CONTENTS
Pages
Conference Basics………………………………………………………………………
2
Dunedin Information………………………………………………………………….
3–4
Amenities……………………………………………………………………………………
5–7
Conference Programme at a Glance…………………………………………
8–9
Venue Map…………………………………………………………………………………
10
PROGRAMME………………………………………………………………………………
11–19
Index to Presenters/Abstracts…………………………………………………..
20–21
Abstracts (organized by session)……………………………………………….
22–52
1
CONFERENCE BASICS
Venues The 2014 Anzasa Conference is being held at the University of Otago
College of Education on Union Street East in Dunedin.
Keynotes/Plenary sessions are in the Tower Block, room TG08. Parallel
Sessions are in the Teaching Wing, rooms T106, T105a, and T105b.
(The entrance on the map labelled “E2” will give you access to both the
Tower Block and Teaching Wing.)
Morning and afternoon teas will be in the foyer outside room TG08.
The reception following the opening keynote on Tuesday, Feb. 11, is
being held at Technique Restaurant on Harbour Terrace (very near to the
College of Education—a five minute walk, at most).
Registration/Check-In Registration/conference check-in will be open from 15.00 on Tuesday,
Feb. 11 either in the foyer outside room TG08 or, if weather permits, in
front of the Teaching Wing building (outside “E2”).
A/V and Internet Each room (TG08, T106, T105a, and T105b) is equipped with a
computer (which can run as either Mac or Windows) as well as a
projector; there are also dvd players, overhead and document projectors,
and connections for personal laptops. Basically, we should be able to
handle all your presentation needs.
In addition, guest wi-fi access and passwords have been arranged for all
delegates. The details are on the back of your name tags.
Conference Dinner The conference dinner is being held at the Carey’s Bay Historic Hotel,
approximately 20 minutes from the College of Education. A bus, included
in the cost of the dinner, will depart from Logan Park (across Union Street
East from the College of Education) at 18.40 and return at 22.00. People
are welcome to arrange their own transportation instead of using the bus.
The price of the dinner includes a three-course meal and some
beverages. Basically, we’ve negotiated the equivalent of one bottle of
wine for every two people, and a (limited) bar tab for soft drinks and beer.
Once the bar tab is exhausted, diners will have to pay for their own
drinks. FYI, coffee/tea will be served with dessert and is included in the
price of the dinner.
If anyone has not signed up for the dinner but would like to attend, or if
you are traveling with a partner (or others) who would like to attend the
dinner, please settle this asap—preferably at check-in or earlier—and be
sure to make any dietary requirements known.
2
DUNEDIN CITY
College of Education
(ANZASA conference
venue)
The Octagon
(Dunedin’s city
centre)
Most central city shops/restaurants/bars are to be found along George St, around the Octagon
(including Moray Place and upper and lower Stuart Sts—upper Stuart St is to the left on this map, lower
Stuart St to the right), and (continuing south) on Princes St.
GETTING AROUND
City buses offer one reasonably priced way of getting around. Dunedin buses operate on a zone
system. It is $2.00 for the first zone (which gives you significant range—it would get you from the city
centre to Logan Park [near the conference venue], for example) and increases 50-70 cents for each
additional zone traversed. From the Octagon to St. Clair Beach, for instance, is a three zone trip which
costs $3.40. It’s best to tell the driver where you plan to get off, and he or she will tell you the fare
required. You need to be on the right bus, however. Routes and schedules can be found at:
http://www.orc.govt.nz/Information-and-Services/Buses/Bus-Information/.
Also, taxis are numerous and not too expensive for most trips within the city (IMHO).
3
THINGS TO DO/SEE
If you have some extra time before or after the conference, Dunedin offers a number of attractions for
visitors; these are just some of what’s available (bold/underscored attractions are free):
Attractions—buildings
 Dunedin Railway Station (at the bottom of lower Stuart St)
 Olveston (42 Royal Terrace)
 First Church of Otago (415 Moray Place)
 Larnach Castle and Gardens (Otago Peninsula)
Attractions—industry
 Cadbury World (280 Cumberland St)
 Speight’s Brewery (200 Rattray St)
 Gas Works Museum (20 Braemar St, south Dunedin)
Attractions—other
 Baldwin St (north Dunedin)—Guinness Book of World Records says this is the steepest street
in the world
Gallerys/Museums:
 Otago Museum (on the university campus)
 Dunedin Public Art Gallery (at the Octagon)
 Toitu Otago Settlers Museum (31 Queens Garden, south past the railway station).
Gardens:
 Dunedin Botanic Gardens (cnr Great King St and Opoho Rd in north Dunedin)
 Dunedin Chinese Garden (cnr Rattray and Cumberland Sts; south past the Railway Station and
Toitu).
 Glenfalloch Woodland Garden (on the Otago Peninsula)
Natural World:
 Nature’s Wonders Naturally, including the Royal Albatross Centre (Taiaroa Head, Otago
Peninsula)
 Penguin Place (45 Pakihau Road, Otago Peninsula)
 Orokonui Ecosanctuary (600 Blueskin Rd; at least 20 minutes from the city centre, though still
technically in Dunedin)
 Tunnel Beach1 (end of Tunnel Beach Road off Blackhead Road)—STEEP uphill climb after
you visit (of course, the downhill is also steep but is a much easier walk).
 Moeraki Boulders* (45 minutes north of Dunedin on State Highway 1)—there is a free parking
area before you come to the café, though then you have to walk further to the boulders.
1
These attractions are “free” when you get to them, but you’ll need transportation.
4
Amenities
ATMs (closest to conference venue):
 Westpac Bank in the Otago Polytechnic Student Centre, Harbour Terrace;
 BNZ in the Commerce Building, Level 3, Union Street;
 Westpac, BNZ, and ANZ ATMs also available in or around the Information Services Building
(Central Library) and Student Union (65 Albany Street). There are also ANZ and BNZ
branches (with ATMs) elsewhere on Albany St (ANZ at #62 and BNZ #58).
Coffee (generally all also offer muffins, scones, etc., both sweet and savory; the first three are closest
to the conference venue):
 Fluid Espresso, 138 Union Street East (corner of Union & Forth Streets);
 Ako Espresso Café, in the Otago Polytechnic Student Centre, Harbour Terrace (summer hours
uncertain);
 Plaza Café, at Forsyth Barr Stadium (east, across Anzac Ave from the College of Education);
 The Fix, Centre for Innovation, University of Otago, 15 Frederick Street;
 Café Albany, located in “the Link” (enclosed area between the University Union and the Central
Library in the Information Services Building), 65 Albany Street;
 Everyday Gourmet, 466 George Street (perhaps the best coffee; daytime only).
Dairies (i.e., “Convenience Stores”; the first is closest to the conference venue):
 Campus Wonderful Store, 138 Union Street East (corner of Union and Forth Street);
 Rob Roy, 500 George Street (corner of Albany and George Street);
 Dundas Corner Dairy, 60 Dundas Street (corner of Dundas and Cumberland);
 Regent Night ‘n’ Day, 2 Regent Road (corner of Regent and George Street, where St. David
Street meets George).
Breakfast:
 Capers Café, 412 George St;
 Governor’s Café, 438 George St;
 Plaza Café, at Forsyth Barr Stadium (see above under coffee; they make breakfasts, too).
Lunch (reasonable walking distance; reasonable prices):
 Plaza Café, at Forsyth Barr Stadium (see above under coffee; make lunches, too);
 College Shop, 157 Union Street East (pies, sandwiches; no seating);
 Fluid Espresso, 138 Union Street East (muffins and sandwiches; limited seating);
 Ako Espresso Café, in the Otago Polytechnic Student Centre, Harbour Terrace (may, in fact,
not be open in the summer).
The above are the nearest options, but a little further away (and perhaps a challenge to visit with only
one hour for lunch):
 Frankly Sandwiches and Campus Shop in “the Link” (Central Library/Information Services
Building);
 Union Grill, in the University Union, 65 Albany Street;
 University of Otago Staff Club (follow Union Street East westward through the Uni; just over the
Water of Leith; coffee and early evening drinks also available);
 The Flying Squid (fish ‘n’ chips), 118 Albany Street;
 Eureka Cafe, 116 Albany Street;
 Formosa Delight (notable for vegan/vegetarian fare, but services other dietary interests as
well), 114 Albany Street;
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Poppa’s Pizza, 74 Albany Street;
Green Acorn, 72 Albany Street;
Sushi Station, 70 Albany Street;
Everyday Gourmet, 466 George Street (deli-style food; daytime only);
The Good Earth Cafe, 765 Cumberland Street (nice atmosphere; daytime only);
Otago Museum, 419 Great King Street (across from Information Services Building; daytime
only);
The Food Department, 20 Malcolm St. (just across Albany St from the Museum, behind the
Bank of New Zealand branch);
Brunch n Lunch, 136 Frederick Street (take Leith St one block south from Albany St; no
seating, but good, inexpensive sandwiches, pies, etc.).
Dinner2
Area covered: mainly from roughly the University south to the Octagon (city centre); you’ll find more
restaurants the closer you get to the Octagon. Moray Place and Stuart St (upper and lower) are in the
Octagon area (see earlier map). There are, of course, many other options; these are just some of the
better ones.
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Scotia Bar & Bistro, 199 Upper Stuart St (modern Scottish cuisine [seriously], most upmarket,
elegant, $$$$);
Nova, 29 the Octagon (modern Kiwi cuisine next to Dunedin Public Art Gallery, $$-$$$);
Two Chefs, 121 Lower Stuart St (French bistro style; pick for best western food, nice space,
$$$);
Del Sol, 12 Moray Place (best Mexican, $$);
Etrusco, 8 Moray Place (Italian; food just OK, but space is lovely, $$);
India Garden, 10 Hanover St (favorite Indian, a family owned, non-chain feel, $$);
Little India, 308 Moray Place (good food, slicker, more chain-like than above, $$);
Chili Planet, 430 George St near Campus (favorite Thai, family owned, $$);
Kwang Chow, 18 Lower Stuart St (excellent; very genuine Chinese, $ - $$);
The Asian, 43 Moray Place (a Dunedin favorite, more westernised than Kwang Chow, $ - $$ );
Wong Gok, 282 Moray Place (very good value, genuine Chinese, cafe atmosphere rather than
restaurant, $);
The Jitsu, 133 Lower Stuart St (Japanese cuisine [and not just sushi]; vegan and vegetarian
friendly; $$);
Best Cafe, 30 Lower Stuart St (classic fish and chip, fresh fish, quirky 1950s atmosphere, $ $$);
Barakah Restaurant, 12 Lower Stuart St (Moroccan/North African themed, $$$);
Galata (a.k.a. Anatolia) Kebab House, 126 Princes St ($ - $$).
Paasha Turkish Café, 31 St Andrew St ($$).
Even further away (a taxi is advised) but worth the trip:
 Plato, 2 Birch St, (in the old seafarers’ hostel; seafood a specialty, $$$-$$$$);
 Salt, 240 Forbury Rd (at St Clair Beach with ocean views; Kiwi cuisine, $$$; a reservation is
recommended).
A couple of the lunch options—Flying Squid (fish ‘n’ chips) and Poppa’s Pizza—may be open for
dinner as well (though summer hours vary). There are also a number of places north from the
2 Adapted and derived from various sources, with special thanks to my colleague Mark Seymour, who knows
Dunedin’s restaurant scene better than I do. The system of $ is random and impressionistic, but $$$$ would be $80-100 for
full meal and wine, $$$ about $80, $$ about $30, $ about $20 or less.
6
university in the 700-900 blocks of George and Great King Sts, including fast food (KFC, Burger King,
etc.) as well as Thai, Turkish, and other options. Hell Pizza (703 Great King St) is perhaps the best
pizza, though it would get an argument from Poppa’s. And if you keep going further north,
Filadelphio’s (3 North Road) also offers excellent pizza.
Pubs/Nightlife
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Eureka Cafe and Bar, 116 Albany St (closest to conference venue and a favorite of the
university’s late-afternoon/early evening drinks crowd);
Starters Bar, 157 Frederick St (one of the last UG bars close to the university).
Some suggestions as you travel further south from the University:
 on George St: The Bog Irish Bar (#387—nice, no frills pub near the university), Mou Very
(#357—perhaps NZ’s [or the world’s?] smallest bar; favorite of some postgrads), and The
Robert Burns Pub (#374—a Dunedin icon);
 in the Octagon: Alibi Bar and Restaurant (1 Princes St), Di Lusso Bar (#12), Bacchus Wine
Bar and Restaurant (#12), and Ra Cafe and Bar (#21) are recommended;
 Lower Stuart St (off the Octagon): Albar (#135—noted especially for its selection of single
malts and range of European and local beers) and Carousel (#141—upstairs; cocktails and
wines their specialty);
 on Moray Place: Pequeño (Spanish-themed wine bar somewhat difficult to find; although the
address is 50 Princes St [the Savoy Building], access is via an alley at 24 Moray Place);
 on Princes St (the continuation of George St on the other side of the Octagon): Toast (#59—
noted for its cocktails) and Tonic (#138—noted for its selection of Belgian beers).
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Programme at a Glance3
Tuesday, February 11
14.00–16.00
PG Afternoon—Arts/Burns Building, room 2.n.8
16.30–18.00
Session A
Mihi Whakatau/Welcome
KEYNOTE:
Frederick E. Hoxie, University of Illinois
18.00–20.00
(TG08)
Reception—Technique Restaurant, Harbour Terrace
Wednesday, February 12
Panel 1
8.30–10.00
Session B
10.00–10.30
10.30–12.00
Session C
12.00–13.00
13.00–14.30
Session D
(T106)
Native Americans in
Historical, Literary,
and Comparative
Perspective
Panel 2
(T105a)
Politics Do Not Stop at
the Water’s Edge
morning tea
SPECIAL GUEST PLENARY SESSION
Panel 3
Commerce, Consuls,
and Confederates:
Diplomacy and War in
New Nations
(TG08)
Claire Hope Cummings, The Cultural Conservancy
Melissa K. Nelson, San Francisco State University
Lunch
Panel 4
(T106)
Panel 5
The United States
Seen from Abroad
(T105a)
Race @ 50
Panel 6
—short break—
14.45–15.45
Session E
KEYNOTE:
Susan M. Schweik, University of California, Berkeley
15.45–16.15
afternoon tea
Panel 7
(T106)
Body Talk
Panel 8
(T105a)
America First: From
Grassroots to Seedbed
of the New Right
17.15–17.30
—short break—
17.30–18.30
Session G
JOHN A. SALMOND MEMORIAL ROUNDTABLE
The Duke Experience, ca.1965–ca.2000
(T105b)
Asia and America—
and Percy Spender—in
the Cold War
14.30–14.45
16.15–17.15
Session F
(T105b)
Panel 9
(TG08)
(T105b)
Art and
(Transnational)
Identity
(TG08)
All venues are in the University of Otago, College of Education (on Union Street East). Keynotes/Plenary
sessions are in the Tower Block, room TG08. Parallel Sessions are in the Teaching Wing, rooms T106, T105a, and T105b.
3
8
Thursday, February 13
8.30–9.30
Session H
9.30–10.00
10.00–11.30
Session I
11.30–12.30
12.30–14.00
Session J
14.00–14.15
14.15–15.15
Session K
KEYNOTE:
Lary May, University of Minnesota
morning tea
Panel 10
(T106)
The Use and Abuse of
Television
Lunch
Panel 13
(T106)
Putting It on Paper:
Letter Writing in the
Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
—short break—
Panel 16
(T106)
Of Kings and
Democrats: Studies in
American Political
History
Panel 11
(T105a)
Tilting the Axis:
Japan, Germany, and
Italy in American
Minds During and
After World War II
Panel 14
(T105a)
(TG08)
Panel 12
(T105b)
Transnational Gender:
The United States,
New Zealand, and
Australia
Panel 15
(T105b)
American Slavery /
American Freedom
“What Then Is The
American, This New
Man?” Answers from
Literature
Panel 17
Panel 18
(T105a)
Remember the
American Revolution?
15.15–15.45
afternoon tea
15.45–17.15
Session L
KEYNOTE:
Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota
(T105b)
Drawing Significance:
Representations of
American Soldiers
(TG08)
A short wrap-up w/ final thoughts from Keynotes and discussion follows
17.15–17.30
—short break—
17.30–18.30
ANZASA AGM
18.40–22.00
CONFERENCE DINNER—Carey’s Bay Historic Hotel
(TG08)
Friday, February 14
Departure
9
Follow George Street
south to Dunedin’s city
centre (the Octagon).
400 block
500 block
N
600 block
George St
Great King St
Cumberland St
Site of the Post-Grad.
afternoon (room 2.n.8)
St. Marg. College
It’s easiest to find the
room by entering on the
side where the map says
“Arts/ Burns”; take
stairs or lift to 2nd
floor, turn right, and
head to the north end of
the corridor.
Union St East
Executive Residence
Technique Rest.
Although it may not look like
it from this map, there are
bridges over the Water of
Leith in these two spots.
Location of the ANZASA 2014 conference
meeting rooms: Tower Block (TG08) and
Teaching Wing (T106, T105a, T105b). Use
entrance E2 for easiest access to all.
(Don’t be fooled by the big “2” you might notice on one of
the Auditorium doors as you pass; that’s not our “E2.”
Note, also, that the gap immediately before the Education
Centre [travelling down Union Street East] is larger than it
might seem from the map. Follow the walkway through
that gap to get to E2.)
10
E2
Conference
Registration/
Check-In will
also be in this
vicinity.
Programme—ANZASA 2014
Tuesday, 11 February
14.00–16.00
Venue:
Post-Graduate afternoon
Arts/Burns Building, room 2.n.8
16.30–18.00
Mihi Whakatau / Session A
Venue:
TG08
Welcome and Keynote Address
Chair: Russell L. Johnson,
University of Otago
19th Century American Indian Political Activists: Their Achievements, Their
Legacy, Their Meaning
Frederick E. Hoxie, University of Illinois
Frederick E. Hoxie is Swanlund Professor of History at the University of
Illinois Urbana/Champaign where he is also an affiliated faculty member in
the American Indian Studies Program and the College of Law. Formerly
Vice President of the Newberry Library and a founding trustee of the
Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, he has
published more than a dozen books in the field of Native studies. These
include: A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the American
Indians, 1880-1920 (1984), Parading Through History: The Making of the
Crow Nation in America, 1805-1935 (1995), and, with co-authors R. David
Edmunds and Neal Salisbury, The People: A History of Native America
(2007). His most recent book, This Indian Country: American Indian
Political Activists and the Place They Made (2012), was awarded the best
book prize from the Western History Association in 2013.
18.00–20.00
Reception
Technique Restaurant, Harbour Terrace
Wednesday, 12 February
8.30–10.00
Panel 1
Venue:
T106
Session B
Native Americans in Historical, Literary, and Comparative
Perspective
Chair: Lisa Samuels, University of Auckland
Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy—Arguments Against Removal
in Letters Written by Native Americans in the First Half of the Nineteenth
Century
Claudia B. Haake, La Trobe University, Melbourne
“Go Back to Where You Belong, Man!”: Teaching Alexie’s Indian Killer
Heather Neilson, UNSW Canberra
Comparative Indigenous Cultures and the Making of “Country”: Maori,
Indigenous Australia, Native America
Paul Giles, University of Sydney
11
Panel 2
Venue:
T105a
Politics Do Not Stop at the Water’s Edge
Chair: Daniel Fleming, University of Newcastle
The “Global Gag Rule” in Context: Debates over Family Planning,
Population Control, Abortion, and the Taxpayer in the 1970s and 1980s
Prudence Flowers, Flinders University
“Who Can Resist This Guy?” Captain Jacques Cousteau and the Defeat of
the Antarctic Minerals Convention
Emma Shortis, University of Melbourne
From Globalism to “Assertive Multilateralism”: Restoring the Credibility of
the Liberal Statesman
Samantha E. Bedggood, University of Queensland
Panel 3
Venue:
T105b
Commerce, Consuls, and Confederates: Diplomacy and War in New
Nations
Chair: Peter S. Field, University of Canterbury
Murder on the High Seas: The Slave Ship Zong, Jamaican Commerce, and
the American Revolution
Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne
Low Level Diplomacy: American Consuls’ Private Businesses and
Professional Autonomy in North Africa, 1800–1810
Brett Goodin, Australian National University
The Wealth of Hawks and Doves: Explaining Variation in Confederate
Congressional Support for the Army during the Civil War
Adam Lockyer, United States Studies Centre
Shawn Treier, Australian National University
10.00–10.30
Morning tea (outside TG08)
10.30–12.00
Session C – Special Guest Plenary Session
Venue:
TG08
The Old and New Stories of Agriculture: Traditional Knowledge and
the Renewal of Farming in America
Chair: Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Retelling the Story of Agriculture
Claire Hope Cummings, The Cultural Conservancy
The Future of Native American Studies: How Traditional Ecological
Knowledge and Food Sovereignty are Transforming the Field
Melissa K. Nelson, San Francisco State University
Claire Hope Cummings, M.A, J.D., is an author, environmental
journalist, and lawyer with over forty years of experience in agriculture—
including farming in both California and Vietnam and serving as a lawyer
for the United States Department of Agriculture. Claire has been honored
for her broadcast journalism and was a 2001 Kellogg Food and Society
Fellow. Her most recent book won the book of the year award from the
Society for Economic Botany and the prestigious 2009 American Book
Award. Before focusing on journalism and law, Claire earned a B.A. in
cultural anthropology at the University of California Berkeley and an M.A.
in educational psychology from UC Davis. She is currently a Distinguished
12
Fellow at The Cultural Conservancy, a native land rights organization,
where she focuses on integrating science, traditional ecological knowledge
and sustainable farming to meet the challenges of climate change.
Melissa K. Nelson, Ph.D., is a cultural ecologist, media-maker and
indigenous scholar-activist. She is an associate professor of American
Indian Studies at San Francisco State University and president of the
Cultural Conservancy, a Native-led indigenous rights organization, which
she has directed since 1993. Her work is dedicated to indigenous
revitalization, environmental restoration, intercultural understanding, and
the renewal and celebration of community health and biocultural diversity.
Her first edited anthology Original Instructions—Indigenous Teachings For
A Sustainable Future (2008) focuses on the persistence of traditional
ecological knowledge and foodways by contemporary Native communities.
Melissa has co-produced four documentary films. Melissa is
Anishinaabe/Métis/Norwegian, and an enrolled member of the Turtle
Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
12.00–13.00
Lunch Break
13.00–14.30
Session D
Panel 4
Venue:
T106
The United States Seen from Abroad
Chair: Paul Michel Taillon, University of Auckland
American Considerations of Australian Federation, 1890–1901
Emily Fitzgerald, University of Melbourne
What Is Anti-Americanism? Negative Stereotypes about Americans and
Their Consequences
Brendon O’Connor, United States Studies Centre, Univ. of Sydney
Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s Cold War Caricatures of American Politicians in
Literaturnaia gazeta
Erika Wolf, University of Otago
Panel 5
Venue:
T105a
Race @ 50
Chair: David Goodman, University of Melbourne
Native America in American Studies: Fifty Years On
Scott Manning Stevens, Syracuse University
After the Dream: The Ongoing Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. in the
Post-King Era
Timothy Minchin, La Trobe University, Melbourne
Where We Are and Where We Go From Here: Writing Transnationalism
and Imperialism in Asian American History
Hong Liang, Yale University
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Panel 6
Venue:
T105b
Asia and America—and Percy Spender—in the Cold War
Chair: Chris Dixon, University of Queensland
“The Imaginative Weapon”: Point Four, the Colombo Plan, and Foreign
Aid in Southeast Asia
Nicholas Ferns, Monash University
Advocate for and to the Americans: Percy Spender’s Public and Private
Diplomacy on the Korean War POW Controversy and Communist China,
1951–53
Daniel Fazio, Flinders University
The End of Isolation: Rapprochement, Globalisation and America’s Trade
with China, 1972–1979
Elizabeth Ingleson, University of Sydney
14.30–14.45
short break
14.45–15.45
Session E
Venue:
TG08
John G. Main Keynote Address
Chair: Russell L. Johnson,
University of Otago
Qualities of Mercy: Disability Divides on the American Small Screen,
1956–1964
Susan M. Schweik, University of California, Berkeley
Susan M. Schweik is a University of California Berkeley professor of
English and associate dean of arts and humanities in the College of Letters
& Science. A former Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education for
Disability Studies at UC Berkeley, Schweik has been deeply involved with
the development of disability studies at Berkeley and was co-coordinator
of the campus’s Ed Roberts Fellowships in Disability Studies. Her
publications include articles in various academic journals, including
American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, The Iowa Review, Narrative,
Public Culture, and Social Research, and two books, A Gulf So Deeply Cut:
American Women Poets and the Second World War (1991) and The Ugly
Laws: Disability in Public (2009). The latter is a social and cultural history
of ordinances adopted by many American cities in the late 19th and early
20th centuries to prohibit “diseased,” “maimed,” and “deformed” people
from exposing themselves to public view.
15.45–16.15
Afternoon tea (outside TG08)
16.15–17.15
Session F
Panel 7
Venue:
T106
Body Talk
Chair: Peter S. Field, University of Canterbury
Out on a Limb: Digital Amputation in American Cinema
Angela M. Smith, University of Utah
Carolee Schneemann’s VULVA’S MORPHIA
Lisa Samuels, University of Auckland
14
Panel 8
Venue:
T105a
America First: From Grassroots to Seedbed of the New Right
Chair: Paul Michel Taillon, University of Auckland
The America First Committee and Its Ordinary Supporters — Populism,
Nationalism, History
David Goodman, University of Melbourne
From America First to the American Security Council: Military Industrialists
and the Evolution of Hawkish Conservatism
Dolores Janiewski, Victoria University, Wellington
Panel 9
Venue:
T105b
Art and (Transnational) Identity
Chair: Alys Moody, University of Waikato
Harlem’s Man of a Thousand Faces: Artists’ Model Maurice Hunter and
Interwar Black Identity
Clare Corbould, Monash University
Culture and Politics: The Use of Art by the United States Information
Programme in New Zealand
Ian Cooke, University of Auckland
17.15–17.30
short break
17.30–18.30
Session G – John A. Salmond Memorial Roundtable
Venue:
TG08
The Duke Experience, ca.1965–ca.2000
Chair: Timothy Minchin, La Trobe University, Melbourne
Panelists:
Erik Olssen, University of Otago
John Weaver, McMaster University
Dolores Janiewski, Victoria University, Wellington
Paul Husbands, Waitangi Tribunal
Thursday, 13 February
8.30–9.30
Venue:
TG08
Session H
Chair: Hilary Radner,
University of Otago
Keynote Address
Unraveling the Culture of War: Rethinking Global Hollywood
Lary May, University of Minnesota
Lary May received his Ph.D. in United States History in 1977 from the
University of California at Los Angeles. Since 1978 he has taught at the
University of Minnesota where he is now Distinguished Teaching Professor
Emeritus of American Studies and History. His publications include
Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture
Industry (Oxford University Press, 1980), Recasting America: Culture and
Politics in the Age of Cold War (ed., University of Chicago Press, 1989),
and The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way
15
(University of Chicago, 2000). He has lectured widely in the United States
and abroad, published articles in a wide range of scholarly and popular
journals, and been interviewed for radio, television, and historical
documentaries.
9.30–10.00
10.00–11.30
Panel 10
Venue:
T106
Morning tea (outside TG08)
Session I
The Use and Abuse of Television
Chair: Barbara Ryan, National University of Singapore
“This Beastly Publication”: The Shirley Temple vs. Graham Greene Civil
Libel Case of 1938
Geoff Lealand, University of Waikato
Femininity, American Consumer Culture and the New Natalism: The
Glamorous Mothers of the Twenty-first Century
Hilary Radner, University of Otago
Boardwalk Empire’s Al Capone: Reinventing the Ultimate Gangster
Rebecca Weeks, University of Auckland
Panel 11
Venue:
T105a
Tilting the Axis: Japan, Germany, and Italy in American Minds
During and After World War II
Chair: Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne
African-American Attitudes toward Japan and the Japanese, 1941–1945
Chris Dixon, University of Queensland
In Time, They Will Join Us in the Sun: The Search for the Psychological
Roots of Fascism, 1945–50
Shane Steven Smits, University of Melbourne
The Image of Conflict: U.S. Military Bases in Italy, an Early History
Holly Eileen Wilson, La Trobe University, Melbourne
Panel 12
Venue:
T105b
Transnational Gender: The United States, New Zealand, and
Australia
Chair: Ana Stevenson, University of Queensland
Land or Labor: The Fracture of Pacific Settler Masculinity in the United
States and New Zealand
Matthew Basso, University of Utah
Dale Austen, Miss New Zealand (1927): Our Modern Girl in Hollywood
Natalie Smith, University of Otago
“A Women’s Paradise”: Australian Women and American Gender Relations,
1920s–50s
Anne Rees, Australian National University
11.30–12.30
Lunch Break
16
12.30–14.00
Panel 13
Venue:
T106
Session J
Putting It on Paper: Letter Writing in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
Chair: Claudia B. Haake, La Trobe University, Melbourne
Placing American Freethought in a Trans-Atlantic Frame: The
Correspondence of Robert G. Ingersoll and George J. Holyoake
Tim Verhoeven, Monash University
Letter Writing, Citizenship, and Black Working Class Freedom Struggles
Paul Michel Taillon, University of Auckland
The Democratization of Letter Writing in the Age of FDR
Paul Husbands, Waitangi Tribunal
Panel 14
Venue:
T105a
American Slavery / American Freedom
Chair: Russell L. Johnson, University of Otago
“Under the Master’s Eye”? Overseers, Slaves, and Producing Agricultural
Knowledge in Virginia, 1720–1820
Dominic Hennessy, University of Queensland
The “Marriage Market”: Nineteenth-Century Marriage and Women’s Rights
Discourses of Slavery
Ana Stevenson, University of Queensland
Convergence: An Interpretation of Lincoln and the Abolitionists
Peter S. Field, University of Canterbury
Panel 15
Venue:
T105b
“What Then Is the American, This New Man?” Answers from
Literature
Chair: Heather Neilson, UNSW Canberra
Poe and an American Pursuit of the Moment
Alexandra Bailey Smith, University of Sydney
“The New School of Decadence”
Samuel V.H. Reese, University of Sydney
A Jewish-American Adam Among the “Indians”: The Ethnicities of Auster’s
Aesthetics
Alys Moody, University of Waikato
14.00–14.15
short break
17
14.15–15.15
Panel 16
Venue:
T106
Session K
Of Kings and Democrats: Studies in American Political History
Chair: Prudence Flowers, Flinders University
A Day of Service: The Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday and the Clinton
Presidency (1993–1996)
Daniel Fleming, University of Newcastle
Will the Real Al Gore Please Stand Up? Name Recognition and the Nature
of American Democracy
Bryan Cranston, Swinburne University
Panel 17
Venue:
T105a
Remember the American Revolution?
Chair: Tim Verhoeven, Monash University
Crafting New Stories from Old: The American War for Independence and
the American Revolution
Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Memories of the American Revolution in 19th Century North Carolina
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Panel 18
Venue:
T105b
Drawing Significance: Representations of American Soldiers
Chair: Barbara Ryan, National University of Singapore
“A Man Knows a Man”: Illustrating Disability after the Civil War
Russell L. Johnson, University of Otago
Gender and the American War Narrative in Post-Vietnam War Comic Books
Richard Young, University of Melbourne
15.15–15.45
Afternoon tea (outside TG08)
15.45–17.15
Session L
Venue:
TG08
Keynote Address and Wrap-up
Chair: Dolores Janiewski,
Victoria University, Wellington
The American Quest for Security
Elaine Tyler May, University of Minnesota
Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor of American Studies and History at
the University of Minnesota, served as 2009-2010 President of the
Organization of American Historians, and as 1995-1996 President of the
American Studies Association. She has taught at Princeton University,
Harvard University, as Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History at
University College Dublin, Ireland, and as Douglas Southall Freeman
Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Richmond. Her
books include America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and
Liberation (2010), Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era (1988, new edition 2008), Barren in the Promised Land: Childless
Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997); Pushing the Limits:
American Women, 1940-1961 (1996); and Great Expectations: Marriage
and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980). She also has written for
publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles
Times, Ms., Chronicle of Higher Education, and Minneapolis Star Tribune.
18
17.15–17.30
short break
17.30–18.30
Venue:
ANZASA AGM
TG08
18.40–22.00
Conference dinner: Carey’s Bay Historic Hotel
Bus (included in cost) departs from Logan Park (on Union Street East,
across from the College of Education) at 18.40 and return at 22.00. (The
trip takes approximately 20 minutes.)
The price of the dinner includes a three-course meal and some beverages.
Basically, we’ve negotiated the equivalent of one bottle of wine for every
two people, and a (limited) bar tab for soft drinks and beer. Once the bar
tab is exhausted, diners will have to pay for their own drinks. FYI,
coffee/tea will be served with dessert and is included in the price of the
dinner.
Friday, 14 February
Departure
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Index of Participants
Emily Fitzgerald
Daniel Fleming
Prudence Flowers
Paul Giles
Brett Goodin
David Goodman
Claudia B. Haake
Dominic Hennessy
Frederick E. Hoxie
Paul Husbands
Session-Panel
(c=chair)
I-12
B-2
K-17
B-3; I-11c
F-9
F-9
K-16
C
D-6c; I-11
D-6
D-6
B-3c; F-7c;
J-14
D-4
B-2c; K-16
B-2; K-16c
B-1
B-3
D-5c; F-8
B-1; J-13c
J-14
A
G; J-13
Elizabeth Ingleson
Dolores Janiewski
D-6
F-8; G; Lc
Russell L. Johnson
Ac; Ec; J14c; K-18
I-10
D-5
B-3
L
H
Cc; K-17
D-5; Gc
F-9c; J-15
B-1; J-15c
C
D-4
G
Hc; I-10
I-12
J-15
I-10c; K-18c
B-1c; F-7
E
B-2
J-15
F-7
I-12
Matthew Basso
Samatha Bedggood
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Trevor Burnard
Ian Cooke
Clare Corbould
Bryan Cranston
Claire Hope Cummings
Chris Dixon
Daniel Fazio
Nicholas Ferns
Peter S. Field
Geoff Lealand
Hong Liang
Adam Lockyer
Elaine Tyler May
Lary May
Michael A. McDonnell
Tim Minchin
Alys Moody
Heather Neilson
Melissa K. Nelson
Brendon O'Connor
Erik Olssen
Hilary Radner
Anne Rees
Samuel V.H. Reese
Barbara Ryan
Lisa Samuels
Susan M. Schweik
Emma Shortis
Alexandra Bailey Smith
Angela M. Smith
Natalie Smith
Abstr.
(page)
p. 42
p. 25
p. 49
p. 26
p. 37
p. 36
p. 48
p. 28
p. 40
p. 32
p. 32
p. 46
e-mail
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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[email protected]
[email protected]
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[email protected]
[email protected]
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[email protected]
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[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
Shane Steven Smits
Scott Manning Stevens
Ana Stevenson
Paul Michel Taillon
Shawn Treier
Tim Verhoeven
John Weaver
Rebecca Weeks
Holly Eileen Wilson
Erika Wolf
Richard Young
I-11
D-5
I-12c; J-14
D-4c; F-8c;
J-13
B-3
J-13; K-17c
G
I-10
I-11
D-4
K-18
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Paper Abstracts (by session/panel).
Session A, Keynote Address
19th Century American Indian Political Activists: Their Achievements, Their Legacy, Their Meaning
Frederick E. Hoxie
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign
It is difficult—but essential—that we recognize the work of Native American political activists in the
nineteenth century. Difficult, because their “work” was not particularly dramatic or even always
praiseworthy. These political activists sought to counter the onslaught of U.S. military and
governmental authority with legal and political action. They were diplomats, lawyers, lobbyists,
Christian ministers and other nonviolent folk who tried to stop the American advance with words
and with appeals to non-Native allies in the church, Congress and the American public. It is hard to
portray these people as the equivalent of the heroic individuals who laid down their lives for their
communities—the Tecumsehs, the Crazy Horses, the people who insisted that it was better to die
than to submit to the new regime. They wore suits, after all, and usually spoke English, and looked
for areas of compromise.
But as difficult as it may be for admirers of heroic warriors to praise these people, they represent a
significant, perhaps central, place in nineteenth century Native history. Their heroic words and
insistent maneuvering made a place for Indian people within the United States, a place that was
not apparent (or even viewed as possible) when the century began. This “place” had three broad
aspects.
First, they proposed that the actions of the United States with regard to American Indians should
be evaluated in the same way as its actions in any other governmental activity. That might sound
unremarkable, but recall that the American Revolution began with a Declaration that denounced
the Crown for deploying “merciless savages” on the settlers’ frontier and ended with the
Gnadenhutten massacre, the cold blooded murder of nearly 100 Christian Delawares. When tribal
leaders in the 1820s called on American officials to live up to their rhetoric of “civilization” by
recognizing Native treaty rights and honoring past agreements as they would a commercial
contract, they were making an argument U.S. officials found difficult to ignore.
Second, they insisted that the American nation state could accommodate autonomous tribal
communities within its borders. Turning the government’s paternalistic rhetoric about Indian
reservations on its head, activists argued that areas set aside for tribal communities were not
preserves where Indians would learn to adopt the habits of “civilization,” but were homelands that
Native people wished to govern and shape for themselves.
Finally, activists offered a unique critique of westward expansion. At a time when the American
public was celebrating the nation’s “manifest destiny,” Indian advocates and their allies were
willing to denounce the violence and betrayal that lay at the foundation of the new American
empire.
How were these ideas articulated and pressed upon the authorities? What did they mean in their
time? And what do they mean today, for indigenous peoples and for students of indigenous
histories?
22
Session B, Panel 1: Native Americans in Historical, Literary and Comparative
Perspective
Civilization, Law, and Customary Diplomacy—Arguments Against Removal in Letters Written by
Native Americans in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
Dr Claudia B. Haake
Dept of Languages, Histories, and Cultures
La Trobe University, Melbourne
In the 1830s, the administration of President Andrew Jackson sought to remove all Native
Americans from the east to the west of the Mississippi. It justified this measure by stating that such
a move would give Native Americans more time to become civilized away from detrimental white
influences. The removal bill was controversial, hotly debated, and passed only by the narrowest of
margins. Native Americans did not just accept their fate but fought against it by different means,
including by writing letters to the federal government. Through these letters their Native American
authors subtly appealed to be allowed to continue a separate existence on their ancestral lands
and tried to avoid both removal or its alternative, tribal dissolution and state citizenship.
Drawing on examples from the Iroquois and the Cherokees, in this paper I will look at some of the
most important arguments made by tribes against removal in letters to the federal government,
such as progress towards civilization, US and Native American law, and customary Native
American diplomacy. I will show that there were similarities as well as differences in the discourses
adopted by the Cherokees and Iroquois. While these depended on many factors, crucial were an
awareness of how the tribes were perceived by US mainstream society as well as the letter writing
practices the Iroquois and Cherokees chose to adopt.
“Go Back to Where You Belong, Man!”: Teaching Alexie’s Indian Killer
Dr Heather Neilson
School of HASS
UNSW Canberra
Sherman Alexie’s novel Indian Killer (1996) confronts the reader with the ongoing damage caused
to Indians (Alexie uses this term rather than “Native Americans”) through their “conquest by arms
and conquest by words,” in Savcan Bercovitch’s phrase. The novel is set in Seattle where a series
of unsolved killings, presumed to have been committed by an Indian, brings to the surface
underlying racial tensions in the city. An escalating cycle of vigilante violence and retaliation
ensues. According to the anonymous web-site summary of the novel from which several of my
students “borrowed” for their examination preparation in 2013, “the major theme of the novel is
atonement through violence.” This is misleadingly reductive. Alexie is not endorsing the violence
which he depicts but, rather, challenging what he perceives as a history of misrepresentation,
appropriation and exploitation of Indians and their heritage. Amongst the novel’s targets are interracial adoption—although his views on this are more complex than might first be assumed—and
the promulgation of “inauthentic” texts purporting to be by or about Indians. “History” is evoked by
several characters in the novel, usually as a blunt instrument by which to assert a prejudice in the
guise of an indisputable truth. Teaching the novel in an undergraduate class for the first time in
2013, I was reminded of the necessity never to assume either a common level of background
knowledge or a shared sense of humour in a classroom. This experience has raised timely
questions about how young Australian students perceive American Indians, where (and how) they
think Indians “belong,” and whence their preconceptions are being derived.
23
Comparative Indigenous Cultures and the Making of “Country”: Maori, Indigenous Australia, Native
America
Paul Giles
Challis Professor of English
University of Sydney
The purpose of this paper will be to consider ways in which the representation of native peoples
has served effectively to mythologize certain forms of national identity in different locations, and in
this sense it will seek to read cultures of Australia, New Zealand and the United States
against each other in comparative terms. Drawing on recent theoretical work by Chadwick Allen,
James Clifford, and others, I will argue that that the instantiation of Indigeneity serves a
retrospective political purpose, as becomes evident from ways in which vectors of nationalism
have been systematically institutionalized since the nineteenth century. By tracing the
representation of Native peoples in 19th century Irish-American writer John Boyle O’Reilly and by
comparing the perspectives of contemporary Indigenous fiction writers such as Leslie Marmon
Silko (from the United States) and Alexis Wright (from Australia), I will suggest ways in which the
constructed nature of Indigenous heritage can be seen to take on certain compelling political
forms. This will have important ramifications more generally for the representation of Indigenous
culture within the contemporary scene, since this paper will suggest that the Native American
model serves effectively to demystify conceptions of time and space that have tended to become
sacralized within Indigenous landscapes of Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. Finally, the
paper will suggest that an American Studies methodology can perform important cultural work in
relation to the emerging situation of a Comparative Australian Studies, one that illuminatingly
repositions the subject within a wider discursive matrix of Indigenous cultures, rather than leaving
it stranded as an isolated form. Hence, this paper will conclude, the American Studies experience
is of urgent intellectual importance for the reconstitution of Indigenous Australian culture today.
Session B, Panel 2: Politics Do Not Stop at the Water’s Edge
The “Global Gag Rule” in Context: Debates over Family Planning, Population Control, Abortion, and
the Taxpayer in the 1970s and 1980s
Dr Prudence Flowers
School of International Studies
Flinders University
In 1984, at the second United Nations International Conference on Population, US delegates
announced a new policy that reversed long-standing support for population control measures. The
delegates appointed by President Reagan described population growth as a “neutral
phenomenon” and repudiated neo-Malthusian ideas about an impending “population bomb.” The
prescription for rapidly increasing population (if a prescription were required) lay not in family
planning programs but rather with free markets and the spread of capitalism. In addition to this
reversal in its views on population growth, the US also introduced an explicitly anti-abortion
element into its international funding decisions. From this point on, any non-government
organization that received US funds was to refrain from providing advice, counselling, or even
information about abortion. Critics of the controversial Mexico City Policy dubbed it “voodoo
demographics” and nicknamed the abortion provisions the “global gag rule.”
From its inception, the Mexico City Policy has been understood as reflecting domestic political
considerations. Recent scholarship has emphasized the influential role played by the US antiabortion movement in the creation, drafting, and implementation of the Mexico City Policy. Thus
the Mexico City announcement is frequently understood as a means by which Reagan could
ensure the continued political support of social conservatives and anti-abortionists in an election
year. However, the policy was also the product of important shifts in the US in terms of ideas about
24
family planning, population issues, and the roles and responsibilities of government. From Roe v.
Wade onwards, there was public and political ambivalence about the idea of the government
paying for abortion, even amongst some supporters of the Supreme Court’s decision. In 1976, the
Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Hyde Amendment and banned the use
of federal funds to pay for abortions, a measure that principally affected low-income women on
Medicaid. Despite the vocal criticisms of many of his advisors, President Carter consistently and
publicly supported the implementation of the Hyde Amendment. In the years following, there were
also increasing political attacks on domestic family planning and population policies funded
through Title X grants, attacks justified by invoking the spectre of government funds being secretly
used to pay for or advocate for abortions. Rather than being a decision made solely with an eye to
the 1984 election, the Mexico City policy was the culmination of a decade-long political fight over
the place of government in family planning efforts, a social and moral fight that ran in parallel with
the rise of economic conservatism and neo-liberal ideas about the importance of reducing the
obligations of the state.
“Who Can Resist This Guy?” Captain Jacques Cousteau and the Defeat of the Antarctic Minerals
Convention
Emma Shortis
PhD Candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
By the time of his death in 1997, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau—JYC, or “Zheek” to his
friends—had become one of the most recognisable international celebrities of his time. The
eccentric Frenchman was a household name, and is still remembered as a pioneering explorer,
inventor, adventurer and lover of the “blue planet.” Cousteau is generally not remembered,
however, for his role in the defeat of the 1988 Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral
Resource Activities (the Minerals Convention). If ratified, the Convention would have allowed
mining to begin in the Antarctic. Already a committed environmentalist, JYC embarked on an
international campaign against resource exploitation in the Antarctic, convinced that the white
continent was “an inestimable treasure that we must preserve intact for future generations.”
The United States, however, remained a staunch supporter of the Minerals Convention. In 1989,
Cousteau embarked on a high profile lobbying campaign to generate American support for the
“World Park” proposal, a tour that the former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard recently
revealed he had secretly funded. Cousteau focused his efforts on the United States because
without the support of the Bush Administration, the “World Park” campaign would almost certainly
have failed. The proposed paper will trace Cousteau’s American campaign, including his public
petitions, high profile media appearances, meetings with Senators and Congressmen and his 1990
awareness-raising expedition to the Antarctic. By late 1990, with Cousteau’s help, American
lawmakers had succeeded in forcing the Bush Administration to support the “World Park”
Antarctica proposal. The new international agreement that Cousteau ultimately helped to bring
about—the 1991 Environmental Protection Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty—is one of the most
significant pieces of international environmental legislation in existence today, and JYC’s crowning
environmental achievement. Its origins, and the JYC’s role in its adoption, however, remain almost
entirely misunderstood.
From Globalism to “Assertive Multilateralism”: Restoring the Credibility of the Liberal Statesman
Samantha E. Bedggood
PhD candidate, Dept of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
University of Queensland
During the 1992 presidential campaign, the tendency to draw parallels between Bill Clinton and
Jimmy Carter was perhaps inevitable. Both were reconstructed southern Democratic Governors,
25
and both were outsiders, not just in terms of the Washington political establishment, but also in
terms of their own party. Both arrived in Washington with a determination to steer the Democratic
Party away from the influence of big-spending northern liberals. Both were viewed as dangerously
lacking in foreign policy expertise, a handicap compounded by the fact that they were poised to
lead the country at a time in which fundamental foreign policy assumptions were being reexamined and re-configured.
Carter, however, was someone who seemingly never rose to the challenges of his time. Fairly, or
unfairly, the Carter administration was viewed as a case study in foreign policy incompetence and
bureaucratic dysfunction. For Clinton campaign strategists, Carter’s ignominious legacy threatened
their ability to position Clinton as a strong and capable Commander-in-Chief. Moreover, the
humiliation of the Vietnam experience had rendered the Democratic Party increasingly pessimistic
about America’s geo-political role and the use of military force. The war had precipitated a
transformation of American liberalism from an aggressive anticommunist, internationalism
movement to one increasingly dominated by a pacifist, anti-imperialist, neo-isolationist ethos.
Proactive geopolitical actions were reflexively opposed by liberals throughout the 1980s and early
1990s, and would serve to create a pervasive image that the Democrats were “weak” on foreign
policy.
This paper will explore the extent to which Clinton sought to distance himself from the failings of
the Carter administration and the timidity of post-Carter liberals in order to convince the American
people that he possessed the requisite “toughness” to preside over issues of National Security. By
crafting a symbiosis between liberal internationalism and his “third-way” in terms of domestic
policy, Clinton sought to extricate himself from the legacy of what Sidney Blumenthal has
characterised as the “moralistic and ineffectual sensibility of Democratic losers through the ages.”
Session B, Panel 3: Commerce, Consuls, and Confederates: Diplomacy and War in
New Nations
Murder on the High Seas: The Slave Ship Zong, Jamaican Commerce, and the American Revolution
Trevor Burnard
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
In late 1781, the crew of a ship in distress well off course from where it was meant to be going took
the decision to throw 122 captive Africans into the sea. Later, the owners of the ship tried to claim
insurance on the murdered slaves as property lost at sea. The resulting court case was a cause
celebre in the beginnings of British abolitionism. This famous case has been studied from a variety
of angles but not as yet as an episode in Jamaican history and in the history of the American
Revolution. This paper examines the events that happened in late 1781 on the Zong as a major
event in the American Revolution and explicable in part only because of the effect of the American
Revolution on slave trade patterns in the western Atlantic. It connects the attempt to get insurance
monies with British relief efforts to restore western Jamaica after a devastating hurricane in
October 1780 and argues that local events played a considerable role in shaping this important
event, which is usually seen only from a metropolitan perspective.
26
Low Level Diplomacy: American Consuls’ Private Businesses and Professional Autonomy in North
Africa, 1800–1810
Brett Goodin
PhD candidate, History
Australian National University
This paper explores how three consuls’ autonomy, private businesses and interpersonal
relationships affected American relations with the North African “Barbary States” of Algiers, Tripoli
and Tunis during the early nineteenth century. Diplomatic history typically occurs in the shadow of
great events and “great men,” such as Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, and John
Adams. However, between the years 1781 and 1820 the U.S. had just 27 of these high-ranking
“ministers,” compared to 383 consuls. These more numerous consuls were ships’ captains,
merchants, international traders and even former Barbary captives. Their official correspondence
with each other and the State Department, their private diary entries, and their commercial
exchanges often overlap to the point where they become indistinguishable. These records
catalogue consuls’ diverse interests and heated exchanges on policy, personality and business,
exposing the nature of early American consulships, where isolation granted consuls significant
discretionary powers and their business dealings impaired diplomatic relations.
During the early republic, the U.S. lacked both a professional diplomatic corps and a rapid means
of communication between the government and its distant consuls. Correspondence between
America and North Africa in 1800 took between two and eighteen months to arrive. Consuls were
therefore granted a surprising amount of autonomy and policy influence. Consuls William Eaton in
Tunis, James Cathcart in Tripoli, and Richard O’Brien in Algiers each impeded and advanced
American policy through their business and personal relationships with locals and their fellow
consuls. Positive personal relations with influential locals and government officials saved the
American government significant sums of money, while personal and business entanglements led
to threats of war with North Africa, national embarrassment, and distrust among the consuls. Yet
consular autonomy ultimately proved a vital asset in Eaton’s march “to the shores of Tripoli,” which
led to the new nation’s first overseas military victory.
The Wealth of Hawks and Doves: Explaining Variation in Confederate Congressional Support for the
Army during the Civil War
Dr. Adam Lockyer
United States Studies Centre
Dr. Shawn Treier
Australian National University
From the Revolutionary War through to Afghanistan and Iraq, researchers and commentators have
frequently pointed to Congressmen’s individual wealth as being suggestive as to why they decided
to either provide or withhold their support for war. However, our understanding of the relationship
between individual and district wealth, on the one hand, and support for war, on the other, remains
patchy. This paper seeks to take an important step towards understanding this link.
It mobilises roll call data from the Confederate Congress between 1862 and 1864 on votes relating
to conscription, impressment and desertion. It traces how Congressmen’s voting changed over the
course of the war on these bills. It particular, the paper will show how Congressmen’s support for
the war changed (or did not change) in relation to their personal wealth, their Congressional
district’s wealth and whether their districts were occupied. We seek to answer questions such as:
did wealthy Confederates sustain their support longer than their poorer countrymen? Was it a rich
man’s war and poor man’s fight? When a district was touched by battle or occupation did this
make their representatives more or less hawkish?
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The Confederate Congress is a valuable source of data for answering these questions. Not only
can we test the significance of wealth at the individual and district levels, but we can also see if
specific kinds of wealth matter. For example, slave and land ownership can be teased out against
wealth from other sources. In few other examples are economic incentives and voting patterns so
easily available for collection and analysis.
Session C, Special Guest Plenary Session: The Old and New Stories of
Agriculture: Traditional Knowledge and the Renewal of Farming in America
Retelling the Story of Agriculture
Claire Hope Cummings
Distinguished Fellow, The Cultural Conservancy
The story of American agriculture is usually told as the “agrarian myth” and the Jeffersonian ideal
of the yeoman farmer. While the family farm was crucial to America’s prosperity, agriculture was
actually based on the plantation model. The “founding farmers” were, after all, slave owners.
The part of the myth that is true is that American farmers were central to nation building, albeit at
the cost of the original indigenous populations. Then, in the 20 th century, as the nation
industrialized, farmers adopted tractors, hybrid seeds, and toxic technologies. Farmers were
transformed from being producers into consumers and farming became agribusiness.
At the same time, another story of agriculture was emerging. Sustainable agriculture and organic
farming are both a response to industrialization and a sui generis social movement. It has proven
itself to be just as innovative and productive as the industrial model. Now, in the face of critical
environmental issues such as climate change, alternative agriculture is proving to be highly
adaptive and resilient. It is this new farming movement, not industrial agribusiness, that is fulfilling
the agrarian vision in America.
Using the story of corn as a way to examine the history of American agriculture, this talk will
explore how corn is sacred and ceremonial for native nations, as well as an abundant staple crop,
and how, in the hands of agribusiness corn is used for fuel, industrial goods and a patented
genetically modified pharmaceutical. The success of the new farming movement, along with
renewed interest in the traditional ecological and farming knowledge of indigenous people, plus the
open collaboration principles being developed by American environmental justice movements, are
multiplying the impact of change and putting the culture back into agriculture.
The Future of Native American Studies: How Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Food Sovereignty
Are Transforming the Field
Melissa K. Nelson
San Francisco State University
Native American Studies is a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary field that encompasses history,
arts, humanities, law, religion, literature, and social sciences. It has not, historically, been a field
that includes science, technology, engineering, or math in any significant way. Today, that trend is
changing and this will have major influence not only on Native American Studies, but also on
American Studies and Environmental Studies.
There is a burgeoning interest in native science and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by
students and faculty in universities, natural resource managers, farmers, and other land care
practitioners. There is also a growing TEK revitalization movement within Native American
communities much of which is centered on restoring Native food sovereignty. Within academia,
Native American Studies is “greening” with courses on Native Food Systems and Indigenous
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Resource Management. Ecology and Environmental Studies is getting more “red” (native) with
focus on these themes and broader indigenous rights, traditional knowledge, and sustainable
practices.
In this talk I present examples and case studies illustrating these trends and focus on the “Three
Sisters of Native American Agriculture” as a clear example of how crucial it is for scholars and
educators in Native American Studies to incorporate the time-tested knowledge, practices, and
worldviews of Indigenous peoples. The Three Sisters are three values inherent in this trend: unity
in diversity, collaboration, and reciprocity. These values are rooted in land, water, and seeds and
are the fundamental cultural elements that provide nourishment and give life. Native American
agriculture includes the growing Native foods sovereignty movement, which is permeating Native
American Studies programs through new curricula, texts, research, and collaborations. In
conclusion, I examine how TEK and food sovereignty are transforming Native Studies by
incorporating the elements of Native ways of knowing, even transforming the very process of
learning itself.
Session D, Panel 4: The United States: The View from Abroad
American Considerations of Australian Federation, 1890–1901
Emily Fitzgerald
PhD candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
Through the 1890s, when Australians were working towards building a federation, the United
States was a central model to follow and learn from. This did not go unnoticed in the United
States. In this paper I explore American perspectives on and responses to Australian federation in
the 1890s. The paper will draw on Consular reports to and from the United States Consul and
Consul-General in Sydney and Melbourne, and official observations and instructions. The paper
will also analyse reports in American newspapers, in order to gauge popular knowledge of and
reactions to the proposed Australian federation. I will thus be highlighting one international interest
in the United States in this period, and considering what aspects of Australia and Australian
federation were of interest. The paper will also highlight how the Australian colonies fitted into the
world beyond the British Empire, and in particular, with the United States.
What Is Anti-Americanism? Negative Stereotypes about Americans and Their Consequences
Brendon O’Connor
Associate Professor, American Politics
US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
This paper treats anti-Americanism as an ideology. My argument is made by drawing on the
writings of travellers to America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when a
powerful set of negative stereotypes emerged about Americans. My aim is to illustrate how the
origins of anti-Americanism emerged from a core set of beliefs formed at that time which have
gone on to have enduring power. I have scrutinized the work of over one hundred writers whose
criticisms honed in on America as an uncouth, unsophisticated, anti-intellectual and ultimately
bland nation. The other recurring themes in the diaries and books of these early commentators
focused on the worship of money, the tendency to boast about American greatness, and
widespread hypocrisy (particularly relating to the treatment of African-Americans). These
writings—voluminous and widely read by the 1830s and 1840s—created a stock of stereotypes
that have been recycled and drawn upon ever since. The legacy of these negative views has been
long lasting. For example when comedy shows interview the “average American” on the street
about world affairs or global geography it is this stock of stereotypes we call upon to make our
proclamation of American ignorance. When America stumbles badly abroad (as in Vietnam or Iraq)
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claims that Americans are hubristic and culturally unsophisticated also stem from this historical
foundation. When American politicians like Reagan, Bush Jnr or Palin emerge on the national
stage, people around the globe feel an instant familiarity and dislike of these types of Americans.
There are of course many reasons for these stereotypes; however, given their essentialist
foundations, they have limitations.
Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s Cold War Caricatures of American Politicians in Literaturnaia gazeta
Associate Professor Erika Wolf
University of Otago
This presentation examines a series of
photomontage caricatures of American
politicians by Soviet artist Aleksandr
Zhitomirsky (1907–1993) that were
published in the early years of the Cold War.
Zhitomirsky established his reputation as a
leading Soviet propaganda artist during
World War 2 with political photomontages
executed in the manner of the German
communist artist John Heartfield. In the
immediate post-war years, he quickly
adapted techniques and themes from his
wartime work to editorial photomontages
explicitly linked to the emergent Cold War.
Regularly contributing to leading Soviet
newspapers and magazines, Zhitomirsky
was a significant figure in shaping Soviet
visual culture of the Cold War. Imagery that
caustically condemned Nazi brutality and
treachery morphed into depictions of the
Cold War enemy, with caricatures of Hitler
and Goebbels shaping representations of such figures as Harry Truman and John Foster Dulles. I
will consider a collection of caricatures of American politicians that were published in Literaturnaia
gazeta (Literary Gazette), several of which were commented upon in the New York Times shortly
after their publication in Moscow. These images will be analysed within the context of Cold War
politics, such as the Marshall Plan and Soviet critiques of the links between American militarism
and Wall Street.
Session D, Panel 5: Race @ 50
Native America in American Studies: Fifty Years On
Scott Manning Stevens, PhD
Director of Native American Studies
Syracuse University
My paper examines the parallel growth of the fields of Native American Studies and American
Studies within the academy over the last fifty years. Institutions such as the D’Arcy McNickle
Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, founded in 1972 at the Newberry Library in
Chicago, were created in response to increased awareness of the issues facing contemporary
Native American peoples in the aftermath of the Red Power Movement and growing demands for
Native civil rights in the 1960s. Within the academy Native American Studies was often included
under the umbrella of American Studies, as a sub-discipline or specialized branch of that already
interdisciplinary field. I will examine how the turn toward a focus on indigenous political sovereignty
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and literary and artistic nationalisms within Native American Studies has complicated its
relationship to the field of American Studies, even as there remains a demand for American
Studies to embrace the cultural and ethnic diversity of the United States. Conservative critics
sometimes lament what they interpret as the “Balkanization” of American Studies, which they see
occurring under the guise of inclusivity. This was a common topic during the so-called Culture
Wars within the academy during the 1990s. Just as American exceptionalism was being critiqued
by American academics on the left, Native American studies was increasingly distancing itself from
American Studies. This has resulted in its inclusion as a program within Ethnic Studies
departments at some universities and at others Native American Studies has become a
department in its own right. My paper examines the history of this trajectory and looks at the
current developments within these two related but now separate fields.
After the Dream: The Ongoing Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. in the Post-King Era
Dr. Timothy Minchin, FAHA
Professor of North American History
La Trobe University, Melbourne
This paper will examine the ongoing struggle for black civil rights in the U.S. in the period after Rev
Martin Luther King laid out his famous “dream” in the summer of 1963. The main focus of the
paper will be on what happened in the crucial decade and a half following the passage of the two
great pieces of enabling legislation: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
These pieces of legislation are often considered the crowning achievement of the civil rights
movement but with their passage a long struggle to implement them had only begun. Civil rights
historiography has focused much more on the struggle to secure the legislation rather than
examining its long-term impact.
Concentrating chiefly on events in the southern states, where the legislation had the most impact, I
will show that significant progress after 1965 was made in integrating public accommodations and
in strengthening black voting rights, but that desegregating schools and especially workplaces
proved much more difficult and provoked significant white resistance. The legacies of these
struggles can still be seen today, in developments such as the election of the country’s first black
president alongside lasting economic inequalities between the races. Drawing on material in After
the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2011), which I co-authored with the late John A. Salmond, I will also review some of these more
recent developments in the paper, and will reflect on the ongoing gap in perceptions of racial
progress between blacks and whites, especially in the South.
Where We Are and Where We Go From Here: Writing Transnationalism and Imperialism in Asian
American History
Hong Liang
PhD candidate, American Studies Program
Yale University
In this historiographical review, I examine the writing of transnationalism and imperialism in Asian
American history since the rise of the discipline in the 1960s by a close reading of the Amerasia
Journal and major works in the field. I argue that an international framework has underpinned
Asian American history since the very beginning, but has undergone significant change in the past
half a century. The political agenda of Asian American scholars in the 1960s and 70s subsumed
the theme of imperialism under questions of identity and racial formation in the United Sates. In
the late 1970s and early 1980s, scholars reconceptualized Asian American communities beyond
the national boundaries of the United States and the availability of foreign-language sources
facilitated the writing of transnational Asian American history. In the 1990s, scholars looked
beyond economic interpretations of imperialism to study the “enduring legacies of empire” in the
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transnational migration in the Philippines and Korea. Racial formation, gender, and sexuality were
key analytical categories to understand the process of migration and the construction of identity. In
this period but particularly around the turn of the century, scholars paid increasing attention to the
role of the nation state and saw transnationalism through the lens of empire. They were concerned
about how race helped to shape a particular logic around empire building. I end this review by
exploring what the Amerasia Journal signals when it calls for both comparative studies of Asian
American migrants at the global level, emphasizing processes of transculturation and power, and
attention on the “small t(ransnational)” factors most visible and transformative at the individual and
family level.
Session D, Panel 6: Asia and America—and Percy Spender—in the Cold War
“The Imaginative Weapon”: Point Four, the Colombo Plan, and Foreign Aid in Southeast Asia
Nicholas Ferns
PhD candidate, History
Monash University
In January 1950, Percy Spender, the new Australian External Affairs Minister, along with other
Commonwealth Foreign Ministers, set in motion a series of events that led to the establishment of
the Colombo Plan. Almost exactly one year earlier, United States President Harry S. Truman, in
the fourth point of his inaugural speech, outlined his vision of technical assistance in
underdeveloped parts of the world. This paper will explore the connections between the Colombo
Plan and the Point Four program, both of which aimed at facilitating the process of economic
development in Southeast Asia. In doing so, both programs exemplified the continuing interest of
the Western world in providing technical and economic aid to areas seemingly under threat from
communism. By examining the influence of the American Point Four program on the Colombo
Plan, and vice versa, this paper will present a broader argument regarding the influence of
American power and ideas on Australian policy in Southeast Asia in the early stages of the Cold
War. External Affairs documents repeatedly demonstrate the ways that Percy Spender and his
successor, Richard Casey, were interested in securing American support for the Colombo Plan.
Foreign aid was one of the key indicators that demonstrated the changing direction of Australian
foreign policy following the Second World War. By exploring the interaction between the Point Four
program and the establishment of the Colombo Plan, this paper will shed further light on the power
of American ideas and their influence on Australian policy.
Advocate for and to the Americans: Percy Spender’s Public and Private Diplomacy on the Korean
War POW Controversy and Communist China, 1951–53
Daniel Fazio
PhD candidate, School of International Studies
Flinders University
The issue of voluntary repatriation of POWs caused the stalemate that defined the two years of the
Korean War peace talks. During this period, Percy Spender, the Australian Ambassador to the US
and head of the Australian UN delegation, was engaged in public diplomacy supporting the US
insistence on voluntary repatriation of POWs. Many US allies, although reluctantly supporting the
Americans, wanted to directly exchange all POWs and end the Korean War, whereas the US was
adamant about voluntary repatriation. Australia unequivocally supported the US stance and
Spender proved to be a vociferous advocate for the Americans at the UN. Aware of the tensions
with many of their allies, the US were very willing to have Spender, representing a nation that
retained genuine goodwill at the UN, argue their case confident that Spender could persuade
wavering allies to stand firm on voluntary repatriation. Simultaneously, Spender also engaged in
private diplomacy with his friend John Foster Dulles, US diplomat and Eisenhower’s Secretary of
State, urging the US to adopt a more flexible and conciliatory approach towards Communist China.
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Spender told Dulles the Americans should moderate their attitude towards the PRC which had
hardened since Communist China’s intervention in the Korean War in 1950. Spender argued the
Soviet-Chinese alliance was fractious and that a split was likely and should be encouraged.
Although Spender’s views on the PRC were contrary to the staunch anti-communist stance of the
Menzies government, he reasoned that a more conciliatory US approach would be in the interests
of both the Americans and Chinese, it would lessen China’s dependency on the Soviets, increase
the prospects for peace and security in the Asia-Pacific, and hasten the end of the Korean War. An
analysis of these diplomatic efforts by Spender suggests that US-Australian relations during the
Korean War were much more nuanced than commonly perceived.
The End of Isolation: Rapprochement, Globalisation and America’s Trade with China, 1972–1979
Elizabeth Ingleson
PhD candidate, History
University of Sydney and the United States Studies Centre
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, in response to rising fears of military conflict
between the United States and China, many American commentators argue that peace will prevail
because of the economic interdependence binding the two countries. Both China and America will
avoid jeopardising their mutual economic interests through war and seek peaceful negotiation of
contentious issues instead, it is claimed. This interdependence is also connected to the process of
globalisation—to the extent that the label “Made in China” on attire sold in America has become
one of the classic symbols of globalisation. This thesis looks at how the foundations of this
interdependence were established in the rapprochement period, from 1971–1979, after 23 years of
economic and political isolation. It will look at how these ideas of liberal-peace and globalisation
interacted and informed the views of American policymakers and businessmen involved in reestablishing Sino-American trade ties. It will focus on the structures established in America that
supported the trade, particularly the National Council for U.S.-China Trade first established during
the Nixon Administration. It will also explore the reactions to the trade from other key stakeholders
who stood to lose from this new relationship, notably textile unions and the Taiwan lobby. In so
doing, it will examine what the alternatives to trade were and how both the pursuit of
interdependence and the globalised context informed the political reactions to these alternatives.
Looking at how the trade relationship was constructed during the 1970s, this paper aims to shed
light on the processes that shaped the current relationship and fuelled the globalised
interdependence so central to international relations and the global economy today.
Session E, Keynote Address
Qualities of Mercy: Disability Divides on the American Small Screen, 1956–1964
Susan M. Schweik
University of California, Berkeley
This talk will place the recent spate of representations of disabled children and their parents in
U.S. popular culture (Andrew Solomon’s Far From The Tree, for instance, or Rachel Adams’
Raising Henry, or novelist David Mitchell’s translation of Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump) in
the historical context of earlier examples on American television between 1956 and 1964. Looking
both at classic television anthology dramas and at slightly later courtroom and medicine episode
dramas, I will focus in part on two prolific dramatists in early television, both activist fathers of
disabled children, Alvin Boretz and Allan Sloane. The talk will examine two strands of television
narrative:
1) melodramas of testing and pedagogy in which special mentors discover and commence to mold
the hidden intelligences of people formerly abandoned to disability (shows that dwelled, for
instance, on Deaf schools, new attempts at state institution reform, and with intensity and
33
surprising ambivalence on Bruno Bettelheim’s “Orthogenic School” at Chicago). Disability studies
discussions of the molding of the child in this period often focus on one text only, the
representation of Helen Keller in William Gibson’s 1959 play “The Miracle Worker”; I will show how
this famous representation was in complex dialogue with other renditions of new modes for
(im)perfecting children and adults.
2) a telling flurry of debate about infanticide, euthanasia, and less explicitly about eugenics that
took place in the Cold War post-Holocaust culture of around about 1961. Here again, disability
history has tended to overlook this material, focusing on eugenics much earlier, in the 1920s (for
instance, on the infamous film “The Black Stork”), or on bioethical debates during the later rise of
the religious right in the 1980s. I will argue that the concentrated period of 1956–1964 is another
key moment in the history of American eugenic ideology. At this time writers on the small screen
sought both quietly and loudly to reshape the meanings of American disability and American
dignity. Examining this period can help us attend to more recent legacies of eugenics that may lie
in current ideologies and practices related to human genomics and assisted reproductive
technologies.
Session F, Panel 7: Body Talk
Out on a Limb: Digital Amputation in American Cinema
Angela M. Smith
Associate Professor, English and Gender Studies
University of Utah
In a 2012 New York Times debate about digital cinema, Manohla Dargis reminds us that the
material, indexical connection of traditional film to “real bodies” is disrupted by digital production.
Digitality, it seems, urges cinema ever more toward special effects, supernatural characters, and
fantastical Hollywood blockbusters. But A. O. Scott insists that digitality can produce compelling
realism, citing “the removal of Marion Cotillard’s legs … in Jacques Audiard’s gritty Rust and Bone”
as “the most amazing bit of digital magic this year.” Scott thus asserts that digital cinema can be
“gritty,” credible, serious, by recasting its removal of material traces as graphic amputation,
This paper considers selected American feature films in which digital manipulation “amputates”
actors’ limbs: blockbusters Men in Black 3 and Iron Man 3, melodramas Forrest Gump and Million
Dollar Baby, and independent films Planet Terror, The Machinist, and Soul Surfer. It examines the
techniques and conventions around these films’ amputated bodies, in order to ask:
Are there important differences between digital disability and (a) the use of a “really” disabled
actor? or (b) the use of disabling prostheses/make-up/in-camera effects? Do these
differences matter?
Why is the digitally disabled body seen as visceral realism, an anchor to audiences adrift in
fantasy, when it is a trick requiring the absence of a “really” disabled body? Indeed, why is
fabrication of disabled bodies apparently less troubling than controversial digital masquerades
such as The Black Swan’s erasure of Natalie Portman’s dancing stand-in or Cloud Atlas’s
virtual racial transformations?
The paper concludes by considering what distinguishes amputations in Hollywood movies from
those in American indies and, in turn, from those in a non-US production like Rust and Bone. Does
virtual amputation in any generic or national context inevitably erase an already marginalized
reality? Or can it convey complex disability experiences? And does a critic’s use of disability to
validate digital cinema put disability at the heart of our cinematic future—or simply, neatly, delete
it?
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Carolee Schneemann’s VULVA’S MORPHIA
Lisa Samuels
Associate Professor, English, Drama and Writing Studies
University of Auckland
VULVA’S MORPHIA was published in a luxurious and expensive artist book form by Granary
Books (USA) in 1997. VULVA’S MORPHIA posits VULVA as an anthropomorphized, or at least
personal-pronouned, organ-consciousness. VULVA gets to have opinions and carry out actions; at
the same time she is clearly an avatar for Schneemann’s theories and experiences.
The biologically explicit and theorized self-telling aspects of this book are what prompted me to the
term bioautography. This term inverts the normative term “autobiography”: instead of the “self-lifewriting” implied in autobiography, the term bioautography gives primacy to the bio-life in selfwriting. More specifically it shifts the syllables from their latinate references to their morphemic
quotients: bioautography is “bio(logical)-auto(nomic)-graphing.”
As term and concept, bioautography emphasizes the “biology” in “bio,” hence the body of life; it
emphasizes the “autonomic” in “auto,” the combinations of control and uncontrol in the systems
that motivate life; and it emphasizes the “graph” of “graphy,” hence the plural potentialities of visual
images with and without visual words, as well as the “graphemic” visuality of words themselves in
a looking environment. Thus bioautography means body life + focus on the accessible and
inaccessible self + making as graphing.
The features of bioautography in Schneemann’s book are not entirely unique but instead are
indicative of a turn in writing to viscerally specific biology of the identified self. The somato-psychic
knowing and explication involved index a widespread change in imaginative languages of the body
self. We can readily read VULVA’S MORPHIA as organically related with Schneemann’s whole
oeuvre, and the inclusion of images from earlier work within the pages of VULVA’S MORPHIA is
an index of the mutually enfolding and cross-referential nature of that oeuvre and its
bioautographies.
Session F, Panel 8: America First: From Grassroots to Seedbed of the New Right
The America First Committee and Its Ordinary Supporters—Populism, Nationalism, History
Professor David Goodman
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
The America First Committee had the backing of some big business men and conservative
Republicans but America First as a social movement was at its base plebeian, populist and
nationalist. Princeton psychologist and opinion poll expert Hadley Cantril advised the White House
that isolationists were “disproportionately from the lower income and poorly educated people,
women, farmers, unskilled workers, and domestic servants.” The strident nationalism of these AFC
supporters is something that calls for some more interpretation and explanation than it has usually
been accorded, given that many of these people were only a generation or two away from Europe
in their own family histories. Their strong populist sense that the people should decide matters of
war and peace is equally significant—R. Douglas Stuart of the AFC reported in June 1941 that “I
have attended a large number of meetings throughout the United States and invariably the
suggestion that the people should be given a chance to vote on the issue of peace or war was
greeted by thunderous ovation.” The paper draws on extensive research in the AFC archive at the
Hoover Institution, particularly in letters written by ordinary AFC supporters, to make the argument
that America First is probably better understood as a populist and nationalist movement than just
in the purely foreign policy category of “isolationism.”
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From America First to the American Security Council: Military Industrialists and the Evolution of
Hawkish Conservatism
Dolores Janiewski
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science, and International Relations
Victoria University of Wellington
A close examination of the core leadership group of America First, based in Chicago and identified
with the Hoover-Taft wing of the Republican Party, will show the formation of an important strand
of the conservative coalition, hawkish conservatives. This ideological grouping provided an
important constituency for Barry Goldwater in the early 1960s and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s
and 1980s. By disaggregating the state into the acceptable warfare state and the objectionable
welfare state, this group manifested the ideological feat of supporting both big government (the
Pentagon) and the small state desired by opponents of the New Deal. Its members opposed
intervention in World War II not only from the pacifist convictions of some of its Quaker leadership
but also from a commitment to Hoover’s vision of a Fortress America which extended its reach to
selected parts of the globe—the Americas, the Pacific, and China—but rejected involvement in
European conflicts, Africa, and the rest of Asia. Ardently anti-Soviet, the core group bitterly
opposed the alliance with the USSR in the period leading up to Pearl Harbor hoping for the mutual
destruction between the two totalitarian powers as expressed through its major mouthpiece,
Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune.
Disbanding after the Japanese attack, the core group continued to challenge Roosevelt’s
interventionist and internationalist policies urging easier terms for Japanese and German
surrender and accusing Roosevelt of culpability in precipitating the attack at Pearl Harbor.
Opposed the moderate Republican wing who nominated Eisenhower in 1952 instead of their
favoured candidate, Douglas MacArthur, the group continued to pursue its foreign policy agenda
under the auspices of For America, the National Military-Industrial Conference, and the American
Security Council to build a corporate-military alliance dedicated to the expansion of the warfare
state under the banner of what became “peace through strength” and espousing aggressive anticommunism, domestically and internationally, through support for Joseph McCarthy, Goldwater,
and Reagan.
Session F, Panel 9: Art and (Transnational) Identity
Harlem’s Man of a Thousand Faces: Artists’ Model Maurice Hunter and Interwar Black Identity
Clare Corbould
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
School of History
Monash University
In October1927, a one-hour radio show profiled “notable colored men.” Among well-known figures
that included W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Paul Robeson was Maurice Hunter, who, the
host declared, “is an artist’s model who has won wide acclaim for his poses.” Indeed, he had.
Although largely forgotten today, Hunter was well known in Harlem from the 1920s to the 1950s.
His fame was not limited to upper Manhattan, although those who knew his face may not have
known his name; as the New Yorker noted in 1935, “you can be pretty sure that any darky waiter
you see in a cigarette or whiskey ad is Hunter, or any dusky pirate, sheik, Moor, African, South
Sea native, or Negro cotton-picker, convict, or crap-shooter you see in the magazine illustrations.”
Hunter claimed to have been born variously in South Africa, Dahomey, or Dutch Guiana, and used
this heritage to forge an extraordinary career. As well as supporting himself with advertising work,
he was also feted for frequent stage performances he called “African pantomime,” and for his work
as an artist’s model, bringing a supposed African authenticity to his role as muse. Even late in his
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life, Hunter was lauded for his services to African Americans when a medal for children was
named for him. In 1945 and 1965, the Schomburg Center hosted retrospective exhibitions of his
life’s work.
This paper will explore how a burgeoning black public sphere, centered in Harlem, was both made
possible by people like Hunter, and the perfect stage for such a career. It was also in this urban
setting that black Americans began to connect their day-to-day lives with broader political
struggles, in local, national, international, and transnational arenas.
Culture and Politics: The Use of Art by the United States Information Programme in New Zealand
Ian Cooke
PhD candidate, Art History
University of Auckland
The United States information programme in New Zealand has received little attention; this paper
will focus on one specific aspect of this, its use of art. In doing so, particular consideration will be
given to art’s role as a form of Cold War propaganda, and the importance of New Zealand agency.
The U.S. information programme in New Zealand originated during World War II when, as part of
the establishment of a Legation in Wellington, the U.S. Government sent out a representative of
the Office of War Information. Subsequently, in the early 1950s this would become a United States
Information Service outpost. Even in its initial incarnation, it utilised art, but in the second half of
the 1950s this would increase as part of the U.S. Government’s broader use of culture as a form of
propaganda during the Cold War. The intention in “friendly” countries like New Zealand was to
help foster goodwill and to combat anti-Americanism and it was as a result of this, for example,
that the first exhibition of modern American art, Eight American Artists, came to New Zealand in
1958. Although such activities would decrease in the 1960s, there would be a brief resurgence in
the 1970s, at a time when the two countries were allies in the Vietnam War.
Of equal importance is an understanding of local aims and agency. Both the New Zealand
Government and New Zealand art institutions, particularly the Auckland Art Gallery, solicited the
U.S. information programme for exhibitions of art: the interactions that did occur were not just
meaningful in a political sense, but would also play a role in the development of New Zealand art,
as well as the New Zealand art gallery institution.
Session G, Roundtable
John A. Salmond Memorial Roundtable: The Duke Experience ca.1965–ca.2000
Erik Olssen, University of Otago
John Weaver, McMaster University
Dolores Janiewski, Victoria University, Wellington
Paul Husbands, Waitangi Tribunal
In 1955, Duke University established a Center of Commonwealth Studies and the James B. Duke
Commonwealth Fellowships. For almost twenty-five years one nationally selected post-graduate
student each in history, political science or economics arrived annually as Duke Fellows.
Altogether, almost seventy-five Duke Fellows went to Durham, North Carolina, during the
Commonwealth Center’s quarter century existence. We have assembled a panel consisting of two
New Zealanders, a Canadian, and an American to reflect upon how their Duke experience
influenced their understanding of North American history and culture.
Erik Olssen (at Duke 1965–1969) and John Weaver (1969–1972) were Duke Fellows. Dolores
Janiewski (1974–1979), an American of French Canadian ancestry, observed our little
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Commonwealth community during the 1970s. Paul Husbands (1993–2006) attended Duke well
after the sad demise of the Commonwealth Center; he can comment on how the lack of a
Commonwealth community may have made his Duke experience different.
This session is dedicated to the memory of the wonderful Dunedin-born Dukee, John A. Salmond.
John was a 1960–1963 Duke Fellow and sadly passed away in late June 2013.
Session H, Keynote Address
Unraveling the Culture of War: Rethinking Global Hollywood
Lary May
University of Minnesota
By the twenty-first century, a global marketplace had come to fruition. In the realm of industry as
well as the media, that new system appeared to be dominated by corporations centered in the
United States. When examining the impact of global media many scholars see that American
goods and images serve as a new means of hegemony or cultural imperialism over other nations.
What has received less attention is how the rise of the new global Hollywood of the twenty-first
century has altered American culture and politics itself. This lecture will revise the common
wisdom by concentrating on one key event: the response of global Hollywood to the attacks on
9/11. As in World War II, the administration asked the film industry to promote entertainment
conducive to United States policy in the Middle East. In so doing they assumed that that
Hollywood would advance the “cultural hegemony” or cultural “imperialism” of the “imaginary
community” rooted in the purposes of the state.
Yet for the for the first time in the modern era, the opposite occurred: a large body of popular films
found a huge market for productions that undermined rather than advanced wartime policy, not
just in the Mideast but in the national security state forged in the Cold War. By examining this
unprecedented development, this lecture will answer three key questions: What was the nature of
the new global Hollywood that made this split between popular art and state policy possible? How
do these events suggest that we revise the theories we have used to explain how the modern
mass media operates? How do we explain the impact of the global media on America itself? This
lecture will address these questions by looking at how the American film industry has developed
as a global medium over the last half century, and how the market for its films has altered in the
wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the wars that followed.
Session I, Panel 10: The Use and Abuse of Television
“This Beastly Publication”: The Shirley Temple vs. Graham Greene Civil Libel Case of 1938
Geoff Lealand
Associate Professor, Screen and Media Studies
University of Waikato
As part of my current research on Shirley Temple “double” competitions in New Zealand in 1935–
1936 (an investigation of fandom and cultural memory), I encountered the High Court of Justice
(UK) civil libel case of 1938, when Twentieth Century-Fox successfully sued Greene and the
publishers of Night and Day magazine in wake of Greene’s review of Wee Willie Winkie (John
Ford, 1937).
The review suggested, amongst other things, that Temple’s admirers were primarily “middle-aged
men and clergymen” who responded to “her dubious coquetry,” and it is regarded by some
feminist writers as possibly the first exploration of the sexualisation of young girls in cinema.
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Nevertheless, there are a number of recent re-interpretations of this case, as in Gaylyn Studlar
(2013), Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Childhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema.
The significance of this case will be examined as well as other “literary” connections to Shirley,
together with an investigation of the child film star (with a particular New Zealand inflection). This
presentation will also reflect on contemporary manifestations of Temple-like celebrations of early
girlhood, such as reality TV star Here Comes Honey Boo Boo (USA, 2012–2013).
Femininity, American Consumer Culture and the New Natalism: The Glamorous Mothers of the
Twenty-first Century
Professor Hilary Radner
Visual Culture Programme
University of Otago
Fashion historian, Caroline Evans claims that twentieth century fashion “has typically defined itself
against the maternal body.” Evans specifies that “early 1960s’ fashion was hysterical in this
respect.” The twenty-first century witnessed a radical shift in this regard, with motherhood
increasingly associated with glamour and fashion through such media celebrities as Angelina
Jolie, Jennifer Lopez and, more recently, Kim Kardashian, whose pregnancy is the object of
intense media scrutiny. The rise to power of style icons who embrace and advertise their position
as mothers suggests a movement away from a youthful vision of fashion in which adolescentoriented disposable styles dominated towards one that posits the glamorous, financially savvy
woman as the ideal, in which a sexualized reinvented mother has supplanted the Single Girl in the
public’s imagination.
Significantly, in May 2012, Jennifer Lopez was named top celebrity of the year by Forbes,
testifying to the efficacy of the strategy adopted by her manager and business partner, Benny
Medina, who promoted Lopez as a brand functioning across media, rather than achievements in
any particular domain, circulating her image as one indelibly associated with maternity. Her role as
a judge on American Idol was pivotal to her comeback as a mature star, a woman of color in her
40s, enabling Medina to build upon the visibility this position afforded Lopez, who deftly negotiated
an image that tempered an exuberant sexuality with unfailing concern for the show’s contestants,
in keeping with her position as a caring and devoted mother. Drawing on her cross-media
reputation and her cross-over audience appeal as a star with a strong ethnic identity who had a
mainstream fan-base, Lopez carved a niche for herself within high fashion, appearing on the
covers of magazines such as Harper’s and Vogue, notwithstanding her reputation for outrageous
outfits and “nip slips,” while also revitalizing her flagging film career. Lopez’s prominence within the
fashion system, including her own line of modestly priced pieces, during a period of marked
recession, suggests how efficient both Medina’s strategies and Lopez’s evolving persona were in
attracting public attention.
In this context, Lopez’s preeminence contrasts with the waning of stars such as Julia Roberts, only
two years Lopez’s senior, associated exclusively with cinema, but also a well-defined girlishness.
While postfeminists might find much to applaud in the rise of a new natalism and its attendant ideal
woman, maternal rather than girlish, in control of her bankbook and her sexuality, its association
with a femininity that remains dependent upon the policing of the body and its appearance might
also give earlier feminists cause for concern. This paper, then, proposes to explore the
implications of this shift and the possible meanings of this new fashionable natalism, in particular
its ramifications in the light of recent debates within contemporary American feminine culture about
postfeminism and its relations to second wave feminism.
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Boardwalk Empire’s Al Capone: Reinventing the Ultimate Gangster
Rebecca Weeks
PhD candidate, History
University of Auckland
On HBO’s Boardwalk Empire three distinct types of characters interact—real historical figures,
characters based on or inspired by historical figures, and completely fictional characters. This
paper focuses on the first character type through a case-study of Al Capone and situates
Boardwalk Empire’s representation of this infamous figure in relation to other popular and scholarly
representations. As well as being the subject of numerous biographies, Al Capone has been
reincarnated on film and television for decades. While many of the details of Capone’s life are still
debated, his biographers agree that he has not accurately been represented on screen and that
consequently he has become a myth, an illusion, a “larger than life symbol of evil,” in the popular
imagination. On Boardwalk Empire, however, Capone is reinvented and viewers are presented
with a new, multifaceted depiction of the 1920s gangster, which they have embraced. The fully
rounded interpretation of Capone considers aspects of his career and personal life rarely found
outside of published biographies. More generally, this paper begins to explore the capabilities of
long-format historical series for presenting history on film. The starting point of Boardwalk Empire,
as well as the extended format of the television series, fosters the development of this complex
representation. In the process of constructing the character of Capone, Terence Winter, the
creator of Boardwalk Empire, and his team of writers necessarily engage in invention—inventing
scenarios, dialogue and relationships. Understanding how and why invention is employed and the
impact that it has on the historical interpretation presented on screen is key when approaching and
assessing history in this modern form.
Session I, Panel 11: Tilting the Axis: Japan, Germany, and Italy in American Minds
During and After World War II
African-American Attitudes toward Japan and the Japanese, 1941–1945
Chris Dixon
Associate Professor, History
University of Queensland
Scholars from a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives have long understood that
questions of “race” were fundamental to the causes and conduct of the conflict that raged across
the Pacific from 1941–1945. For Black Americans serving in the Pacific Theater, these issues
were all the more urgent, not just because African Americans were frequently victims of an often
brutal racism in a segregated military system, but also because the areas and peoples being
fought over were sites of continuing colonial injustices and racial inequalities. Further complicating
this volatile mix, Japanese propagandists sought to persuade Black Americans that they were
victims of transnational white racism, and should therefore participate in a global struggle of
liberation against colonial authority. It is within that context that this paper considers black
Americans’ attitudes toward their Japanese adversaries. Exploiting a wide array of sources—
archival, diaries and letters, published memoirs, and newspapers—enables an analysis of the
prewar and wartime Japanese propaganda directed toward African Americans, as well as Black
Americans’ reactions to that propaganda, along with their wider attitudes towards the Japanese.
Although American military and civilian authorities exaggerated the potential impact of Japanese
propaganda on African Americans, white Americans’ anxieties in this regard reveal much about
deeper tensions within the United States. The wartime attitudes of African American service
personnel toward the Japanese thus tell us much about Blacks’ reactions to an enemy widely
regarded as brutal and inhuman, provides insights into African Americans’ attempts to transform
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the wider American military culture, and suggests ways in which the Pacific War served as a
platform for the postwar struggle for civil rights.
In Time, They Will Join Us in the Sun: The Search for the Psychological Roots of Fascism, 1945–50
Shane Steven Smits
PhD Candidate in History
University of Melbourne
Of all the events, actions, and discussions for which the Second World War served as a catalyst,
the debate over how to raise children was one of the most unique. From the rise of Hitler in 1933
onwards, American experts and commentators sought to explain how the Germans, a people who
on the surface appeared not unlike Americans themselves, could have become caught up in the
madness of fascism. The answer, many argued, lay in how contemporary Germans had been
raised as children, under the authoritarian regime of a domineering father. “This making of a
German presents so strange and tragic a picture of childhood,” argued Parents Magazine, “that
democracies need look no further for an object lesson on how not to raise their children.”
The Second World War was a catalyst for the expansion of the role and prestige of the social
sciences. Within anthropology the “culture and personality” school of experts attempted to assess
the “national character” of the Allied and Axis nations. This school was deeply influenced by the
prevailing psychological theories on “personality.” This paper will explore the key anthropological
field work studies of Germany in the immediate postwar period, as well as subsequent sociological
studies on fascism, within the wider context of the public discourse on democracy occurring in the
United States. Democracy, many argued, was the collective expression of mature, mentallyhealthy personalities. De-nazification was insufficient; what was needed was an entire remaking of
the German, Italian and Japanese nations, down to the very core of what it meant to be human.
The Image of Conflict: U.S. Military Bases in Italy, an Early History
Holly Eileen Wilson
PhD Candidate, Department of History
La Trobe University, Melbourne
Sailing into the war-scarred Italian port of Livorno, R.E. Callan, a transport ship for the United
States (U.S.) military, foreshadowed a marked change in the future of the small Tuscan coastal
city. As the 1300 U.S. Army troops disembarked onto the two-month-old American supply base,
they were met by a 100-piece Italian band. Yet “there were no cheering crowds.” The celebratory
pomp of citizens waving American flags was remarkably absent. Instead the troops were
welcomed onto Italian soil by “several hundred riot police.” With “rifles at the ready,” the Italian
forces were anticipating a backlash, particularly from local Communist bodies, against the
establishment of the supply base. The scenes of August 12 th 1951 in Livorno, differed vastly from
the ease at which the ruling Italian elite accepted and then permitted the establishment of a
number of U.S. military installations on Italian territory, as portrayed throughout the limited
scholarship on U.S. forces in Italy.
This paper will highlight the conflicted and discordant reception of the United States’ military
facilities in Italy through an examination of the early history of the supply base established at
Livorno, later named Camp Darby. Through the examination of events in Livorno, this paper will
argue that varying levels of support for the U.S. forces existed among Italian society; a point of
view largely neglected and underrepresented in the historiography. This paper is based on the
research conducted in the early stages of my PhD. I acknowledge that this paper will not be able
to address all the questions evoked by the topic of U.S. military forces in Italy, however what it
does address is strongly support by evidence collected from local communist newspapers and
foreign broadsheets.
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Session I, Panel 12: Transnational Gender: The United States, New Zealand, and
Australia
Land or Labor: The Fracture of Pacific Settler Masculinity in the United States and New Zealand
Matthew Basso
Associate Professor, History and Gender Studies
University of Utah
This paper is part of a larger research project that traces the tensions among white men in three
Pacific settler societies—the U.S. West, New Zealand, and Australia—beginning in the latter
nineteenth century. I argue that central source of these tensions was the transition that occurred in
these societies as affordable and sustainable farmland became increasingly rare while
industrialization and wage labor expanded. This shift prompted a debate over whether land (and
the men that owned it or wanted to own it) or labor (and the men who did it for a wage) should
dominate the politics and culture of those societies. Although they played out differently in all three
countries, competing ideas about class structure and masculinity were at the center of these
contests. Likewise, in each country racial ideologies proved themselves to be inseparable from
ideas about masculinity and property. In my presentation I will look specifically at how this debate
played out in New Zealand and the U.S. West and discuss how the differences and similarities
illuminate the dynamics of settler colonialism. I will also discuss the transnational aspects of this
history, showing how American ideas about land and labor influenced New Zealand, and New
Zealand’s liberal reforms informed American progressive politics. Popular illustrations, the
vernacular language used by ordinary settlers, and labor records provide my major source
material.
Dale Austen, Miss New Zealand (1927): Our Modern Girl in Hollywood
Dr Natalie Smith
University of Otago
When 17 year old Dale Austen was crowned Miss New Zealand in 1927 she was catapulted from
her Dunedin, New Zealand home, into the world of Hollywood glamour and scandal. Her prize
package included first class return tickets to Los Angeles, a meeting with MGM studios and a 25
pound per week screen contract. Austen spent six months in Hollywood where she underwent
screen tests and starred in a Hollywood film The Bushranger (1928). On her return to NZ Austen
became a local “star” and was cast by pioneering NZ filmmaker Rudall Hayward in Bush
Cinderella (1928) and Daughter of Dunedin (1928). In Daughter of Dunedin Austen played the
female lead, embodying aspects of the international Modern Girl look popularised by Hollywood—
she is fashionable, she smokes, has bobbed hair, painted lips, and an easy smile. Yet, this on
screen image was at odds with Austen’s own account of Hollywood being no place for a NZ girl. In
correspondence and interviews Austen speaks of her ambassadorial role as Miss New Zealand,
and her concern not to let her country down. Using Dale Austen Miss New Zealand (1927) as a
case study, this paper explores the extent to which the global phenomenon of the Modern Girl, as
portrayed in Hollywood cinema through figures such as It girl Clara Bow, was localised.
“A Women’s Paradise”: Australian Women and American Gender Relations, 1920s–50s
Anne Rees
PhD candidate, History
Australian National University
During the early twentieth century, hundreds of Australian women crossed the Pacific in quest of
adventure and career opportunities in the United States. At a time when most of their
contemporaries yearned for the “Mother Country,” these women made the unconventional decision
to try their fortune among the skyscrapers of Manhattan or the film studios of Hollywood. While
42
they busied themselves with travel and work, these visitors were also intently studying American
society, and, in particular, American gender relations. In letters, diaries, memoirs and newspapers,
Australian women reported with astonishment that American girls took college education and
careers for granted, and that husbands routinely performed their fair share of the housework. Even
women who remained in the domestic sphere appeared to enjoy abundant leisure, thanks to the
installation of labour-saving devices in every home.
The fruit of archival research in Australia and the United States, these accounts lend support to
previous scholarship arguing that American women enjoyed greater professional opportunities
than their antipodean counterparts, but they also suggest that visiting the United States could
prompt a form of feminist awakening. Through witnessing a more modern model of gender
relations, Australian women became newly conscious of the opportunities they lacked back home.
While these limited opportunities had certainly been a factor motivating many to travel abroad, the
full extent to which Australia was a man’s country only became apparent once they encountered “a
women’s paradise.” For some, the professional opportunities available to women in America
proved hard to resist, and they carved out careers abroad. Most, however, ultimately returned to
Australia, where they reported on the American woman and called for new freedoms for her
Australian counterparts. The United States, therefore, not only alerted Australians to new ways of
being female, but also became a template for a more equal Australia.
Session J, Panel 13: Putting It on Paper: Letter Writing in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
Placing American Freethought in a Trans-Atlantic Frame: The Correspondence of Robert G. Ingersoll
and George J. Holyoake
Dr Tim Verhoeven
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies
Monash University
Robert Green Ingersoll, or the “great Agnostic” as he was known, was the leading figure in the
freethought movement that flourished in the United States after the Civil War. In 1879 he began a
long correspondence with George Jacob Holyoake, the English freethinker who was the last man
convicted for blasphemy in England, and who coined the term “secularism.” In this paper I explore
the relationship between the two men through their numerous letters. I will use their friendship to
reflect on the extent to which we might place nineteenth-century freethought in a trans-Atlantic and
transnational framework.
Letter Writing, Citizenship, and Black Working Class Freedom Struggles
Paul Michel Taillon
Department of History
University of Auckland
This paper investigates the letter writing of black railroad workers to the United States Railroad
Administration (USRA) during the World War I era. One of a number of wartime agencies created
to mobilize American society for war, the USRA figured as part of a state apparatus that reached
into American society in ways not seen since the era of Reconstruction. For black railroaders,
wartime mobilization created an opportunity to challenge discrimination. However, it took acting on
that moment of opportunity to realize the potential to undermine the legitimacy of segregation,
disfranchisement, and economic subordination. One of the most fundamental and yet underappreciated forms of black activism involved the writing of letters.
I argue that letter writing constituted a political act and a form of political activism. Writing to a
government official in an agency like the USRA offered black workers a relatively low-cost, low-risk
43
means of expressing themselves and articulating grievances in the hope of redress. Letter writing
also offered, as epistolary historians have recently shown, a means of fashioning one’s selfidentity. In the context of a war for democracy in Europe and industrial democracy at home, letter
writing also provided a means for disfranchised black workers to constitute themselves as fully
endowed citizen-subjects. Although the great majority of black petitions to the USRA did not meet
with success, black workers’ encounters with the wartime state through their missives contributed
to a historical convergence in political consciousness that influenced black politics in the interwar
era and beyond.
The Democratization of Letter Writing in the Age of FDR
Dr Paul Husbands
Waitangi Tribunal
The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt is well-known as a time of high levels of popular mobilization
and political participation. During the New Deal years, in particular, working people expressed
themselves politically by joining unions, taking part in protests and strikes, and voting in their
millions for FDR. This paper looks at another significant but under-analyzed form of popular
participation that flourished during the Roosevelt years: the writing of letters to the President of the
United States. Over the 12 years of his tenure Franklin Roosevelt received literally millions of
letters from ordinary Americans (including close to 500,000 in the first week of his presidency
alone).
This paper attempts to explain this remarkable phenomenon. Rather than focusing upon the
obvious charisma of FDR or the almost magical power of radio as other historians have done, it
focuses upon the letter writers themselves. In particular the paper shows how many Americans (in
the Northeast, Midwest and Western states at least) became habituated to the practice of
communicative and expressive letter writing during their years at school. Equipped with the ability,
and apparently the confidence and inclination to express themselves through letter writing, many
thousands of ordinary men, women and children in the 1930s and 1940s embraced the medium as
a means of engaging with, and shaping, the world beyond the boundaries of their immediate
communities.
In addressing themselves to President Roosevelt ordinary working Americans not only created an
outlet for their writing talents but also asserted themselves politically. In the process, they
democratized the hitherto largely elite practice of political letter writing, transforming it into a new
form of popular political expression and engagement. A new form of political engagement, that
was distinguished by its own distinct genre of writing, which although largely contained within the
conventions of school-taught letter writing, and obviously influenced by the rhetorical currents and
prevailing discourses of the day, nevertheless carried the distinct imprint of the people who
produced it.
Session J, Panel 14: American Slavery / American Freedom
“Under the Master’s Eye”? Overseers, Slaves, and Producing Agricultural Knowledge in Virginia,
1720–1820
Dominic Hennessy
PhD candidate, History
University of Queensland
Studies of plantation agriculture recognise Southern plantations were not moribund in the late
colonial and early Republic. Planters were rational, creative, and adaptive agriculturalists and
these qualities determined their productivity as well as their bound labour. During the Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth centuries the Virginia grandees sought to lessen the risks posed by tobacco
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monoculture. The broad quantitative outlines of this process are well established but only faintly
understood is how planters utilized and generated agricultural knowledge to adapt to a volatile
economic and ecological environment. In the spirit of the enlightenment and confident in
improvement through practical application of scientific principles the great tidewater planters
embarked on a program of diversification: experimenting with new crops and crop rotations,
plough culture, and soil fertilization methods. Their laboratories were their fields. Their lab
technicians were their overseers and slaves. These “invisible assistants” performed the actual
trials and noted the results. Their labours not only determined the success of a planter’s program
for improvement, they also produced agricultural knowledge. This paper will demonstrate how this
knowledge was produced at what were sites of contestation and negotiation. From the early
Eighteenth to the early Nineteenth Century agricultural journals, letters, and plantation records of
the Virginia gentry demonstrate a complication of planters’, overseers’, and slaves’ experimental
observations by the patriarchal power dynamics endemic to Southern plantations. Examining
planter’s multifarious interpretations of their invisible assistants’ “results”, this paper highlights a
constructivist epistemology unique to Southern plantations. Explicating this complicated process
adds further recognition to the dynamism of Southern plantations and to the agency of overseers
and slaves to determine that dynamism.
The “Marriage Market”: Nineteenth-Century Marriage and Women’s Rights Discourses of Slavery
Ana Stevenson
PhD candidate, History
University of Queensland
The institution of marriage was of key significance to nineteenth-century American social
reformers, especially following the 1848 women’s rights Declaration of Sentiments. As many
reformers interested in women’s rights had previous involvement with the antislavery movement,
they brought their existing perceptions of slavery to their emerging understanding of women’s
oppression, particularly within marriage. Although reformers sought to promote a view of marriage
based upon a voluntary and spontaneous emotional relationship of equals—free of legal
coercion—they were very aware of the restrictions marriage placed upon women, due to the legal
realities of coverture. To communicate the inequality that characterised women’s experience of
marriage, reformers therefore employed discourses of slavery to draw comparisons between the
legal and social position of women and that of the enslaved. This enabled white reformers such as
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lillie Devereux Blake to critique the purportedly “enslaving” nature of
marriage and convey the gender-based inequalities inherent in the institution, yet primarily with a
focus on the experience of white women. African American reformers, such as Frances E.W.
Harper and William Wells Brown, however, also used such discourses to elucidate the tenuous
legal position and liminal experience African American—especially the enslaved and women of
mixed race—had within the marriage relation. Discourses of slavery were expounded through
tropes such as the “fugitive wife” and the “tragic mulatta,” as well as “white slavery” and the
“marriage market,” thus demonstrating women’s lack of autonomy and legal “death” within the
“bonds” of matrimony. By the turn of the twentieth century, these tropes gained cultural currency
beyond the realm of social reform, most clearly in the literature of Edith Wharton. Through this
interpretative paradigm of gender and race, discourses of slavery enabled women’s rights
reformers to reconceptualise understandings of women’s oppression by emphasising their position
within marriage.
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Convergence: An Interpretation of Lincoln and the Abolitionists
Peter S. Field
History Programme, College of Arts
University of Canterbury
Generations of historians have debated the causes of the American Civil War. Not surprisingly
they have long failed to achieve consensus on a host of issues, none more contentious than on
the role of abolitionists in fomenting sectional discord and fighting for racial justice. That is, until
the sesquicentennial of the conflict. Today we seem to be witnessing what I call a convergence.
The majority of historians have achieved something of a consensus, even if unbeknownst to them.
Following Lincoln’s vision as expressed in the Second Inaugural Address, they have concluded
that slavery constituted the cause of the war and that emancipation was right and good, even if
freedom came at the cost of many hundreds of thousands of American lives. Following on from
this consensus around the war, historians as diverse Doris Kearns Goodwin, James Oakes, and
Eric Foner have increasingly come to portray abolitionists and Abraham Lincoln as working
together toward a common goal. Despite their famous and public disagreements during the war,
the Radical abolitionists and the Republican president coalesced into a team, of rivals perhaps, but
unified in their striving toward the singular aim of freedom nationally. Even Hollywood has jumped
on the convergence bandwagon, with Stephen Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln, a film that poignantly
focuses on the President and Thaddeus Stevens coming together (at least for one month) to
ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Hollywood and the historians have given us a
Lincoln for the Age of Obama.
Session J, Panel 15: “What Then Is the American, This New Man?” Answers from
Literature
Poe and an American Pursuit of the Moment
Alexandra Bailey Smith
PhD candidate, English Literature
University of Sydney
In his “Philosophy of Composition,” Edgar Allan Poe set out an influential model of literary form,
arguing that “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to
dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression.” Poe considered
a work’s significance to come from its dénouement, and this paper will argue that this concept can
be considered as a precursor to the modernist “moment” or “event.” As a moment around which a
text is structured, the dénouement is the literary instant decisif; a term coined by Henri CartierBresson in regards to urban photography. Indeed, Poe’s short texts are underpinned by a pursuit
for the moment, structured around “such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid in the
construction of the effect.” This preoccupation, in particular, influenced the French Symbolistes
and, in turn, the Surrealists, and as such, contributed to a wider European modernist pursuit of the
moment. If we consider the widely known statement that Poe “is, after all, a French creation,” and
the extensive posthumous influence he had as a model for literary praxis in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century Paris, Poe’s relative invisibility in American literature during this time is
striking. As such, Poe’s concept of effect and dénouement can be understood as a distinguishing
factor in the respective developments of American and French modernisms. By considering Poe
within this framework, I hope to trace more clearly his role in developing a distinctly modern
conceptualisation of the moment, and in the process determine if such a development occurred
within the context of American literary modernism.
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“The New School of Decadence”
Samuel V.H. Reese
PhD candidate, English Literature
University of Sydney
In response to reviews of his collection of short stories, The Delicate Prey, author Paul Bowles
wrote to James Laughlin at New Directions, about the concept of a “New School of Decadence.”
Developing out of a review by his friend, author Tennessee Williams, Bowles suggested that the
idea of such a school of contemporary authors—“lumping together such disparate writers as Gore
[Vidal], Truman [Capote] and Tennessee”—was “manifestly ridiculous.” Williams, on the other
hand, argued that the negative connotations of such terminology “could be combatted by means of
a manifesto,” and it seems clear that Williams, at least, considered the affinities between the four
authors to be strong enough to validate such an association. In fact, aside from any literary
correspondences, all four of these authors maintained personal friendships with each other. This
paper seeks to take up specifically, however, the idea of a “New School of Decadence,” and
consider the ways in which Bowles, Capote, Vidal and Williams responded to mid-twentieth
century American culture in ways that could be considered “decadent.” In the same review,
Williams notes that “contemporary American society seems no longer inclined to hold itself open to
very explicit criticism from within,” and given this view, it is worth considering how their writing
raised questions about American society. Looking at Bowles’ Delicate Prey (1950), Capote’s Other
Voices, Other Rooms (1948), Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and Williams’ Streetcar
Named Desire (1947), this paper will outline how these works comment on American culture and
in what ways their criticisms overlapped and diverged.
A Jewish-American Adam Among the “Indians”: The Ethnicities of Auster’s Aesthetics
Dr Alys Moody
English Programme, FASS
University of Waikato
Although Paul Auster regularly insists on his identity as an American writer, the abstract, Frenchinfluenced intellectualism of his early works has been difficult to situate within an American studies
that remains focused on questions of nation and race. This paper will argue that Auster’s early
work undoes this opposition, founding a highly abstract, intensely linguistic approach to literature
on submerged and effaced anxieties about racial and ethnic identity. Notes and drafts from
Auster’s archives reveal a strong interest in questions of ethnicity in his earliest writing, particularly
around Jewish-American identity and encounters with Native Americans. Although many of the
overt references to ethnicity are effaced in the published versions, the passages in which they
appear are nonetheless central to the development of Auster’s aesthetics of vision and
observation, a key theme across his early poetry, essays and novels.
For Auster, Objectivist poetry provides a link between the Jewish-American experience of exile
and an aesthetics grounded in observation. Across a number of texts and drafts, Auster recasts
the “American Adam” myth to posit America as the site of the re-construction of a prelapsarian
language, a feat made possible by this act of poetic observation. As such, Auster’s mythology of
an ideal American poetry capable of undoing the fall of language seems to also constitute a
Jewish-American appropriation of Christian mythologies. In parallel, Native Americans, like Jews,
are linked to the experience of exile in these drafts, but, where the Jewish response is one of
distanced observation, Auster’s imagined Native Americans seem to respond through embodied
praxis, ultimately becoming the objects of an ethnographic gaze that seems at times to parallel or
embody the implicitly Jewish-American poetic gaze. Together, these tendencies transform the
aesthetics of Auster’s early writing into an image of a contested American nation, founded on a
position of universal but asymmetrical exile that promises recuperation in the form of a linguistic
and literary Eden.
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Session K, Panel 16: Of Kings and Democrats: Studies in American Political
History
A Day of Service: The Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday and the Clinton Presidency (1993–1996)
Daniel Fleming
PhD candidate, History
University of Newcastle, Australia
On 25 January 1994, the King Holiday and Service Act of 1994 enlarged the memorial scope of
the Martin Luther King Jr., Federal Holiday. In future, the day would be used to foster “nonviolent
conflict resolution, equal economic and educational opportunities and social justice.” The Martin
Luther King, Jr. Federal Holiday Commission, led by Coretta Scott King, was to organise these
activities.
The new emphasis on “equal economic” opportunity marked a philosophical departure from
previous Holidays, which were celebrated when the Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and
George H.W. Bush held power. The King Holiday Commission began to rely less on King’s “I Have
a Dream” speech and imagery, which had become so intertwined with the Republican emphasis
on colour-blind race relations. The change meant the Holiday was more aligned with the
philosophy of the new Democrat president, Bill Clinton, and also with the sentiments of civil rights
veterans.
Senator Harris Wofford and Representative John Lewis, both deeply involved with the civil rights
movement in the 1960s, instigated the change. The Holiday became a day of community service,
the inspiration for which was based on King’s 1968 “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, when he
preached “everybody can be great” because “everybody can serve.”
Thus far, historiography about the Holiday has focused on the Reagan/Bush era. This
historiography, by Vincent Harding and Michael Dyson, for example, has highlighted what was
forgotten, notably King’s post-1965 radicalism, during the first Holiday celebrations. Based on
extensive research in, and analysis of documents from, the neglected King Commission archive,
my paper will add to the scholarship about the King Holiday. I will answer the following questions:
How did President Clinton and the Democrats define King during this time? How did Coretta and
the Commission define King? My paper will also examine the complicated issue of who had the
right to control King’s legacy.
Will the Real Al Gore Please Stand Up? Name Recognition and the Nature of American Democracy
Bryan Cranston
PhD candidate, Faculty of Life & Social Sciences
Swinburne University, Melbourne
Ever since the United States revolted against the shackles of monarchy, the political dynamics and
lived experiences of its ostensibly democratic development have often been at odds with the
nation’s founding principles. Despite its unique development of political representation, where
voters elect almost every conceivable public office, the country’s democratic process often
contradicts its egalitarian foundations. One such contradiction is evident in the development of
political elites within the public sphere, and the hegemonic role of America’s political families. In a
nation where citizens elect offices from school board members to county judges, a dynastic name
carries significant cache. As Cindy D. Cam and Elizabeth J. Zechmeister have argued, this is
particularly so in “low information” campaigns. Their argument appears to assist in explaining why
otherwise unknown and unheralded candidates, but who carry the same name of a significant
political dynasty, have succeeded at the polls. Name recognition can lead to false positives. This
paper examines the phenomenon of false positive name recognition as a factor in American
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elections by looking at three examples over the past fifty years: the 1962 US House of
Representatives contest between Richard D. Kennedy and Robert Taft Jr; the succession of
unrelated Bob Caseys in the state of Pennsylvania during the seventies and eighties; and the case
of Al Gore’s 2010 Mississippi senate campaign. Through these case studies, this paper aims to
assess the value of name recognition in American politics and examine what this might tell us
about the nature of American democracy.
Session K, Panel 17: Remember the American Revolution?
Crafting New Stories from Old: The American War for Independence and the American Revolution
Michael A. McDonnell
Department of History
University of Sydney
The American War for Independence lasted for eight years. It was one of the longest and bloodiest
wars in America’s history. And yet it was not such a long and bloody war merely because the
might of the British armed forces was brought to bear on the hapless colonials. The many divisions
among Americans themselves over whether to fight, what to fight for, and who would do the
fighting often had tragic and violent consequences. The Revolutionary War was by any measure
the first American Civil War.
Yet national narratives of the Revolution and even much of the scholarship on the era focus more
on simple stories of a contest between the patriots and the British. Loyalists and other opponents
of the patriots are routinely left out of these narratives, or given short-shrift. But so too are the tens
of thousands of ordinary colonists—perhaps the majority of the population—who were disaffected
or alienated from either side, or who tried to tack between the two main antagonists to make the
best of a bad situation.
This paper, then, is a plea for us to take the war seriously and begin to think about narratives that
capture the experience of the many, rather than the few. In this short conference paper, I will
provide a few examples to gloss the wide scope of the activities, or inactivity, of the disaffected
during the war, and suggest some reasons why we have a hard time measuring this. But more
importantly, this paper will start to explore the consequences of disaffection—particularly in
creating divisions within the states, increasing levels of violence, prolonging the war, and changing
the nature of the political settlements in each state.
It is my contention that the very divisions among diverse Americans that made the War for
Independence so long, bitter, and bloody also explains much of the Revolutionary energy of the
period. Though not as seamless as traditional narratives of the Revolution would suggest, a more
complicated story also helps better explain the many problems the new states and eventually the
new nation would face. In making this argument, the paper will finally suggest ways we can
overcome what John Shy long ago noted as the “characteristic tendency” of scholars to separate
the “destructive” War for Independence from the “constructive” political Revolution.
Memories of the American Revolution in 19th Century North Carolina
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
William B. Umstead Professor
Department of History
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
During the nineteenth century white North Carolinians were at the forefront of the commemoration
of the American Revolution. That North Carolinians did so is surprising. North Carolina was not a
major site of the conflict until the closing months of the war and by the turn of the nineteenth
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century Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania had already staked out competing claims to
primacy in the revolutionary narrative. Revolutionary commemorators in North Carolina were
motivated to defend the patriotic honor of their state. By taking the lead in erecting a
commemorative landscape, North Carolinians sought to position themselves and their
revolutionary forefathers at the center of the nation’s founding. But North Carolinians also
attempted to work out a surprisingly inclusive historical memory that acknowledged the Loyalist
cause, as well as wrestled with the meaning of the Revolution in a nation divided by slavery and
later the memory of the Civil War. By tracing commemorative projects at the King’s Mountain,
Moore’s Creek, and Guilford Court House battle fields, which were among the earliest
Revolutionary era commemorative sites in the nation, this paper reveals the complex motivations
of the grass roots voluntary organizations that took the lead in the formal memory of the
Revolution in North Carolina. It also traces the shifting commemorative vocabulary (esp. with
regards to monuments).
Session K, Panel 18: Drawing Significance: Representations of American Soldiers
“A Man Knows a Man”: Illustrating Disability after the Civil War
Russell L. Johnson
Department of History and Art History
University of Otago
This paper examines the depiction of disabled individuals in illustrations published in popular
nineteenth-century periodicals in the years after the American Civil War. Although some
appearances of disability were non-political, many depictions of disability had a clear political
purpose. Thus, for instance, Harper’s Weekly artists Thomas Nast and A.R. Waud deployed
disability to promote black (male) suffrage after the war. At other times, illustrations featuring
familiar individuals with disabilities—Union army General Daniel Sickles, for example, or Corporal
James Tanner of the Grand Army of the Republic veterans’ organization—manipulated their
impairments, emphasizing them or even erasing them, depending on the artist’s intended political
message.
I argue that these uses and manipulations of disability potentially complicate the scholarly
interpretation of disability. Much of the scholarship in disability studies stresses the negative—or
stigmatizing—nature of non-normative bodies, arguing for disability’s similarly to race, gender,
sexuality, and other signifiers of power in Western societies. This line of argument, pioneered by
psychologist Erving Goffman in the early-1960s, suggests that bodies which are disabled—or nonwhite, female, or otherwise marked as different from the white, male, able-bodied norm—have
long tended to define certain people as powerless, dependent, and inferior. Post-Civil War
illustrations, however, reveal the power non-normative bodies could wield in American society and
politics.
Gender and the American War Narrative in Post-Vietnam War Comic Books
Richard Young
PhD Candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
University of Melbourne
The Vietnam War had a significant impact on the representation of gender in American war comic
books. “Gung-ho” soldiers were replaced by morally conscious men whose muscles, unlike
previous comic soldiers, did not challenge anatomical science. Despite such changes in the
representation of gender in comics late in the Vietnam War, gender performed a major role in
comic book depictions of war in the post-Vietnam period. Although emphasis was placed on a
collective rather than individual identity in these comics, American soldier masculinity was
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nonetheless represented in such a way as to distinguish between social and racial groups in the
conflicts at home and in Vietnam. This notion of a collective identity was adopted to create a more
realistic representation of the war, however, such notions of comradeship were often abandoned
when readership declined, raising interesting questions about the influence of reader perceptions
on comic representations of gender.
This paper seeks to examine the use and representation of gender in post-Vietnam war comics,
discussing how gender was defined in comics, as well as what external factors shaped this
interpretation. Firstly, comic representations of gender will be compared to those in other
contemporary forms of popular culture, including Vietnam War films, which have attracted
significant scholarly debate since the 1970s and 1980s. Secondly, comic representations will be
historicised by examining how public perceptions of gender were shaped by contemporary public
and political debates, ranging from Vietnam memorialisation to women’s rights. This paper will
explain that although gendered representations were a common theme in most American comic
books, their use in Vietnam War comics also reflected the conservative ideological stance that this
genre of comics typically endorsed.
Session L, Keynote Address
The American Quest for Security
Elaine Tyler May
University of Minnesota
The first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by the events of September 11, 2001, and
the war on terror that followed. We have seen a dramatic preoccupation with security that sparked
a wide range of anti-democratic policies, from torture to Guantanamo to the Patriot Act. We have
become accustomed to orange alerts, metal detectors, and taking off half our clothes at airports.
But if we assume that all this started with 9/11, or that the trouble lies primarily with public policies,
we miss the deeper roots of our national security obsession, which began more than half a century
ago, permeating not just public life but private life as well.
The preoccupation with security emerged during the same decades that American democracy
expanded to become more inclusive and more tolerant. As a result of what some have called the
“rights revolution”—the Civil Rights, feminist, gay liberation and disability rights movements—the
United States came much closer to reaching its full democratic promise.
These two goals—one to expand democracy, the other to achieve security—need not be in
conflict. Democracy and security depend upon each other. In a thriving democracy, citizens
engage with each other across differences, empowered to grapple with problems and address
common concerns. Democracy fosters trust and a healthy public life. But when citizens retreat
from public life, they are unable to achieve meaningful change on behalf of the common good.
People are more likely to feel insecure and distrust each other, and democracy withers. Security
also withers, shrinking to a negative concept that is little more than fear combined with force. Yet
true security has more to do with trust and confidence than boundaries, bunkers and weapons.
In the United States since World War II, security and democracy have been on a collision course.
Misguided ideas about security, along with an investment in private life at the expense of public
life, have muted efforts to expand and strengthen democracy, resulting in a nation that is not as
democratic, nor as secure, as it could be.
Anti-democratic policies, from the early cold war purges of suspected communists and
homosexuals, to the erosion of individual rights in the War on Terror, have received extensive
attention by scholars. Less studied are the ways in which citizens, in their private lives, have
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adopted and internalized the preoccupation with security. I will argue that the undermining of
democracy in the name of security has penetrated much deeper into American life than our public
policies, right down to the level of daily life. The question remains, are we any safer as a result?
This presentation will examine how the obsession with security has affected American life over the
last half century.
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