Colonial Identity Research Articles

Colonial Identities of United States Army Commissioned Officers: The Negotiation of Class and Rank at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins, Oregon, 1856–1866

During the 19th century the American West played host to the colonial expansion of the United States. This period saw an attempt by the federal government to balance the westward expansion of White settlement spurred, in part, by ideas of Manifest Destiny, with what was then believed to be a humane solution to the “Indian problem.” What resulted from these attempts was the reservation system, where native peoples were relocated to reservations to be kept separate from White settlement and guarded by a system of U.S. Army forts. These forts became liminal environments in which the army operated both as the oppressors and protectors of indigenous peoples and lifeways, and also as stages for the display and transmission of European American ideas of social class and personal identity. Commissioned officers at these posts played an important role as actors in the drama of colonial westward expansion, holding identities as both frontiersmen and as bastions of 19th-century American sociocultural norms of social inequality and their expression through material culture. This article examines the material expressions of class represented by artifact assemblages recovered from six commissioned officers’ houses at Fort Yamhill and Fort Hoskins. The artifact assemblages from these posts suggest that these army officers not only brought the sociocultural norms of materialism and conspicuous consumption with them to the frontiers, but that they were also highly competitive individuals who were interested in displaying and affirming their identities as colonizers and as members of the sociocultural elite.

La narrazione dei corpi nell’edificazione “eurocentrica-androcentrica” coloniale: terra femminilizzata, reificazione e subalternità

In this essay the aim will be to reflect on the connection between colonization and feminization of the conquered territory, considering that in the asymmetric scheme of patriarchal domination, the territory or nation includes and incorporates gender, and gender is the sexual center of recognition in the construction of territorial and colonial identities. The analysis will refer to the intersections between sex and race, fundamental elements in the dichotomous domination-oppression mechanism, which is very strong in the colonial conquest phase. Colonialism emerges, therefore, as a masculine and phallocentric dimension, in which the female body becomes the center of production of the sexualization of the body inscribed within a social and public racial reproductive process. Feminism, especially the postcolonial theoretical horizon, has reflected on the connection of colonialism with racism and sexism, as elements aimed at a process of othering the 'other world' with a connotation of permanence. In this perspective, the categorization of the Third World woman – as a sexually oppressed woman – is interpreted in a post-modern key of colonizing misogyny that has influences in today's society, and this conceptualization is linked to the opposition between western feminism and non-western feminism.

Introduction to Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes: A Collection of Transhistorical Studies

The papers in this special issue arise from the Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes session held at the 2017 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada. That session focused on the role of status and power in shaping colonial interactions and identities throughout the Andes during the fifteenth to seventeenth century CE. The papers in this issue examine how Inka and colonial period individuals (indigenous, African, Iberian, mestizo, etc.) selectively incorporated or rejected Imperial goods, and how differing levels of access to these goods may have influenced social status, health, and relationships with imperial actors.

First World War veterans and the state in the French and British Caribbean, 1919-1939

ABSTRACTAs demobilization gathered pace in 1919, the colonial authorities in both the British and French Caribbean fretted about the reintegration of thousands of men imagined to have been rendered volatile and dangerous by their time overseas. By 1939, however, the situation appeared quite different. Veterans in the British islands were restive and dissatisfied, while their French Caribbean counterparts were comparatively settled. This contrast was not simply about disparities in state generosity. Rather, the article explores how differing conceptions of the relationship between military service and citizenship shaped the actions of the colonial and imperial governments. Where the governments of Martinique and Guadeloupe helped to foster the growth of veterans’ associations which were then incorporated into local policy-making and, more broadly, an imperial network of state aid, the British colonial authorities sought to suppress veteran identity in pursuit of the ultimately unachievable ideal of a final settlement with the demobilized men. An analysis of the interwar veterans’ movements therefore opens up questions of colonial governance, citizenship, and identity.

Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne

Reviewed by: Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics by Heather Milne Angela Hume POETRY MATTERS: NEOLIBERALISM, AFFECT, AND THE POSTHUMAN IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY NORTH AMERICAN FEMINIST POETICS, by Heather Milne. Contemporary North American Poetry Series. University of Iowa Press, 2018. 278 pp. $80.00 paper; $80.00 ebook. Heather Milne’s Poetry Matters: Neoliberalism, Affect, and the Posthuman in Twenty-First Century North American Feminist Poetics argues that “experimental and innovative” poetry by Canadian and American women published in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century takes seriously the potential for poetry to be a site for political engagement and protest (p. 11). Milne suggests that conceptual or procedural, appropriative, erasure, collage, and documentary poems all perform “complex forms [End Page 471] of [political] critique” through their forms and composition strategies (p. 5).What distinguishes this body of work in particular, Milne argues, is its investment in matter and mattering; innovative feminist poetry foregrounds the body and material environments often through the materiality of language itself. Milne makes the point that while a Canadian feminist poetics movement emerged in the 1980s, Canadian women’s poetry of recent decades has been largely overlooked by critics. Today, both Canadian and American women’s experimental poetry “circulate and function transnationally” (p. 27). Canadian poetry in particular has committed itself to tracking global capitalism’s transnational flows of information, commerce, and migration and, moreover, “reject[s] the nation as a colonial construct” (p. 26). Thus, Canadian and American women’s poetry should be read together. This poetry requires a transnational literary critical approach, Milne argues, but one that accounts for how the countries “have distinct histories of settlement, colonization, and independence as well as distinct systems of governance and democracy” (p. 198). Throughout the book, Milne models what such an approach to feminist poetics might look like. Notably, she decenters poetry by United States authors from the outset; five of the six poets Milne discusses in part one are Canadian. Milne’s chapters provide detailed, careful readings of “experimental” texts. By attending closely and facilitating greater access to contemporary forms of poetry by women that have been marginalized in the United States especially, Milne extends the literary critical tradition of scholars such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Lynn Keller, who have taken seriously the project of reading twentieth and twenty-first century women’s poetry for its form, as opposed to reading for its content exclusively. Throughout Poetry Matters, Milne applies language and concepts from an eclectic group of contemporary theorists—including Rosi Braidotti, Jodi Dean, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Timothy Morton, Ann Cvetkovich, and Sara Ahmed—to illuminate the poetry. But some of her sharpest insights are those she arrives at through her own skillful close readings. For example, in a discussion of Margaret Christakos’s What Stirs (2008), which critiques the fetishization of the maternal body, Milne shows how the poet uses fragmentation, repetition, and wordplay to convey the ways in which primary attachments, especially the attachment to the mother’s breast, condition “a dialectic of gratification and frustration” that also characterizes the “insatiable drives” of contemporary capitalism (p. 57). Poetry Matters is organized into three two-chapter sections. This structure adds to the book’s accessibility and navigability. In part one, “Economies of the Flesh and Word: Biopolitics and Writing the (Posthuman) Body in Late Capitalism,” Milne explores how Jennifer Scappettone, Larissa Lai and Rita Wong, Margaret Christakos, Nikki Reimer, and Rachel Zolf use [End Page 472] “strategic embodiment” to critique neoliberal, biopolitical, and late capitalism (Milne invokes all three) (p. 47). Part two, “Poetic Matterings: New Materialist and Posthuman Feminist Ecopoetics,” considers how the New Materialist “ecopoetics” of Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Rita Wong, and Evelyn Reilly decenter human agency in the process of reimagining the material world. Part three, “Geopolitics, Nationhood, Poetry,” reads Juliana Spahr’s, Claudia Rankine’s, and Dionne Brand’s post-9/11, post-United States-invasion-of-Iraq poetry. Then it turns to poems by Rachel Zolf, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka, which challenge national and colonial discourses and identities. All of the poets in this part, Milne argues, mobilize documentary...

The Year in Conferences—2018

The Year in Conferences—2018 Rachel Linnea Brown (bio), Ryan Charlton (bio), Amy Huang (bio), Joshua Tuttle (bio), Susanna Compton Underland, Senior Advisor (bio), Marla Anzalone (bio), Elizabeth Boyle (bio), Rachael Dewitt (bio), Jenessa Kenway (bio), Regina Yoong (bio), Kacie Fodness, Senior Advisor (bio), Brittany Biesiada (bio), Hannah Champion (bio), Jane Fleming (bio), Seth Spencer (bio), Regina Yoong Yui Jien (bio), and Gia Coturri Sorenson, Senior Advisor (bio) The "Year in Conferences" (YiC) accelerates the circulation of ideas among scholars by covering the field's major conferences. Graduate students from across the country collaboratively author an article that appears annually in ESQ's first issue. Now in its tenth year, this report includes C19, ALA, and SSAWW. c19, 22–25 march 2018, albuquerque, new mexico The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19) held its biennial conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March 2018. The conference theme was "Climate," an especially prescient designation given that inclement weather thwarted many participants' travel plans. But conversations at C19 were not limited to the weather: panels and roundtables undertook such wide-ranging concerns as ecology and science; the Anthropocene and literary periodization; and race, gender, and the body politic. Many critical threads led to political conclusions as the current cultural climate motivated speakers to consider how nineteenth-century legacies might illuminate our present moment. This frame prompted self-reflective practices: In what ways does our field need to change? How can we accommodate more voices, encourage interdisciplinarity, and decenter the United States in our understanding of what we mean by American? [End Page 109] At the plenary event, "C19 Now!," Jenni Monet spoke about Indigenous activism at Standing Rock and her experiences as a journalist covering "Indian Country." Monet stressed her dual identity as an expert and an activist. In many ways, expertise and activism were C19's twin discourses, whether panelists approached climate through the archive, the body, materiality, form, space, race, or performance. Program link: http://programme.exordo.com/c19conference2018/ reconsidering nineteenth-century archives and histories Panelists critically interrogated physical, temporal, and linguistic boundaries associated with diverse histories and archives. In doing so, they blurred conventional categorizations and offered new models for assessing nineteenth-century expertise and activism. Roundtable presentations for "Beyond Early, Beyond American" addressed temporal distinctions by questioning the meanings of early and American and exploring what story such literary periodization tells. Hester Blum considered the Anthropocene and noted possible start dates of 1610, the Industrial Revolution, and 1945. Blum pointed out that in the context of deep or geologic time, these dates do not register as far apart. Similarly, the terms Early Americanist and nineteenth centuryist become less distinct within this scope. But if everything is about deep time, she concluded, do we then lose particular political contexts? Marissa López similarly questioned the connotations of early American, pointing out that early resonates only if by America we mean United States. This formulation, she argued, perpetuates a colonial identity and national framework. Phillip Round specifically explored Mississippian contexts for this field of study, thus embodying [End Page 110] López's aim for early American scholars to decenter colonial narratives. Round contended that by engaging archaeological material and visualizing America in new ways—for example, with a map of Missouri River drainage—we can understand how Indigenous peoples have shaped global history. Sandra Gustafson considered a different global history through the legacy of Republican thought in texts such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). Extending the examination of early and American, several panelists considered how this debate intersects with issues of narration, genre, and discipline. Michelle Burnham employed a model from Nicholas Paige's Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (2011) to question the patterns we assume exist in early American literature. Patterns of genre formulation, for example, are based on our knowledge of what is to come rather than what might exist beneath the surface of earlier eras, Burnham asserted. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers described how poetry and politics intersect for her scholarship and pedagogy. Though some students resist discussions about slavery in creative writing courses, she...

Desiccation Resistance and Micro-Climate Adaptation: Cuticular Hydrocarbon Signatures of Different Argentine Ant Supercolonies Across California

Cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs), the dominant fraction of the insects' epicuticle and the primary barrier to desiccation, form the basis for a wide range of chemical signaling systems. In eusocial insects, CHCs are key mediators of nestmate recognition, and colony identity appears to be maintained through a uniform CHC profile. In the unicolonial Argentine ant Linepithema humile, an unparalleled invasive expansion has led to vast supercolonies whose nestmates can still recognize each other across thousands of miles. CHC profiles are expected to display considerable variation as they adapt to fundamentally differing environmental conditions across the Argentine ant's expanded range, yet this variation would largely conflict with the vastlyextended nestmate recognition based on CHC uniformity. To shed light on these seemingly contradictory selective pressures, we attempt to decipher which CHC classes enable adaptation to such a wide array of environmental conditions and contrast them with the overall CHC profile uniformity postulated to maintain nestmate recognition. n-Alkanes and n-alkenes showed the largest adaptability to environmental conditions most closely associated with desiccation, pointing at their function for water-proofing. Trimethyl alkanes, on the other hand, were reduced in environments associated with higher desiccation stress. However, CHC patterns correlated with environmental conditions were largely overriden when taking overall CHC variation across the expanded range of L. humile into account, resulting in conserved colony-specific CHC signatures. This delivers intriguing insights into the hierarchy of CHC functionality integrating both adaptation to a wide array of different climatic conditions and the maintenance of a universally accepted chemical profile.

Colonial Race, Identity, and Resettlement - To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America. Edited by Mónica Díaz. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 296. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Colonial Race, Identity, and Resettlement - To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America. Edited by Mónica Díaz. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Pp. 296. $95.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.

Fictions of Liberation: A Paradoxical “Palimpsest of Colonial Identity” of Chŏng (Jeong)

Within Asian/American feminist theology, this article addresses specifically Korean/American feminist theological discourse of chŏng. I argue that by employing racialized signifiers such as han and chŏng, we are marginalizing ourselves. Such discursive identity markers of Korean/American feminist theologians have been constructed by utilizing colonialist historiography and methods that the Japanese first used in their efforts to justify colonial rule of Korea (1910–1945), thereby reproducing and reinforcing the racialized discourses of the colonial era. This author implores Asian/American pastoral theologians to engage in a more critical, complex analysis of power during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). I argue for the importance of historiographical analysis as being central to understanding how Korean/American theological identity came to embrace the cultural signifiers it does. Our task, then, as critical feminist liberation theologians is to engage in ongoing critiques and analyses of patri-kyriarchal power in colonialism(s) and imperialism(s) in order to dismantle its structures and influences.

Mapping Senegambia: Legacies of Ambition and the Failure of an Early Colonial Venture

Britain's short-lived Province of Senegambia (1765–1783) was part of an expansion effort in the region driven by a desire to secure access to the gum trade of the Senegal river. Drawing on Britain's knowledge of France's dealings with the Upper-Senegal region it was complemented by the adoption of French cartography, edited to illustrate a new colonial identity. It is argued here that there was an additional motive of developing closer contact with the African interior. This pre-dates the establishment of the African Association in 1788 and its subsequent and better-known expeditions to the River Niger. In contrast to the French, however, the British struggled to engage with the region. This paper approaches the topic from a perspective of cartographic history. It highlights Thomas Jeffery's map of ‘Senegambia Proper’ (1768), copied from Jean Baptiste Bourguingnon d'Anville's ’Carte Particuliére de la Côte Occidentale de l'Afrique' (1751) and illustrative of several obstacles facing both British map-making and colonial expansion in mid-eighteenth century Africa. It is argued that the later enquiries and map-making activities of the African Association, which were hoped to lead to the colonisation of West Africa, built upon these experiences of failure in Senegambia.

Racializing Religion: Constructing Colonial Identities in the Syrian Provinces in the Nineteenth Century

AbstractIn recent decades, international events and incisive critical voices have catapulted the concepts of race and religion to the foreground of International Relations research. In particular, scholars have sought to recover the racialized and imperial beginnings of IR as an academic discipline in the early-20th century. This article contributes to this growing body of work by analyzing both race and religion as conceptual tools of scientific imperial administration—tools that in the 19th century classified and divided the global periphery along a continuum of civilizational and developmental difference. The article then applies this framework to the case of French, and more broadly, European, relations with populations in the Ottoman Empire, particularly within the Syrian Provinces. As described throughout this article and the case study, the Europeans used the language of race to contribute to religious hierarchies in the Syrian provinces in the mid- and late-19th century, having a lasting effect on discussions of religion in IR and international politics.

Contesting conservation-planning: insights from Ireland since independence

ABSTRACTWhere conservation evolves in contentious political contexts, it can be framed by competing priorities reflecting collective remembering, cultural politics and identities intertwined with the symbolic representation of the built environment. Ireland provides a unique lens to examine these themes as the only western European country to experience colonial domination, which forms a key aspect of the context for the evolution of conservation policy and practice. The aim of this paper is to chart the shifting representations of built heritage in Ireland, and their relevance in the emergence of conservation and heritage policy, set in the context of broader social, political and economic change over time. This is achieved, firstly, by a review of secondary source material to identify key events, eras and trends. Discourses of heritage are then examined in debates of the Oireachtas (the Irish legislature), identifying tensions around the emergence of conservation in a historic environment largely associated with colonial power and identity. These shifting discourses are then related to policy evolution, particularly the late adoption of a legislative framework for conservation (in 1999). Finally, conclusions are developed to identify wider lessons from the production of urban conservation priorities in the context of contested heritage.

Cloth as a membrane of the imagination in the artwork of Mary Sibande

This paper brings future-orientated theories of becoming to bear on the work of artist Mary Sibande. Contemporary social theory is increasingly interested in how human life and matter join in vital forms of assemblage. In relation to Sibande’s work in particular, I explore her sculptures and images in terms of the interplay between body, skin, cloth and the world. I suggest that these interminglings enable forms of transfer between inner longings and outer forms of actualisation, between experience and imaginative reach. Using cloth as a technology of the imagination, Sibande embodies critique and possibility in her work. The paper shows how the artist strives for a form of world-making that is not “a simple reaction to social and political conditions” (Eyene 2013) but a performative enactment of the possibility of living and imagining outside the constraints placed on black bodies under apartheid or narrow foreclosed colonial identities. The paper draws on theories of futurity and possibility, arguments about assemblages formed between matter and persons, and on notions of technologies of the imagination that conjoin matter and human skill.

Frequency and antimicrobial susceptibility of Staphylococcus pseudintermedius in dogs with otitis externa

ABSTRACT: Infections by Staphyloccocus pseudintermedius in the skin of dogs have been object of studies, since such microorganisms often present multiple resistance to antibiotics. This study aimed to identify and evaluate the antimicrobial susceptibility of Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (SP) strains isolated from dogs with otitis. Swabs from both ears of 52 dogs with otitis (n=104) were included. Bacteria were cultured using Muller-Hinton agar (supplemented with 5% equine blood and incubated at 37°C for 24 to 48 hours. All colonies underwent biochemical evaluation for identification of staphylococci. The identity of colonies as SP was confirmed by polymerase chain reaction. The antimicrobial susceptibility of SP strains was evaluated by disk diffusion. The presence of the gene mecA was evaluated in all SP isolates by PCR. Forty-four SP strains were isolated from swabs of 31 dogs (31/52, 59.6%). Seventy-five percent of the strains were susceptible to cephalexin and 93.2% to amoxicillin plus clavulanic acid. Less than 23% of the strains were susceptible to penicillin. For non-beta-lactam antimicrobials, 63.6% of the strains showed resistance to sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim, 61.4% to tetracycline, and 38, 64% to enrofloxacin. Aminoglycoside resistance rate was 27.3% for gentamicin. Resistance to oxacillin in vitro was detected in 13 of the 44 strains (29, 55%). A total of 12 strains (27.3%) were positive for mecA gene and five of these 12 strains were susceptible to in vitro oxacillin. Twenty-six (59, 1%) strains were resistant to three or more classes of antimicrobials, and classified as multi resistant. Our results showed high frequency of SP and multi resistant isolates to antimicrobials commonly used in veterinary.

‘Walking Backwards into the Future’: Music, Museum Culture, and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition (1889–1890)

In 1889–90 the city of Dunedin staged the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the colony instigated by the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi by indigenous Māori and representatives of the British Crown. In acknowledgement of the bicultural perspective encoded in the Treaty, this article takes a tour of the musical artefacts of the exhibition, including both Māori and Western instruments and musical works, to reveal how colonial identity was forged through museum culture: whereas Māori instruments (taonga puoro) were curated by settlers and exhibited as the curiosities of a supposedly dying race, Western musical instruments and practices were beholden both to narratives of progress and to the rhetoric of the imaginary museum of musical works, inherited from Britain. However, while the framing of music at the exhibition often contradicted Māori perspectives, a closer look at the exhibition of music in New Zealand in 1889–90 reveals unexpected resonance between the two Treaty parties. Moreover, by tracing the afterlife of one of the Māori instruments displayed at the exhibition, this article reveals how Māori have more recently helped to reshape museum culture itself.

The pervasiveness of colonial identity in Lucie Cousturier’s travels to West Africa

ABSTRACTThis article examines the travel narratives by the French painter and writer Lucie Cousturier, Mes inconnus chez eux: Mon amie Fatou, citadine and Mes inconnus chez eux: Mon ami Soumaré, laptot (1925). Critical scholarship has recently excavated Cousturier’s travelogues from oblivion, but it has neglected to connect her writing to discourses on the imaginary female figure termed the coloniale, a model citizen of French Empire. I argue that Cousturier exposes the tensions within imperial ideology through direct criticism of the feminine role of a coloniale that she was expected to inhabit. Focusing on the contradictions of her status as a white woman with an official mission in the colonies, Cousturier depicts a traveller coming to a gradual but inevitable awareness of her own whiteness. This realisation leads Cousturier to represent herself as a bad “coloniale” throughout the narratives and subvert the power dynamics underpinning interracial relations in French West Africa.

Mad Colonial Narrators in Anglo-Irish Literature: Lemuel Gulliver and Freddie Montgomery

The following discussion highlights parallels between the narrators, Lemuel Gulliver of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Freddie Montgomery of John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989). The argument calls on post-colonialism, Foucaultian theory of “will to truth” and the narrative theory of Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan to emphasize similarities in the rendering of mental degeneration in Gulliver and Montgomery. The colonial-induced mental breakdown of both narrators can be said to unravel, not so much in the tale these narrators think they are relating, but instead between the lines of their stories in narratives which continually focus attention back onto themselves. Despite the 260 years separating these works, the madness of both Gulliver and Montgomery can be interpreted as a reluctance on their respective parts to shed established colonial identities once the colonial stage has receded.

Exploring the Impact of Captions on the Construction and Presentation of Colonial Latin American Cultural Identities

Spanish Colonialism in Latin America from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century constitutes a time period during which the interactions between numerous cultural groups, both indigenous and colonial, resulted in the creation of distinct regional, cultural, and individual identities and artistic practices. The proposed paper explores the role and importance of Spanish captions in paintings created in the colonial viceregal centers of New Spain (today Mexico) and Peru through a discussion of two maps from the Relaciones Geográficas (indigenous made maps), three colonial portraits, and two casta paintings (painted records of racial mixes). These paintings, spanning from the end of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, all feature written segments directly on their surface to enable the effective communication and portrayal of the chosen colonial subject to the viewer. Being created in such a diverse and unstable cultural climates each paintings’ capacity for success in communication and representation was ensured through the use of captions. Thus, the paper approaches the study of captions through a close consideration of the discussed captions’ messages, their intended perception, and main audience. My paper will discuss the instrumental role of the Spanish captions when visualizing and creating distinct colonial identities. The caption served as a means of literally spelling out the importance of the colonial settings, their distinct social systems and identities reinforcing their validity vis-à-vis the imposed Euro-Spanish ideal.

Geographic vocal variation and perceptual discrimination abilities in male Australian sea lions.

Vocal characteristics can vary among and within populations. In species with geographic variation in the structure of vocalizations, individuals may have the ability to discriminate between calls from local and non-local individuals. The ability to distinguish differences in acoustic signals is likely to have a significant influence on the outcome of social interactions between individuals, including potentially mate selection and breeding success. Pinnipeds (seals, fur seals, sea lions and walruses) are highly vocal yet the Australian sea lion (Neophoca cinerea) is the only eared seal known to show geographic vocal variation in male barks. Barks are produced in many social interactions and encode sufficient information for both individual and colony identity to be discriminable. Yet until now, whether males could themselves discriminate these bark differences was unclear. We performed playback experiments in four breeding colonies to investigate whether males can discriminate local from non-local barks. Overall, males responded more strongly to barks from their own colony compared to barks from other colonies regardless of whether those other colonies were close or distant. Competition for females is high in Australian sea lions, but mating periods are asynchronous across colonies. The ability to correctly assess whether a male is from the same colony, thus representing a potential competitor for mates, or merely a visitor from elsewhere, may influence how males interact with others. Given the high cost of fighting, the ability to discern competitors may influence the nature of male-male interactions and ultimately influence how they allocate reproductive effort.

‘The South African “Children of the Mist”’: The Bushman, the Highlander and the Making of Colonial Identities in Thomas Pringle's South African Poetry, 1825–1834

This article examines the circulation of the first anglophone poem to be written in the voice of an indigenous southern African, Thomas Pringle's ‘Song of the Wild Bushman’, in the newspapers and periodicals of Britain and the Cape Colony in the years preceding the abolition of slavery in the colonies in 1834. In both the Cape and Britain, Pringle positioned the poem in dialogue with contemporaneous travel writing in order to reflect critically upon the relationship between colonists and indigenous peoples in Britain's fledgling settler colonies. By placing the poem in the newspapers and popular periodicals of both Britain and the Cape, Pringle was able to disseminate to a range of colonial and metropolitan readers an image of a trans-imperial Britishness that could accommodate a range of national and colonial identities, including those of the European and indigenous subjects of the expanding British Empire.