Colonial intellectuals at the end of Empire: Manning Clark's Australia and Guy Butler's South Africa

Abstract

Colonial masters considered it their right to take human remains collected from colonies or plundered as a result of war. The skulls of Chief Mkwawa and the sub-chief Songea were looted in the same manner from Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to Germany. While Chief Mkwawa’s skull was returned in 1954, the demands for sub-chief Songea’s skull are ongoing, with the Tanzanian community contesting ownership of human remains in European museums. The absence of bones in graves, particularly those of chiefs, have a major impact on the colonised people as graves are associated with communities’ spirituality and wellbeing. This article shows that without a final resting place for the victims of colonialism, mourning is difficult, traumatic and endless. Individuals, communities and nations bestow social, cultural and political significance on human remains, even those curated in museums. The significance of each group is attached to the affective memorialisation of personal bereavement. What happens, then, when the memorialised graves were created at a time when mourning was impossible and the authority to bury or not to bury was in hands of the colonisers? How do the colonial plunder of human body parts and the demands for their return unfold in the contemporary history of Tanzania? These are some of the questions     

Consuming and living the corner shop: belonging,remembering, socialising

This paper presents findings from an ethnographic case study in Germany investigating the relationship between shopkeepers and customers of small grocery stores owned by immigrants. The focus is on social practices within the shops and how those engaged in these activities make sense of them. Shops become meaningful through shared practices that revolve around selling and buying. However, this process is complex and not without conflict. Moving through the themes of belonging, remembering and socialising, I will show how the everyday lifeworlds of customers and shopkeepers, including their aspirations, expectations and uncertainties, intersect and how the shop emerges as a meaningful space through negotiation. Rather than looking at cultural differences alone, it is concluded that there can be significant other ways to understand multicultural places by focusing on the multiple ways that consumers engage with so-called ‘ethnic’ enterprises.     

The chattelization of northern whites: An evolving abolitionist warning

A recurring abolitionist theme was that the failure to destroy southern black slavery would eventuate in the enslavement of northern white laborers. During the 1830s this theme was the particular province of a few evangelical, markedly antimaterialist 'left' abolitionists like William Goodell. More inclined than their cohorts to regard the northern social order as oppressive for increasing numbers of workers, these abolitionists were also more likely to accuse capitalist 'aristocrats' of aspiring to go further and chattelize their workers in emulation of their southern slavocrat allies. Such white-chattelization warnings, which assigned a virtually coequal role in the slave power to malevolent employers and other northern 'aristocrats,' were supplanted in the late antebellum period by ones that instead targeted slavery's mulattoization and the southern slavocracy's proclivity for exploiting this ongoing erosion in racial boundaries. These white-chattelization warnings, which Goodell also notably promoted, acquired greater antislavery support than had the earlier anticapitalist ones. The late-antebellum warnings substantially reflected the ascendance of northern nationalism and the additional legitimacy that it conferred on capital-labor arrangements in the free states.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.     

The application of quicklook NOAA AVHRR satellite imagery in Northern Scandinavia for synoptic weather analyses

The suitability of imagery from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) on the NOAA series of satellites for the synoptic classification of circulation trends in the European Arctic is assessed with reference to data from three climate stations. Simplified synoptic cyclonic classifications are derived from the satellite imagery and tested against climate data. Five classes of frontal system are derived from the tracking of systems over the UK‐Scandinavia‐Baltic region using 1460 satellite images over two years. An index based on the qualitative interpretation of satellite imagery was related to the reference data. The tracking of the systems in the imagery also facilitates a comparison of travel times across the region and the frequency of occurrence. Frontal systems that remain largely stationary over the Baltic were found to correlate best with precipitation at the reference sites. The paper thus investigates the use of AVHRR imagery for the categorisation of weather patterns towards deriving quantitative relationships between circulation classes and weather elements (such as temperature and precipitation) where, for example, climate data are sparse or where skills required for the interpretation of Height Potential Fields are lacking.     

Defining Citizenship for a New Nation

A key part of any process of decolonisation is the need for the emerging nation to determine the rules for citizenship. In Papua New Guinea, what it meant to be a citizen was the first topic that the Constitutional Planning Committee considered when it set about its task to develop a ‘home grown’ constitution in late 1972. The process by which it first comprehended this matter and then involved thousands of Papua New Guineans in their villages, missions and schools in a territory-wide exercise in consultation forms the subject of this paper. The records of the discussions that took place between February and April of 1973 reveal much of how the criteria for membership of the national enterprise came to be established. This case study of defining citizenship in PNG demonstrates the intensive consultation of the local peoples on key issues in nation-building and reveals the high degree of Indigenous agency in the decolonisation process.