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Re-Orienting Whiteness This page intentionally left blank Re-Orienting Whiteness Edited by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus RE-ORIENTING WHITENESS Copyright © Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, 2009. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-61885-5 All rights reserved. Chapter 10 is a slightly revised version of “Making Tasmania Home,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28, nos 1 and 2 (2007): 1–17, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2007 by Frontiers Editorial Collective, Inc. Photo Credits: Cover image: “Naked for Dinner.” Published in the Lone Hand, September 2, 1907. Figure 14.1: “A Gin and Piccaninny,” reproduced from the Rex Van Kivell Collection, NK10389, Courtesy of the National Library of Australia; Figure 14.2: “Portrait of an Aboriginal Mother and Child, Canning Stock Route, Western Australia, 1942,” reproduced from the National Library of Australia, nla.pic-vn4463084, with the kind permission of Roslyn Poignant; Figure 14.3: “Earthly Mother,” William Ricketts Sanctuary reprinted with the permission of Parks Victoria; Figure 14.4: “An Old Woman,” in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, George French Angus, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria; Figure 14.5: “A Curiosity in Her Own Country,” cartoon by Phil May reprinted from the Bulletin, 1888. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-38157-9 ISBN 978-0-230-10128-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230101289 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field 1 Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus Part I Historians Approaching the Study of Whiteness 2 Whiteness and “the Imperial Turn” 17 Angela Woollacott 3 The Strange Career of Whiteness: Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication 31 Louise Newman 4 “Whiteness,” Geopolitical Reconfiguration, and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Politics 45 Leigh Boucher Part II Whiteness as a Transnational Colonial Production 5 Traveling White 65 Warwick Anderson 6 The Question of Miscegenation in the Politics of English-Speaking Countries in the Early Twentieth Century 73 Henry Reynolds 7 “Being Thankful for their Birth in a Christian Land”: Interrogating Intersections between Whiteness and Child Rescue 83 Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel, and Belinda Sweeney 8 “I Followed England Round the World”: The Rise of Trans-Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim 99 Penelope Edmonds vi ● Contents Part III Whiteness as a Settler-Colonial Identity 9 W hite is Wonderful: Emotional Conversion and Subjective Formation 119 Marilyn Lake 10 T he Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania 135 Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish 11 R eading the Shadows of Whiteness: A Case of Racial Clarity on Queensland’s Colonial Borderlands, 1880–1900 149 Tracey Banivanua Mar 12 The Deluded White Woman and the Expatriation of the White Child 165 Margaret Allen Part IV Whiteness and the Imagining/Managing of Colonial Populations 13 “Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race”: Whiteness, Eugenics, and the Articulation of Race 183 Jane Carey 14 “Born and Nurtured in Darkest Ignorance”: White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity 199 Liz Conor 15 Rethinking “Squaw Men” and “Pakeha-Maori”: Legislating White Masculinity in New Zealand and Canada, 1840–1900 219 Angela Wanhalla 16 Into the White Man’s Kingdom: Whiteness and Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia, 1880s–1960s 235 Katherine Ellinghaus Part V Conclusion 17 E pilogue 253 Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus Notes on Contributors 259 Index 263 Acknowledgments T his volume would not have been possible without the input of many people. We would like to thank all the participants of the Historicizing Whiteness conference, held at the University of Melbourne in 2006. The essays in this collection are much stronger for having been delivered in such a collegial and rigorous environment, and the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne provided essential institutional and financial support to make that meeting of minds possible. We are grateful to all the con- tributors for their patience and engagement with the project, and to Lindi Todd, Roger Knight, Vera Mackie, and David Goodman for their support (both intellectual and otherwise). When our enthusiasm for the task of histor- icizing whiteness flagged we had only to turn to the work of these fine scholars to be reinspired. Sarah Pinto was a skilled, professional copy editor who went above and beyond the call of duty to smooth the edges of these many authorial voices. The editors at Palgrave are also due our gratitude for their enthusiasm and support for the project. All three editors of this volume were the product of the postgraduate school at the University of Melbourne between the mid-1990s and 2006. The friend- ships among fellow postgraduates and junior staff that we found there were unquestionably important to our development as scholars, and we were also fortunate to come into contact with a remarkable group of senior academics whose intellectual generosity shaped our own perspectives. We are better histo- rians for being exposed to this rich environment at the early stages of our careers. CHAPTER 1 Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus S ince whiteness studies made its dramatic entrance into the U.S. academy in the early 1990s it has generated tremendous scholarly output. Monographs and edited collections have proliferated across and between numerous disciplines. Amongst all this intellectual activity, however, the ques- tion of whiteness and colonialism remains a significant and curious absence.1 As its Saidian-inspired title signals, Re-Orienting Whiteness emerges from our desire to address this gap by pushing “whiteness studies” toward a more sus- tained engagement with critical postcolonial thought and the history of colo- nialism. Despite their many obvious synergies, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between these approaches to understanding the modalities of race, past and present.2 There is a clear need for this radical separation to be addressed. This collection offers an explicit challenge both to work on race in the United States (which has tended to elide the foundational significance of its settler-c olonial origins), and to historical scholarship on British empire- building (which remains deeply conflicted over the significance of race)3. Our work is based on the conviction that the construction of whiteness and the phe- nomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected, and that whiteness studies must be “Re-Oriented” to take this into account. Equally, a greater and more rigorous focus on whiteness as a racial category has much to offer to our understandings of the historical operations of colonialism and its ongoing effects. The essays presented here perform precisely these tasks. Most had their ori- gins in a conference on “Historicising Whiteness” held in Melbourne, Australia, in late 2006.4 This gathering deliberately set out to move beyond the North 2 ● Carey, Boucher, and Ellinghaus American focus that has shaped studies of whiteness. As conveners, we were taken aback by the level of interest it generated. While we were and are convinced that whiteness studies opened productive new avenues for historians interested in racialization broadly and colonialism specifically, we were caught unawares by the number of scholars who shared this view. This was close to a decade after the first major scholarly whiteness conference, the (in)famous Berkeley gathering of 1997, generated so much attention in and out of the U.S. academy.5 And the intervening years had witnessed many a dismissal of the field’s utility, particularly for historians. We wondered, at first, if the energy might have dissipated and we were simply caught in a time-lag. The depth and breadth of the work that appeared soon assuaged any such fears. This is not to say that this collection is united by an unfaltering commit- ment to whiteness studies. It is equally shaped by a uneasiness with the field tendencies toward ahistoricity, reification, and universalization; its ill-defined analytic vocabulary; and especially its potential simply to reinscribe white peo- ple at the center of historical narratives. And we are acutely aware that, since its emergence, the field has proven “a lightning rod for critics.”6 Indeed, alongside its rapid growth, the apparently deserved death of the field has been simulta- neously announced as the latest headstone in a graveyard of academic fads.7 A key development that argues these dismissive predictions, however, is the degree to which the terms “white” and “whiteness” have already been adopted by historians, particularly those writing about European colonialism. These categories have recently been inserted alongside class, gender, and various “others.”8 This book functions in some ways simply to highlight the signifi- cance of this quite startling analytic uptake. But it also registers a profound discomfort with the ways that whiteness has snuck through the backdoor into the historian’s toolkit, often with little definition or explanation. Its meanings are often taken for granted, as if they were self-evident. The nuanced, histori- cally grounded, and theoretically broad-ranging approaches in this collection suggest a number of ways forward for scholars. As Matt Wray has recently observed, “whiteness studies has left childhood and is now enduring adolescence. It’s having its identity crisis right on time.”9 The time is ripe for a major reassessment of the field. In approaching this task, we wish to foreground the limitations that have resulted from the U.S.-centered nature of most whiteness scholarship. This is clearly problematic for a field that makes broad, even universal, claims to explaining the operations of “race.” Whiteness, obviously, has had far wider geographic purchase.10 We seek to decen- ter the United States in the area of whiteness studies, and in some ways to recog- nize that it was never central to begin with. So too, the isolationist tendencies of U.S. whiteness scholarship have produced its lack of engagement with work on race in other contexts, particularly the analytic frames that have emerged through attempts to theorize European colonialism. We contend that this nationally and theoretically limited approach represents in fact the major weakness of the field.11 In other words, whiteness needs to be reconciled with the major intellectual cur- rents that have shaped research on race outside the United States.
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