Tracing the Plantation Archipelago in Australia and the Pacific

In this lecture, I trace historical and imaginative connections between twentieth and twenty-first century artistic and literary representations of blackbirding and sugarcane plantations in Australia, Vanuatu, and Fiji. I refer to, among others, the works of writers and artists such as Grace Mera Molisa, Shireen Malamoo, Jasmin Togo-Brisby, Nancy Cato, Faith Bandler, Manisha Anjali, and others. Drawing on Tracey Banivanua Mar’s and Evelyn Araluen’s respective critiques of settler-colonial structures, I trace out the archipelago as a logic of power that informs how we remember and connect experiences of plantation labour. The archipelago contextualises a defining rhetorical move in these connections: the diffraction of an individual perspective towards a fictional composite of collective experiences, a response to the enclosure and circumscription of lived and emotional engagement within indentured labour practices. 

This paper comments particularly on how these archipelagic logics determine the rhetorical question of slavery, while noting that these logics reflect a wider carceral imaginary that interconnects national and transnational contexts. This talk therefore forms a single part of a wider research project investigating archipelagic connections across representations of convictism, settler-colonialism, indenture, and offshore detention in Australian and Pacific literatures. 

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.

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