Seminar Series: Abstract

Terra Australis to Oceania: Racial Geography in the 'Fifth Part of the World'
Dr Bronwen Douglas - PAH

This paper is a history of racial geography in the 'fifth part of the world': an extended region embracing what are now Australia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Island Southeast Asia. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity, the Renaissance, the early modern era, and the Enlightenment to focus on the heyday of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This vast space has long been settled by modern human beings who named themselves and the places they dwelt in and knew of. I do not directly address that important theme but conclude with a brief reflection on ironic indigenous appropriations of racialist colonial terms as anticolonial strategies and postcolonial markers of identity. The core of the paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their contested, nebulous racial classifications of people as Malay, Papuan, Oceanic Negro, Aborigine, Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian. Congealed by colonialism, racial categories and hierarchies haunted the novel, often anomalous political borders that were negotiated by colonial states, inherited by postcolonial ones, and further reinscribed in the partitioning of academic research. I locate the formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge at the interface of metropolitan discourses and often fraught regional experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the profoundly ethnocentric but universalized deductions of savants, cartographers, and humanitarians in the metropoles; and, on the other hand, the uneasily cosmopolitan empirical logic of navigators, naturalists, missionaries, and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency, cartographies, and nomenclatures