Superflat architecture : culture and dimensionality

Takashi Murakami’s notion of ‘superflat’ art has specific roots in the western-influenced woodblock prints of nineteenth-century Edo and contemporary applications in the popular culture media of manga and anime. As applied to architecture, ‘superflatness’ is suggestive of a sensibility that derives its aesthetic qualities from a mixture of Japanese traditions and western architectural lineages. More intriguingly, the idea of superflat architecture implies a way of perceiving space and dimensionality that is distinctive to contemporary Japanese architects.

Defending friends : Robert Codrington, George Sarawia and Edward Wogale

Friendship between nineteenth century missionary anthropologists and their converted cultural mentors was central to the gathering of cultural and linguistic information. This chapter traces the friendship between Anglican missionary/anthropologist, Robert Codrington, and brothers George Sarawia - first Melanesian priest - and Edward Wogale - deacon. Codrington's theological perspective on Melanesians and his close friendships with the pupils of the Melanesian Mission School at Norfolk Island allowed him to resist the increasing racialism of Atlantic science in the late nineteenth century and to challenge the evolutionist anthropology of the 1870s and 1880s. The chapter is based, in part, on a cache of letters from Wogale and Sarawia to Codrington written in Mota, the lingua franca of the Anglican Mission.

Tropes of friendship, undercurrents of fear : alternative emotions on the friendly frontier

This article examines a conciliation narrative at King George Sound in Western Australia that originated in the early nineteenth century during an era of European exploration when explorers had fleeting meetings with the Mineng. This friendship narrative has been continually re-presented and inscribed by settlers and later by historians without its imperial power dynamic being critiqued. This essay attempts a genealogy of this friendship motif  as well as exploring the destablising of this narrative by writers and community members. This essay also suggests ways of decolonising this narrative and searches for alternative emotions from this frontier.

The sermon in the British colonies

This article discusses sermons in the British colonies. It draws on existing studies to identify key themes and areas of investigation that may be fruitful for further study. It considers examples from the North American colonies, from 1688 until independence, and from India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Cape Colony in the nineteenth century. It then presents a case study of the sermon in early colonial Australia.

Experiencing turbulence: Asia in the Australian imaginary

Over the last century and a half the competing merits of withdrawal from and connection to Asia-and the related vocabularies of separation and engagement-have been defining themes in Australian history. Experiencing Turbulence brings together a selection of publications on Australian representation of Asia, published in various journals and books in the last ten years that follow the publication of Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850 to 1939. Collectively they address key themes in the Australian response to Asia: survivalist anxieties, climate and race, population and immigration, empty Australia, gender and bush mythologies, and regional Identities. These essays reveal the central, often constitutive role that Asia has played in the formation of ideas of nation and identity in Australia from the late nineteenth century to the present. The collection underlines the often unpredictable character of engagement and the fluid nature of fear and fascination, proximity and distance in the Australia-Asia relationship. With the recent publication of a government White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century there is a new determination to persuade Australians that "rising Asia," turbulent though it may be, is an opportunity for Australia more than it is a threat.

The importance and significance of heritage conservation of ex-tin mining landscape in Perak, the Abode of Grace

The thematic history of tin mining in Perak reveals the evolution of tin production, technology, infrastructure, transportation, social and the state economic development. The mining expansion that spread from Larut district to Kinta at the end of nineteenth century has distinctively impact on it's landscape. The surviving evidences that spread over Kinta demonstrates the importance and significance of conservation of ex-tin mining places. These surviving evidences are testimony of the past history and legacy for the present and future generations.

Sex in Japan's globalization, 1870-1930: prostitutes, emigration and nation building

Based on archival research undertaken in Japan and Britain, Mihalopoulos offers a new perspective on the relations between gender hierarchies and the political economy in a newly modernized Japan. The industrialization of Japan in the late nineteenth century coincided with attempts to establish new trade links abroad. The peasant class were sent overseas as ‘free labourers’ in a state-sponsored programme that also sought to maintain traditional codes of behaviour and morally acceptable forms of work. This study examines the particular impact of these restrictions on Japanese prostitutes abroad and reveals how the freedom offered to the poor by the state was limited and highly selective.

The digital pillory: media shaming of 'ordinary' people for minor crimes

This paper discusses the intensified role of the media in shaming ‘ordinary' people when they commit minor offences. We argue that shaming is a powerful cultural practice assumed by the news media in western societies after it was all but phased out as a formal punishment imposed by the judiciary during the early nineteenth century. While shaming is no longer a physically brutal practice, we reconceptualize the idea of a ‘lasting mark of shame' at the hands of the media in the digital age. We argue that this form of shaming should be considered through a lens of media power to highlight its symbolic and disciplinary dimensions. We also discuss the role new and traditional media forms play in shaming alongside formal punishments imposed by the judiciary. While ‘ordinary' people armed with digital tools increase the degree of disciplinary surveillance in wider social space, traditional news media continue to play a particularly powerful role in shaming because of their symbolic power to contextualize information generated in social and new media circles and their privileged position to other fields of power.

Constructing girlhood through the periodical press, 1850-1915

Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

China in a book: Victorian representations of the 'celestial kingdom' in William Dalton’s 'The wolf boy of China'

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel.
Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.

Jocoserious ‘ignorance shifting’ or ‘aestho-psycho-eugenics’?: interrogating Joseph Furphy’s Bulletin ‘apprenticeship'

Annotating Joseph Furphy’s first publication for the Bulletin raises some intriguing questions: to what extent was Furphy the product of the Bulletin writing academy, the late nineteenth century equivalent of a writing course, or to what extent was his talent sui generis? I intend to put this question to an extreme test, by reading closely his first published contribution to the Bulletin in 1889, ‘The Mythical Sundowner’.