Milner and the mind of imperialism

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 February 1979Capitalist development in Southern Africa, particularly in Kimberley and on the Rand, was very much the result of the penetration of British and foreign capital as well ac the rapid growth of commercial interests. The continued expansion of the mining industry, with its huge amounts of initial capital outlay, particularly after 1893 when the deep levels came into operation, depended upon the state of the capital markets of Europe: speculative booms in "kaffir" shares not only lined the pockets of investors but also provided new working capital, for little capital was raised by the issue of debentures, (l)

Unsettling Australia: modernity and mobility in some recent Australian fiction

This thesis explores motifs of modernity and mobility in recent Australian fictions by Joan London, Rodney Hall, Gail Jones, and Michelle de Kretser, demonstrating how these interrelated themes “unsettle” the notion of national identity. Recent Australian criticism advocates methods of reading beyond the strictly local category of the national, instead reflecting the ways in which influences from across the modern world inform literary and national identity. Since part of this critical project has been to assert that transnational mobility has underpinned Australia’s modernity since colonial settlement, analysing instances of mobility in these contemporary novels unsettles modernity as perpetual present and advancement, for the project necessarily involves referring back to the past. Drawing on critical articulations of transnationalism, postcoloniality, and an Australian uncanny, in conjunction with arguments for a multi-temporal notion of modernity, I use the notion of “unsettlement” to articulate the terms and framework for the spatial and historical anxieties that this multi-temporal and multi-spatial modernity presents, considering it as a postcolonial predicament. Not only is Australia as a literary setting unsettled through the depiction of journeys to and from the nation but, since modernity must always be defined in relation to the past that precedes it, these authors’ depictions of modernity in effect reanimate Australia’s history. “Unsettlement,” in the novels examined, reveals the space of the modern nation to be destabilised by the dislocations of global mobility and striated by the continuing effects of its colonial past. The first chapter pursues the figure of the travelling colonial woman, whose mobility destabilises the boundaries between home and away, and enables an alternative, gendered and fluid narrative of modernity. As a historical fiction, London’s Gilgamesh (2001) also animates the unsettling of Australia’s past, invoking an ancient epic in order to unsettle the boundaries between the “Old” world and “New.” The second chapter focuses on Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home (2000), in which travel mobilises the proximity of two distinct historical locations (National Socialist Germany and colonial Australia) to unsettle each nation’s mythological origins. The third chapter argues that Jones’s Black Mirror (2002) and Dreams of Speaking (2006) develop an underlying poetics of the unmodern through their concern with subjectivity, memory, and both personal and national traumas. These novels disrupt a coherent narrative of modernity as progress and renewal, presenting it instead as an unsettling condition, but one that is also empathetically engaged with the past and with others. The final chapter, on de Kretser’s The Lost Dog (2007), examines unsettlement as a condition of modernity within the national space and argues that the diasporic, double consciousness performs an unsettled, lived tension between the past home and the present inhabitation