BRITISHNESS AND OTHERNESS
Locating Marginal White Identities in the Empire
Abstracts
Campbell, Malcolm
University of Auckland
‘Marginal micks’ or mainstream men and
women? Irishness and Britishness in nineteenth and early-twentieth
century New Zealand
Compared with other ‘settler societies’, New Zealand’s
historiography seems to have been remarkable for its homogenisation
of nineteenth century newcomers from the United Kingdom. Immigrants,
the canonical accounts seem to iterate, entered their new society
as Britons—and ‘Better Britons’ at that—who
passed on quickly and seamlessly to become Pakeha New Zealanders.
Very recently, however, a more complex reading of New Zealand’s
colonial past has begun to emerge, breaking free from the older
nationalist imperative and exploring the diversity of the nation’s
nineteenth century immigrants. Central to this revision has been
exploration of the Irish presence in New Zealand, and consideration
of a critical question—how Irish was New Zealand? As yet
answers to this question remain elusive, and the variety, meanings
and significance of the Irish presence in late-nineteenth century
and early-twentieth century New Zealand remain far from fully
understood.
This paper discusses the complex position of the Irish in New
Zealand and in New Zealand historical writing in order to address
two specific lines of inquiry: the validity of singular narratives
of Britishness within the empire and whether or not (and if so,
when) phenotypically-similar groups such as the Irish accessed
the privileges of Britishness.
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Carter, Sarah
University of Calgary
Cultivating Distinctions: The Category of "White
Woman" in the Canadian Prairie West, 1896 - 1920
That there is no singular narrative of White experience in Western
Canada has long been acknowledged in Canadian history. Many studies
have examined the discrimination and prejudice faced by phenotypically
similar but diverse colonizers because of their nationality, religion,
or other factors. These included Mormons, Germans, Ukrainians,
Mennonites, Doukhobors, Hutterites, French-Canadians and other
Catholics. It is also not new to say that there were wide economic
disparities among the British and British-Ontarian colonizers,
and far from all enjoyed elite privilege and status. Within this
literature however, little attention has been paid to issues of
gender, and in particular to the history of women, and my paper
will suggest some possible avenues of investigation. My focus
will be the category of "White woman" in the post-1896
Canadian West. Before 1896, when the government launched an ambitious
campaign to populate the prairies, "White" meant British
or British-Ontarian, and the "other" women were Aboriginal.
The matter was less clear-cut as the multicultural fabric of the
West took shape. Ukrainian and other European women were excluded
from this category through the circulation of negative representations,
similar to those attached to Aboriginal women. The issue of which
women were considered White was raised in the courts, when judges
were called on to interpret the "white women's labour laws,"
that prohibited Asian business men from hiring White women. I
will examine distinctions cultivated within the British and British-Ontarian
fragment through a focus on the celebrated elite "Pilgrim
Mothers" of the West, and those on the margins, such as Calgary's
Caroline "Mother" Fulham, an Irish pig farmer known
also as the "Queen of Garbage Row".
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Emma Greenwood
Australian National University
Being & Becoming a British Migrant: Postwar British
immigration to South Africa & Australia, 1945-1960
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Lowry, Donal
Oxford Brookes University
The Irish Diaspora
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Parolin, Tina
Australian National University
Contagion and Containment: Political Prisoners and
the 'Other' in early Nineteenth Century England
Early 19th century Britain percolated with revolutionary possibility.
While the surge in popular radicalism centred on the need to reform
the parliamentary system, the radical vision challenged so much
more, threatening the prevailing social, cultural and political
order. Radicals offered the disenfranchised, the uneducated, the
hungry, the poor and the powerless the restitution of privileges
they were entitled to as free-born Englishman - an end to their
status as the “other”. This paper examines the responses
to the ‘contagion’ of popular radicalism in this period.
In particular it focuses on the attempts to contain the spread
of ‘infidelism’ through the criminalizing of heterodoxy
and the alignment of radicals both physically and morally with
the much maligned and feared segment of society – the criminal
‘other’.
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Roselya, Lancia
Australian National University
Grace Aguilar: A Sephardic Woman's Perspective on
the Prospect of Embracing the Christian 'Other' in the Nineteenth
Century
To embrace or not to embrace the religious 'Other' was an inflammatory
question that was widely debated in the nineteenth century. Even
though many British Jews were racially indistinguishable from
neighbouring Protestants, these two groups did not share the same
legal and social privileges. Jewish efforts to maintain their
traditional religious practices highlighted the difference between
Jews and Protestants and challenged the latter's value system,
which was thought to epitomize 'British' values. In addition to
religious variances, Protestant attitudes about Jewish racial
traits, their gender roles and their access to wealth influenced
their willingness to allow Jews to access full privileges within
society. Grace Aguilar, a young Sephardic woman stepped forward
in the mid-nineteenth century and gently made public recommendations
to promote harmonious relations between Protestants and Jews in
order to end a long period of estrangement and work toward mutual
goals, as distinctive but equal British citizens.
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Saunders, Chris
University of Cape Town
Black British and White British in South Africa
This paper explores some of the ways in which those who were
regarded as `black' or `white' in the South African context identified
with Britain both during the period in which Britain ruled parts
or all of what is today South Africa as well as after Britain
had devolved a large measure of independence to the white minority.
A number of examples will be chosen to illustrate the wide variety
of meanings of 'Britishness' in this particular context. It is
hoped that this will help open up the possibility of comparisons
being drawn between `Britishness' in South Africa and in other
countries once within the British Empire.
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Tyrrell, Alec
La Trobe University
Scottishness and Britishness: From Scotland to Australia
Felix
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Wellings, Ben
Australian National University
Crown and Country: Britishness and Australian Nationalism
since 1788
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Westcott, Robyn
Macquarie University/Australian National University
The uses of (an)other History: A digression from
Linda Colley’s Britishness and Otherness: An Argument (1992)
What is the function of the figurative 'other' in authorising
specific conceptions of ‘Britishness’? How is this
'other' constituted - as strategic and ephemeral; or as a definitive
(and therefore representative) presence? How does political and
epistemic power operate in the critical separation of ‘Britishness’
from its ‘outside’. Is the invocation of the ‘other’
an opportune appropriation of post-structuralist idiom, or a productive
methodology for thinking through what was at stake in the prohibition
of particular identities within the Empire?
This paper responds to the assessment of several competing models
of Britishness offered by Linda Colley in her essay Britishness
and Otherness: An Argument. My aim is to engage Colley’s
historical speculations in conversation with critical strategies
and theoretical frameworks advanced in disciplines such as Cultural
Studies and Whiteness Studies. I contend that such a dialogue
will disrupt the opposition of the ‘concrete’ with
the ‘abstract’ implicit in the dichotomy of ‘Britishness’
and ‘otherness’ and allow for the exploration of minority
white identities that are often effaced in the existing histories
of the period.
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