
determine the extent to which discourses concerning
benevolence, philanthropy and humanitarianism interact with,
challenge and alter ideas about charity/aid, democracy, power,
race, gender, class and globalisation, to nominate a few key
areas of interest. As part of this project, the postcolonial
research group is hosting an international conference in
December 2003: Burden,
Benefit, Trace: The Legacies of Benevolence.
Seminars
There are several seminars
planned for Semester 1, 2003 and a special conference in
honour of Helen Tiffin on 25 June.
Visiting Members
Professor Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Michigan State University)
has joined the group this year to pursue her year-long sabbatical
project on reparation and guilt in settler societies. In
June, we are also hosting Dr Anna Johnston (University of
Tasmania) while she pursues ARC funded research on missionary
texts and Australian colonial culture.
Professor Graham Huggan, University of Munich, will visit
in August 2003. His current projects include a book with
Patrick Holland on 'extreme' forms of travel writing, which
is a follow-up to their earlier work, Tourists with Typewriters
(U of Michigan Press, 1998); and a book with Helen Tiffin
on postcolonialism, animals and the environment. Helen and
Graham have also been invited to guest-edit a special issue
of Interventions on 'postcolonial ecocriticism'
Hot off the Press
 In Transit: Travel, Text,
Empire
Edited by Helen Gilbert and Anna
Johnston
New York: Peter Lang, 2002
Synopsis
The essays gathered in In Transit focus on issues
arising from the historical nexus between travel and
imperialism. Contributors investigate the ways in which
specific imperial projects were inextricably linked to
developments in travel technologies and practices. At the same
time, this collection reveals that imperial fantasies of
exploration and conquest, whether actualized or not,
irrevocably shaped the formulation of travel as a category of
modern experience, as a rite/right of passage, and as a type
of embodied knowledge. This dynamic, reciprocal relationship
between imperialism and travel is examined in relation to
written and pictorial documents produced at different
historical moments and across a broad range of geographical
locations, including India, Borneo, the Caribbean, South
Africa, Australia, Britain, Polynesia, and Papua New Guinea.
Contents
Helen Gilbert and Anna Johnston: Introduction • Lisa
O'Connell: 'Scotland 1800: A Tourist's Matrimonial Guide' •
Claudia Brandenstein: '"Making 'the agreeable' to the big
wigs": Lady Nugent's Grand Tour of Duty in Jamaica, 1801–1805'
• Anna Johnston: '"Tahiti, 'the desire of our eyes'":
Missionary Travel Narratives and Imperial Surveillance' •
Leigh Dale: 'Imperial Traveler, Colonial Observer: Humanity
and Difference in Five Years in Kaffirland' • Jo Robertson:
'Anxieties of Imperial Decay: Three Journeys in India' • Helen
Tiffin: 'Pleasant Companions: Nineteenth-century Travel
Writing and the Head-hunters of Borneo' • Robert Clarke:
'Australia's Sublime Desert: John McDouall Stuart and Bruce
Chatwin' • Hsu-Ming Teo: 'Femininity, Modernity, and Colonial
Discourse' • Robert Dixon: 'Frank Hurley's Pearls and Savages:
Travel, Representation, and Colonial Governance' • Libby
Macdonald: 'Prime Directives: Travel in Star Trek and the
South Seas Tale' • Gillian Whitlock: 'Instant Infamy: A Short
History of Broometime' • Helen Gilbert: 'Belated Travel:
Ecotourism as a Style of Travel Performance'
Recommendation
"Travel is the first principle of colonial encounter.
Discourses of travel continue to underwrite imperial relations
in an unequal world. In Transit seeks to understand the
ubiquity of travel in the colonial record not by reaching for
a general theory of the practice and its modes of
representation, but by grounding specific travel activities to
their technological and ideological conditions of possibility.
This superb collection demonstrates that the processes of
subject-formation under empire are radically contingent on
mobility and its limits. It reveals that travel writing is a
genre that knows no institutional boundaries, and it proves
that a critical respect for historical specificity is the
impassable ground zero of genuinely explanatory postcolonial
critique."
(Stephen Slemon, Department of English,
University of Alberta)
Forthcoming Publications
Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and
Empire
Edited by Helen Tiffin
Amsterdam:
Rodopi
Contents
Helen Tiffin: Introduction • Leigh Dale: 'Empire's Proxy:
Sheep and the Colonial Environment' • Claudia Brandenstein:
'Representations of Landscape and Nature in Anthony Trollope's
and James Froude's West Indian travelogues' • Helen Gilbert:
'Ecotourism: A Colonial Legacy?' • Andrew McCann: Colonial
Nature – Inscription on Haunted Landscapes' • Carrie Dawson:
'The "I" in Beaver: Sympathetic Identification and
Self-Representation in Grey Owl's Pilgrims of the Wild' •
Robert Dixon: 'The Sandline Mercenaries Affair:
Postcoloniality, Globalization and the Nation State' • Anna
Johnston: 'Planting the Seeds of Christianity: Ecological
Reform in Nineteenth-Century Polynesian London Missionary
Society Stations' • Susie O'Brien: '"Back to the World":
Reading Ecocriticism in a Postcolonial Context' • Gillian
Whitlock: '"The Animals are Innocent": Latter-Day Women
Travellers in Africa' • Jo Robertson: 'Colonial Cordon
Sanitaire: Fixing the Boundaries of the Disease Environment' •
Meenakshi Sharma: 'Polluted River or Goddess and Saviour? The
Ganga in Discourses of Modernity and Hinduism' • Ruth Blair:
'Transported Landscapes: Reflections on Empire and Environment
in the Pacific' • Chris Tiffin: '"Five Emus to the King of
Siam": Acclimatisation and Colonialism' • Catherine Howell:
'Views from Van Dieman's Land: Space, Place and the Colonial
Settler Subject in John Glovers Landscapes'
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