Asian Servants for the Imperial Telegraph: Imagining North Australia as an Indian Ocean Colony before 1914

In the late nineteenth century, the officers of the Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company provided north Australia with a cable connection to London via Java, Singapore, and India. The telegraph project prompted a new era of colonisation in tropical north Australia and the officers of the company sought to ensure that the north would be shaped according to their notions of Indian Ocean colonial culture. They insisted on employing Asian domestic servants in opposition to White Australian nationalists who advocated restrictions on Asian migration. Like the pearling industry, which was permitted ongoing access to Asian labour, the telegraph company drew on the support of liberal parliamentarians, and leveraged their privileged position as providers of imperial telecommunications to develop an elite colonial counter-culture in north Australia.     

Phosphate and Forced Relocation: An Assessment of the Resettlement of the Banabans to Northern Fiji in 1945

At the end of the Second World War, 1,003 Banaban and Gilbertese from Banaba Island in the central Pacific were relocated to northern Fiji. Colonial authorities had realised early on that, because of extensive and continued phosphate mining, Banaba Island would soon become uninhabitable. The community was forcibly and reluctantly moved 2,000 miles across the Pacific. This article assesses the post-war relocation of the Banabans; original colonial documents and correspondence are examined, interviews with elderly survivors of the relocation conducted and a study-team visit undertaken in Rabi Island, Fiji. Prior to relocation, the colonial authorities drew up a resettlement plan, and the successes and failures of this plan are also analysed. The Banabans suffered intensely from physical separation from Banaba Island and from a lack of familiarity with their new environment. They were also disadvantaged by conflicting views of opposing colonial jurisdictions and from a lack of long-term support after their initial resettlement phase. Today, elderly Banabans still yearn after Banaba Island, and the young are curious to visit their degraded ancestral home.     

“They want a different life”: Rural northern settlement dynamics and pathways to homelessness in Yellowknife and Inuvik,Northwest Territories

Visible homelessness in the Northwest Territories, Canada is often described as a recent phenomenon by policy makers and the popular media alike. Indeed, since the late 1990s, homeless shelters in Yellowknife and Inuvik report a steady increase in demand for beds and other support for homeless people. Homelessness in these two communities disproportionately affects Aboriginal northerners, however little is known about their individual pathways to homelessness. Moreover, homelessness in the Northwest Territories is often portrayed as an issue confined to larger “urbanizing” regional centres, yet many homeless Aboriginal northerners have originated from small, rural settlement communities. Despite this, little concern has been paid to how factors at the small community level intersect with more visible forms of homelessness in larger, urban centres, not to mention how these intersections shape a territorial geography of homelessness. In this article, I aim to uncover and explore the often hidden factors at the northern rural settlement level that ultimately contribute to more visible forms of homelessness in northern urban centres. I suggest that uneven and fragmented social, institutional, and economic geographies result in a unique landscape of vulnerability to homelessness in the Northwest Territories. This geography emerges through the production of particular dynamics between rural settlement communities and northern urban centres. In particular, four main factors represent these rural‐urban dynamics: 1) the attractions of opportunity in northern urban centres; 2) rural settlement‐urban institutional flows; 3) chronic housing need in the settlements; and, 4) disintegrating social relationships in the settlements. I explore the particular ways in which these factors influence rural‐urban migration among the homeless population and what roles this mobility plays in individual pathways to homelessness.     

Telling stories: Exploring research storytelling as a meaningful approach to knowledge mobilization with Indigenous research collaborators and diverse audiences in community‐based participatory research

A growing number of geographers seek to communicate their research to audiences beyond the academy. Community‐based and participatory action research models have been developed, in part, with this goal in mind. Yet despite many promising developments in the way research is conducted and disseminated, researchers continue to seek methods to better reflect the “culture and context” of the communities with whom they work. During my doctoral research on homelessness in the Northwest Territories, I encountered a significant disconnect between the emotive, personal narratives of homelessness that I was collecting and more conventional approaches to research dissemination. In search of a method of dissemination to engage more meaningfully with research collaborators as well as the broader public, I turned to my creative writing work. In this article, I draw from “The komatik lesson” to discuss my first effort at research storytelling. I suggest that research storytelling is particularly well suited to community‐based participatory research, as we explore methods to present findings in ways that are more culturally appropriate to the communities in which the research takes place. This is especially so in collaborative research with Indigenous communities, where storytelling and knowledge sharing are often one and the same. However, I also discuss the ways in which combining my creative writing interests with my doctoral research has been an uneasy fit, forcing me to question how to tell a good story while giving due diligence to the role that academic research has played in its development. Drawing on the outcomes and challenges I encountered, I offer an understanding of what research storytelling is, and how it might be used to advance community‐based participatory research with Indigenous communities.     

Intergenerational transmission of reproductive behavior during the demographic transition

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDP) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.     

Nationalism, racism and propaganda in early Weimar Germany: contradictions in the campaign against the "black horror on the Rhine"

During the early 1920s, an average of 25,000 colonial soldiers from North Africa, Senegal and Madagascar formed part of the French army of occupation in the Rhineland. The campaign against these troops, which used the racist epithet ‘black horror on the Rhine’ (schwarze Schmach am Rhein), was one of the most important propaganda efforts of the Weimar period. In black horror propaganda, images of alleged sexual violence against Rhenish women and children by African French soldiers served as metaphors for Germany’s ‘victimization’ through the Versailles Treaty. Because the campaign initially gained broad popular and official support, historians have tended to consider the black horror a successful nationalist movement bridging political divides and strengthening the German nation state. In contrast, this essay points to some of the contradictions within the campaign, which often crystallized around conflicts over the nature of effective propaganda. Extreme racist claims about the Rhineland’s alleged ‘mulattoization’ (Mulattisierung) increasingly alienated Rhinelanders and threatened to exacerbate traditional tensions between the predominantly Catholic Rhineland and the central state at a time when Germany’s western borders seemed rather precarious in the light of recent territorial losses and separatist agitation. There was a growing concern that radical strands within the black horror movement were detrimental to the cohesion of the German nation state and to Germany’s positive image abroad, and this was a major reason behind the campaign’s decline after 1921/22. The conflicts within the campaign also point to some hitherto neglected affinities between the black horror and subsequent Nazi propaganda.     

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Myth and Archive. A Theory of Latin American Narrative.

Abstract

Nigel Dennis, ed. El Epistolario (1924–1935). José Bergamín-Manuel de Falla. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1995. 178 pp. Nigel Dennis, ed. En torno a la poesía de José Bergamín. Universitat de Lleida: 1995. 266 pp.

David K. Danow. The Spirit of Carnival: Magical Realism and the Grotesque. The University Press of Kentucky, 1995. 153 pp.

Karl D. Uitti with Michelle Freeman. Chrétien de Troyes Revisited. (Twayne's World Author Series Revisited, 855) New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. xv + 169 pp.

Downing A. Thomas. Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1995. xi + 195 pp. $49.95.

George May. La perruque de Dom Juan, ou du bon usage des énigmes dans la littérature classique. (Coll. Bibliothèque de l'Âge classique.) Paris: Klincksieck, 1995. 144 pp.

Norman Roth. Converses, Inquisition, and the Expulsion. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. xv + 429 pp.

Simon Gaunt. Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature. (Cambridge Studies in French, 53) Cambridge University Press, 1995. x + 372 pp.

F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, eds. A Handbook of the Troubadours. University of California Press, 1995. vii + 501 pp. $55.00 (HB) $22.50 (PB).     

The Italian welfare state after the financial crisis

The essential characteristics of the Italian welfare state as it developed after the Second World War generated social cleavages and inequities that affected the Italian economy and provided grist for future reforms. At the same time, the welfare state provided political actors with incentives and resources that constrained attempts at reform. With the financial crisis beginning in 2008, serious reform was no longer optional. But austerity politics have generated pressures for changes to the welfare state which are unlikely to moderate most of the underlying inequities generated by the post-war system. Going forward, Italian policymakers must chart a path that is informed by efforts to overcome the pathologies of the past without further undermining the social and economic health of the country.