This paper takes up the concept of the “afterlife” in order to reflect upon the logics of exclusion, belatedness, and succession that have characterized key interventions in transpacific American studies. That transpacific American studies might be thought of as “belated” is less to do with the actual chronology of the field than with the way that even early, groundbreaking scholars situated themselves in the field on the one hand and, on the other, the way that others have engaged and, at times, celebrated the fantasized atemporality of the region itself.Footnote ¹ For Rob Wilson in the year 2000, the American Pacific was excluded from the “Eurocentric and/or ‘exceptionalist’” models that governed American studies.Footnote ² Paul Lyons (2006) identified ignore-ance “as a constitutive component of American studies work in Oceania,” a concept that resurfaces in Mari Yoshihara's Editor's Note to Lyons's and Ty P. Kawika Tengan's 2015 special issue of American Quarterly on Pacific Currents in which Yoshihara proposes that the absence implied by the notion of a Pacific “Rim” is perpetuated by the neglect of the region in Americanist scholarship.Footnote ³ Yunte Huang (after James Clifford) returned to the imagined Pacific's premodernity in order to celebrate “aprogressive narratives” as a form of poetic resistance to imperialist and nationalist discourses of the transpacific, even as Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Sacarano's Colonial Crucible, among others, made a strong case for US imperial sites in the Pacific as laboratories for new forms of social and political experimentation.Footnote ⁴ In his introduction to Pacific Triangles, the 2014 special issue of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, Paul Giles remarked on the propensity of Australasian Americanists to see “all the really serious action … [as] happening elsewhere.” Most recently, Donald Pease and Yuan Shu have framed Turning toward the Transpacific with an account of the Obama administration's response to the “shift in the globe's strategic and economic epicenter from the North Atlantic to the Western Pacific.” They thus situate the essays in the volume within a narrative in which the transpacific succeeds the transatlantic. The “Atlantic world,” they argue, “has occupied a privileged but settled space in constructing US history and narratives from the country's founding to the end of the so-called American century.”Footnote ⁵

Concurrently with these explorations of the transpacific, influential works of American studies scholarship have also coalesced around the question of “afterlife.” Saidiya Hartman, for instance, declares, “This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances … premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”Footnote ⁶ Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents enters this conversation by exploring the emergence of racialized indentured labour in the Caribbean and the United States as a remainder of enslavement. Lowe argues that coerced labour endured beyond emancipation not in spite of dominant liberal narratives that freedom has overcome slavery, but precisely because of the necessary “intimacy” between genocide, enslavement, and indenture on the one hand and, on the other, liberal, individual, conceptions of freedom. What is missing from these recent scholarly and popular conceptions of Atlantic slavery and its aftermath/legacies in American studies is, we suggest, Australia and the Pacific world. The history, experience, and afterlife of convict transportation, the coerced indenture of Pacific labourers, and the long history of unfree conditions under which Indigenous Australians laboured and lived, are often no more than a footnote – an afterthought – as in Lowe's book. Indigenous labour in Australia appears only as a footnote in The Intimacy of Four Continents in Lowe's claim that “settler colonialism was premised on displacing the native indigenous populations to appropriate their lands, rather than extracting surplus value from their labor.”Footnote ⁷ Here, Lowe follows Patrick Wolfe's well-known dictum that the settler colonial state aimed to expropriate the labour of African slaves while aiming to expropriate the land of native peoples.Footnote ⁸ But Lowe has assumed, as have some of Wolfe's critics, that the state was successful and that the labour of Australian and Pacific Indigenous and Islander people is irrelevant – or unrelated – to American studies.Footnote ⁹ This omission is not unique to the scholarship described above, as Damon Salesa has pointed out in his elegant summary of the ways Antipodean scholars do – and must – engage with Atlantic scholarship while Atlanticists can all but ignore the work of native histories and histories of colonialism.Footnote ¹⁰ With some still quite new, notable exceptions, scholars of American studies have not yet engaged with this aspect of Pacific history much, if at all.Footnote ¹¹ All this is not to say that there have been no transnational considerations of labour in Australia and the Pacific; rather that this history does not seem to have been taken up within American studies. We perceive a gap between those American and Americanist scholars who have considered the afterlife of slavery in the US on the one hand and, on the other, those based in Oceania who have taken up the history of labour in that region.

A notable antidote to the persistence of the transatlantic paradigm is Paul Giles’s Antipodean America, on which we build here. In this substantial study, Giles explores the complex negotiations that enabled both the US and Australia to maintain in an uneasy equilibrium the internal divisions resulting from their shared position as simultaneously colonized and colonizing societies. Giles is interested, as we are, in the ways in which the resulting “cultural formations overlap and interfere with each other in surprising ways.”Footnote ¹² But where Giles’s comparative method is dominated by spatial metaphors throughout, we seek to add to his cartography the temporal mode of “belatedness” as a lens through which to consider transnational American studies. For still others, Australia is not just not belated, but also sometimes at the forefront in the history of ideas, or constituted by relations quite distinct from the supposed diffusion of knowledge from the North Atlantic.Footnote ¹³

What does it mean, then, to pay attention to the Pacific as a space in which events (both historical and scholarly) purportedly happen later – follow after – without reproducing the fetishized backwardness that has characterized so many representations of the region?Footnote ¹⁴ We argue that the coerced recruitment and indenture of Pacific Islanders to work on Queensland sugar plantations in the latter half of the nineteenth century as well as unwaged Aboriginal labour in the first half of the twentieth have not yet received sufficient attention in transnational American studies scholarship. We demonstrate the ways in which progressive white writers and Indigenous and Pacific Islander-descended writers described such practices as extensions of Atlantic slavery. We do not seek to draw direct parallels between indenture and slavery; rather, we are interested in the ways in which tropes associated with slavery circulated in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary and visual cultures.Footnote ¹⁵ We propose that attention to slavery's rhetorical and visual afterlives in Australia and the Pacific also permits a clear view of the emphasis that contemporary critics of coercive labour practices put on the “life after” enslavement. Such critics included, of course, Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Pacific themselves. In doing so we seek to “unsettle” “settled” histories (such as that of Pease and Shu's Atlantic world) in ways that reflect Dana Luciano's call to use temporal unsettlement to “move rather than mourn the state of things.”Footnote ¹⁶ We note, too, Vincent Brown's critique of “slavery's afterlife” as one in which “dispossession [is] the basis of black self-definition.”Footnote ¹⁷ Taking heed of such injunctions, we speculate that the logic of belatedness might be veiling what was, for those who laboured in unfree conditions, a tentative logic of hope, or at least one of futurity.

“Afterlife” is itself an invention or fiction of time and place, as Susan Gillman emphasizes. “The history of slavery,” she writes, “is of course neither new nor unknown, its afterlives repeatedly rediscovered, and erased, at particular moments in time.”Footnote ¹⁸ Here we seek to “rediscover” the role played by Australia in prolonging the afterlife of enslavement, explore how this role might be illuminated and explicated by American studies scholarship, and demonstrate why it might acquire particular urgency in our present political and scholarly moment. With the impetus provided by the Black Lives Matter movement, there has emerged a much stronger popular sense of the continuities of slavery in modern forms of power, including policing, punishment, and, especially, incarceration. Some of this popular sentiment about historical continuity has drawn on scholarship such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (2010), and has appeared on screen most recently in Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th. It has become urgent once again to understand slavery and its legacies, hence also the upsurge in numbers of feature films and television series on the topics, not least a remake of the iconic popular miniseries of Atlantic slavery and enslavement in the US South, Roots.

Using Mark Twain's preoccupation with “clock time” during the Pacific leg of his 1897 travelogue Following the Equator: A Journey around the World, as a frame for our discussion we lay out a speculative genealogy of temporal and other tropes associated with New World slavery to demonstrate how such images were taken up in the Pacific context to critique coercive labour practices there. We note that ideas about the relationship between labour and time structured American responses to Australian novels such as Katharine Susannah Prichard's 1930 Coonardoo, which US readers took to describe latter-day slavery. Finally, we examine how Indigenous and Pacific Islander-descended Australians took up the discourse of slavery when, in the 1970s and beyond, they seized the opportunity to portray their experiences in novels and memoirs.

Historian Laurence Brown has calculated that “in the second half of the nineteenth century more than 100,000 islanders from the western Pacific were recruited as migrant labourers in these regions, with more than 80% concentrated in Queensland, Fiji and New Caledonia.” “The emergence of plantation production,” he goes on to argue, was directly fuelled by the collapse of North American cotton production.” Colloquially known as “blackbirding,” this labour trade was regularly denounced by missionaries and abolitionists as a form of enslavement. That “blackbirding” existed on a continuum with slavery, and indeed, in Twain's opinion was nothing short of a version of it, is the argument made in chapters 5 and 6 of Following the Equator. As Giles has noted, “Twain draws a clear parallel between Queensland and the American South, as he describes how ‘vessels fitted up like old-time slavers come here and carried off the natives to serve as laborers in the great Australian province’.”Footnote ¹⁹ In referring to the lands on which sugar was cultivated as “the Queensland plantations,” Twain used the designation reserved in the United States for agricultural holdings associated with antebellum southern slavery. Twain's choice of designation was not a sign of American solipsism, or at least was not simply such a sign, as within Australia, then and now, the word “plantation” has been used to refer largely to the sugar industry. In assigning this label to farms on which that specific crop was raised, which was the agricultural output associated most closely and often solely with the imported labourers from Pacific islands, Australians gave away their uneasiness regarding that which Twain argued was obvious and explicit: that those indentured labourers, or as he sardonically referred to them within quotation marks in his book, “recruits,” were slaves.

Twain layered implicit intertexts between his explicit observations, in order to echo and index narratives of slavery. In a repetition that recalls the abolitionist trope of the anguish demonstrated by enslaved mothers and fathers, he imagines the responses of recruits’ parents to the loss of their children to the labour trade: their violent defence of children at risk of being “carted into exile” and their subsequent sorrow and distress at the loss.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, his note on the sharks that lurk in the wake of recruiting vessels – in such prevalence that Queensland law (as quoted by Twain) explicitly states that any unwilling recruit should be set ashore by boat in order to avoid their depredations – recalls both the satirical “PETITION of the SHARKS of Africa” that surfaced in 1792 amidst calls to end the slave trade and the terroristic use of sharks by ships’ captains unearthed by Marcus Rediker's “human history” of the slave ship.Footnote ²¹

Yet in a crucial respect, that of the relation to time, indenture was not slavery. Enslavement was a world without end (at least on this earthly plane) and, as an inherited condition, one that was continued endlessly through reproduction. Indenture in theory, if not always in practice, had an end point. This relation to time is signified in Twain via an extended digression on the use that returned labourers made of the trappings of civilization with which they had been vested during their time on plantations, in particular the Waterbury watch: “The Waterbury, broken and dirty, finds its way to the trader, who gives a trifle for it; or the inside is taken out, the wheels strung on a thread and hung around the neck.”Footnote ²² This description is accompanied by two illustrations. The first, by F. M. Senior, appears on the same page, and depicts the returned recruit performing a kind of “cakewalk” in his adapted finery, distributing his largesse to the villagers who seem to be either emerging from their huts to witness his return or exclaiming over their spoils.Footnote ²³ The second, by architectural illustrator Francis Berkeley Smith, is placed uncaptioned at the conclusion of the chapter directly below a quotation from former missionary the Rev. William Gray's 1895 pamphlet The Kanaka; Or, How the Queensland Planters Get and Treat Their ——: “The bed-rock of this Traffic is that the life and liberty of a black man are of less value than those of a white man. And a Traffic that has grown out of ‘slave-hunting’ will certainly remain to the end not unlike its origin.”Footnote ²⁴ Situated thus, this image at first glance evokes both the abolitionist iconography of the slave as man and brother – the indirect gaze, the chain around his neck reminiscent of the slave collar – and classical renderings of statesmen in profile as in Roman coinage. There is a nobility to this visage altogether lacking from the Senior image that speaks to the labourer's humanity, and yet the iconography of collar and coin monetizes Gray's notion of the Islander's value in relation to that of the white man.Footnote ²⁵

But closer attention to the neckpiece renders this image altogether more emancipatory. The disassembling and rearrangement of the Waterbury watch may signify here both a quite literal rejection of “clock time” – a reclamation of the recruit's own time (and labour) – and the alienation of property – the right to do what he wants with the watch – which enslavers hoped to deny to the slave.Footnote ²⁶ By dismantling time, the returned recruit may imagine for himself a future. Reading Twain thus rounds out Lowe's four intimately linked continents into a global account of coercive labour trades that also allows a glimpse into the processes of future world making enacted by the subaltern subjects of this traffic.

Well into the twentieth century, the Pacific continued to serve as an echo for Americans, a place where, at its edges at least, labour practices now outlawed in the “New World” of the western hemisphere still flourished. In this, they were aided by humanitarians in London and elsewhere whose activism enlarged the category of slavery into “forced” labour, resulting in the 1930 Forced Labour Convention of the International Labour Organization (ILO). This work took decades, as organizations such as the London-based Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (ASAPS) brought worldwide attention to forms of labour coercion that gradually became regarded as slavery. Such attention included in the United States, where Australia was especially interesting given the links between the two nations, as settler colonies and comembers of a self-proclaimed small band of “white man's” countries.Footnote ²⁷ As historian Fiona Paisley has shown, activism such as that of ASAPS served to bring the plight of Aboriginal workers to attention in London, Europe, and even Australia itself.Footnote ²⁸ Horrific reports also made their way into American newspapers, no more so than in very late 1930 and well into 1931, when newspapers in cities and towns as widespread as Fort Myers, Florida and Oakland, California, Port Huron, Michigan and Vernon, Texas, picked up an Associated Press item out of far northern Australia. There, they reported, white Australian cattlemen were exploiting Aboriginal stockmen. The story ran under the title “Charges Slavery” and “Australians Accused of Enslaving Negroes.”Footnote ²⁹ Australia came to serve as a kind of antimodernity for white Americans; where Americans had supposedly tamed and closed the western frontier, and demolished such retrograde labour relations as slavery, in the remote parts of Australia time functioned differently and one could still find dark-skinned labourers under the lash.Footnote ³⁰

Such ideas underpinned American reviews of Katharine Susannah Prichard's sixth novel, Coonardoo. Set in an outback location as remote as the places where it was said Aboriginal workers were “enslaved,” the controversial book depicted the intertwined lives of the title character, an Aboriginal girl and then woman, and those of the white family on whose station (or “ranch,” as Iowa and Michigan reviewers had it) she lived and toiled.Footnote ³¹ For several American reviewers, this was a depiction of latter-day slavery, with black subservient to white. A short notice in the Los Angeles Times demonstrated the recouping of a classic trope of American slave narratives, in which respectable and virtuous women were forced into sexual servitude.Footnote ³² “The docile, faithful native girl Coonardoo, whose story is here told,” wrote the reviewer, “reveals the sad plight of the West Australian blacks. They are little better than slaves to their white masters, with the women used as hand-maidens in the biblical sense.”Footnote ³³ For many of these reviewers, such labour relations were borne of a primitiveness that the United States had overcome or outgrown. As one critic put it, Prichard rendered “The last frontier, the tropic plains of West Australia as her setting for Coonardoo. America, England, and even Australia, itself, knows very little about the northwest of Australia.” These were “the wild, open To-morrow ranges, with only the cattle and the primitive black to break the spell of loneliness.”Footnote ³⁴ For still others, this backwardness was something for which to feel nostalgic. According to one reviewer's summary, the white Watts family “had a deep regard for the people who served and fought it for them, who claimed their loyalty and their protection. Generous and kindly was their relationship and the blacks recognized and accepted it by working for food and clothing.”Footnote ³⁵

In the circulation back to the United States of accounts of Indigeneity that relied on tropes of antebellum American enslavement, Aboriginal people in Australia became aligned, once again, to African Americans. In terms of Indigenous Australians’ resistance to their exploitation and impoverishment, there was some basis for this comparison. The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, founded in 1924, for instance, took as its motto “One God, One Aim, One Destiny,” which had served as the slogan for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for many years.Footnote ³⁶ When heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson toured Australia, Aboriginal men made friends with him and maintained activist relationships with him for many years. Johnson himself claimed that Jack London's description of his “golden smile” came from the look on Johnson's face that arose from a moment of kinship with an Aboriginal man.Footnote ³⁷ Such exchange would continue for decades, most obviously in the Freedom Rides in regional NSW, the formation of a Black Panther Party in Brisbane, and all manner of radical links between black power activists in the English-speaking islands of the Pacific, the US, and the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁸ But such parallels in political and cultural activities were not the basis for the analogies made by white Americans (and more latterly, white Australians).

Rather, by portraying Aboriginal Australians as enslaved, white Americans distanced themselves from Australia. If Australians could permit slavery still to exist, then this British-descended nation-state was indeed belated, and perhaps even stagnant. Where the Revolution had catapulted the United States towards a post-slavery modernity, Australia remained its backward, slow, settler colonial cousin. The fact that a great array of labour relations existed in both countries could be overlooked, as could the ongoing dispossession of Native American people. Slavery became America's “original sin,” now overcome, and this narrative itself displaced the story of the colonies’ founding. Thus not only did the disavowal of any link to Australia serve to made America seem more modern, it also permitted Americans to “forget” the sin that pre-dated African slavery: the invasion and colonization of land that belonged to someone else.

Yet when Indigenous Australians, and those descended from Pacific island labourers, likened their experiences to those of enslaved African Americans, they did so in part to resist the alternative, which was to be cast alongside Native Americans as a dying race in need of the “protection” of the state.Footnote ³⁹ If their labour was valuable enough to warrant enslaving them, then they were not the slowly perishing group that the logic of settler colonization required.Footnote ⁴⁰ They were, in short, of the future rather than the past; by drawing attention to and critiquing the adoption of slavery in the Pacific, they paradoxically insisted upon their own endurance. Faith Bandler's 1977 Wacvie, a biographical novel based on the life of her father, described his experience as a “recruited” worker explicitly as one of enslavement, and in its description of Wacvie's capture, transportation by sea, experiences, and escape replicated many of the key features of ex-slave narratives, from Olaudah Equiano down to Harriet Jacobs.Footnote ⁴¹ The novel's cover image by Robert Ingpen, which echoes Smith's illustration for Twain's travelogue, drew on classic iconography of antebellum slavery: a dark-skinned man in half-turned profile with a distant gaze, his neck chained in iron, and secured by a sugarcane peg.Footnote ⁴² Bandler's narrative also reflects Following the Equator in the way that the first half of the novel is structured by the move from natural to “clock time.” The island of Ambrym, from which young men including Wacvie are “stolen,” is a place out of time. Barely even seasonal, days are “an endlessly repeated cycle only broken by the desire for food” and no “ruins of a past civilization” exist to suggest that life ever operated otherwise.Footnote ⁴³ In stark contrast, the intimate relationship between the whip and the watch on the southern plantation as explicated by Mark Smith appears in Wacvie: the whip regulates the rhythm of the cane knives in a “time [that] was no longer timeless.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In telling their life stories, Pacific Islander descendants such as Bandler, and Indigenous Australians such as Sally Morgan, drew on a template provided by Alex Haley's bestselling book Roots (1976) and the miniseries, broadcast in 1977 in both the United States and Australia.Footnote ⁴⁵ Chapters from Roots appeared in Readers’ Digest long before Haley completed his manuscript, and although there is no direct evidence that Bandler read those chapters, she was part of a family-history boom that took place in both countries, which Roots helped to escalate.Footnote ⁴⁶ Oral histories have charted the impact of black American history making from the 1960s forward, and Clive Moore noted that many Australian South Sea Islander families owned a copy of Roots.Footnote ⁴⁷ When Aboriginal playwright Robert Merritt's three-acter The Cake Man came to a Sydney stage, its interpretation of Aboriginal history, including the Dreamtime, white invasion, and the present day, was a novelty for both black and white audiences.Footnote ⁴⁸ During the play's second run, Roots screened in Sydney to record-breaking numbers of television viewers. Immediately, the newspaper advertising for the play quoted a complimentary review that hailed it as “almost a mini-Roots … an extraordinary play.”Footnote ⁴⁹ There was some resemblance, insofar as a family was at the centre of The Cake Man, but as Indigenous scholars and activists at the time pointed out in related cases, the more obvious parallel would have been with Native American experiences. When Sally Morgan's memoir of her discovery as a teenager that her family was Aboriginal, and of her quest as an adult to learn about that history, was published in the United States, the cover depicted a photograph of Uluru and declared My Place, “The Australian Roots.” Almost all the reviews in US publications described the book as a “search” or “discovery” of “roots,” while one made the link to Alex Haley's work explicitly.Footnote ⁵⁰

Despite the fact that many Indigenous critics rejected a simple alignment of Aboriginal and African American experiences – Aboriginal historian Jackie Huggins notably offered a trenchant critique of the parallel, asking instead, “how do the Native Americans deal with My Place” – in the very recent past the lexicon of slavery has returned to the way that both Indigenous and Pacific Islanders are choosing to represent their forebears’ experiences.Footnote ⁵¹ Both Australian Solomon Islander Amie Batalibasi's 2015 short film Blackbird, advertised as “Inspired by the history of Australia's Sugar Slaves,” and Stephen McGregor's 2016 documentary Servant or Slave not only explicitly consider blackbirding and unwaged labour as forms of enslavement but also draw on tropes associated with antebellum slavery that open up further possibilities for comparative analyses.Footnote ⁵² Likewise, as recent legislation in Queensland (similar laws are under discussion in other states) has made it possible for Indigenous workers subject to “stolen wages” to make claims for reparations, there has been an outpouring of public discussion as to whether their labour was slavery.Footnote ⁵³

Over the course of the twentieth century, when Indigenous Australians and indentured Pacific Islanders and their descendants called themselves enslaved, they did so to claim a place in the future – they were a strong people who were not, contrary to the expectations of early twentieth-century racial science, dying out. Sometimes when they likened themselves to enslaved African Americans and their twentieth-century descendants, they did so because they were inspired by a worldwide movement of oppressed people which, partly because of the prominence of the United States in the world, seemed to be led by African Americans. Our interest in redressing the oversight by American studies scholarship of the role that coercive practices like recruitment and unwaged labour played in prolonging the life of Atlantic slavery is thus not simply about extending the transnational reach of American studies scholarship across the Pacific to Australia, nor only about the ways in which recognizing the hallmarks of slavery in Oceania enabled American commentators to avoid facing the ongoing remnants of slavery in the post-Reconstruction South. We propose that these literary and cultural tropes may equally serve as touchstones of radical possibilities in futures already and yet to be imagined.