Abstracts

1 Melissa ADAMS: Transporting Possibilities: Reading Cultural Dierence in Captivity Narratives

2In the eighteenth century, British readers were cautioned against being ‘too involved’ in their reading materials. Reading could potentially transport one to other places, other times, even inside other bodies. Yet, reading was crucial to a conception of advanced British civilization that emphasized not only extensive trade, but also a high value on learning, an appreciation of the arts, and an enhanced capacity to feel. This paper’s objective is to elucidate what we might call the absorptive power of reading, through the increasingly frequent descriptions of reader identification as a transporting experience, one that literally carries us away. By investigating the evolving use of the word ‘transport’ in the late eighteenth century, this paper will attempt to navigate the intersections between reading, feeling, and the discourses of travel. Close readings of two colonial American captivity narratives provide spaces to unfold the work of early ethnography, sympathy, and textual transport. I will take seriously the claim that, in the eighteenth century, reading may, in fact, have been dangerous by describing the rhetorical difficulties inherent in an imperial mission to civilize others (rather than to sympathize with them). By replacing sympathetic textual transports which offer readers possibilities of cultural exchange with romanticized, historical transports that take one back to an idyllic, pre-colonial setting, many British authors depoliticize the transformative powers of reader identification in proto-ethnographic texts.

3 Isabel ALONSO-BRETO: Reenacting history: the Underground Railroad live!

4During the first half of the 19th century, hundreds of slaves saw themselves transported to freedom through the Underground Railroad which covered most of the United States and Canada. This was a secret organised network of communications and routes whose aim was to rescue from slavery as many people as possible, helping them to reach safely territories where slavery had been abolished. In many cases, Canada was the final step of the journey. One of the protagonists of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave that, once a free woman in Canada, spent the rest of her life helping fellowmen and women to escape the ordeal of slavery, doing several trips back to the south in search of new ‘cargo’ to be transported north to freedom.

5More than a century later, in 1988 Toronto, a black and witty fourteen-year-old will find her heroine and social model in the figure of Harriet Tubman. Margaret Cruishank is the main character in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s novel for teenagers Harriet’s Daughter (1988). In her coming-of-age process, she sees the need to disavow her real name to become Harriet, a name which, she reckons, carries with it a signification that her own name lacks. A girl of unusual courage and determination, Margaret-Harriet will seduce her schoolmates with a new and fascinating game: the Canadian Underground Railroad. Thus they will set out to reenact history, twisting it on the way and unlearning some of its particulars: ’ “Can slaves be white?” “Of course they can!"’ we read, for instance, at one point in the novel.

6The children’s game will eventually be discovered, and its organiser severely reprimanded. But through this and other adventures, Margaret-Harriet will herself become a sort of Harriet Tubman, since with her account she traces new routes for her fellow teenagers to reach a safe Afrocaribbean-Canadian identity, making them feel proud of their origins, their culture and their skin colour.

7 Susan BARRETT: Transporting the Last Tasmanian Aborigines in Contemporary Australian Fiction

8When the word ‘transportation’ is mentioned in connection with Van Diemen’s Land, it is invariably taken to refer to the white convicts. However, between 1830 and 1834 with the Governor’s permission, George Robinson, a local tradesman, rounded up the last remaining Tasmanian Aborigines and had them transported to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, where they remained until 1847. Supposedly for their own good, this forced transportation undoubtedly hastened the deaths of the vast majority.

9 This paper proposes to examine three novels: The Savage Crows (1976) by the white Australian writer Robert Drewe, Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) by the indigenous writer and activist Mudrooroo and English Passengers (2000) by the English novelist Matthew Kneale. All three novels deal with the above mentioned events and show how the initial transportation of white convicts led almost inevitably to the transportation of the indigenous population.

10The first part of this paper will analyse how the novels work as historical fiction; in other words, how the reader is ‘transported’ not only back in time but also into an unfamiliar indigenous culture. The second part will consider transport as an emotional effect. Drewe’s novel is very much about white guilt and the need for expiation. Mudrooroo is writing for both white and indigenous readers and attempts to offer a new reading of the past which will improve black/white relations in the present. Kneale has sufficient distance to treat things with a wry humour and is, arguably, the most effective in denouncing past atrocities.

11 Wolfgang BINDER: ‘Where the remote Bermudas ride . . . ’. On Exploration, Expansion, Transport(s), and Two Texts on Jamaica

12After establishing possible categories of travel writing and referring to medieval and Renaissance examples, I am using Christopher Columbus’s log book and letters to the Catholic Kings of Spain as a paradigm for an analysis of issues concerning European expansion into the Caribbean space. It is shown how from the very beginning ‘new’ territories and their populations were named and classified, and how attempts at subjugation were undertaken. Constructions of Otherness and a discourse of hierarchic differences in the ‘contact zones’ (M.L.Pratt) served as tools to ensure superiority and exploitation. In the second half of the paper two texts are discussed: Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica... (1839) and Matthews Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). The main focus here is on the respective authors’ travels and their perceptions of enslaved Africans and of ‘The Peculiar Institution’ in Jamaica.

13 Rita CHRISTIAN: ‘They Came in Ships . . . ’: Indo-Caribbean Women and their Construction of Safe Spaces in the Caribbean

14The perception of the Indian woman in the Caribbean has been one of docility, placidity and subservience, limited by notions of victimhood and subjugation. Much emphasis is often placed on the fact that the women who left India as ‘bound coolies’ were prostitutes, dancers and low caste women. Almost from the beginning of their indentureship, there has been an erroneous assumption that these women were kidnapped en masse or duped into ‘this new system of slavery’ by unscrupulous arkatis. Closer examination of the history has shown that these women who crossed the kala pani or ‘black waters’ were among the most resilient of human beings. Desperate women, in great acts of defiance, resistance and independence, demonstrated their resourcefulness by choosing to travel unaccompanied by relatives to places like Fiji, Mauritius and parts of the Caribbean as indentured labourers. Because of the received perception of Indian women in the Caribbean, there has been a tendency to focus on the fact that they were lured into this ‘new system of slavery’ as well as on their subsequent exploitation on the plantations. As a consequence we have never really considered what the journey meant for these women.

15 Guillaume CINGAL: Transe, errance, et transhumance dans Travelling with Djinns de Jamal Mahjoub

16« Je ne peins pas l’être, je peins le passage ». Même s’il n’est pas certain que Jamal Mahjoub ait eu la célèbre formule de Montaigne en tête au moment de s’embarquer dans l’écriture de son dernier roman publié, Travelling with Djinns (Chatto & Windus, 2003), elle s’applique à merveille à son projet narratif. En effet, le roman raconte l’histoire de Yasin, un Soudanais qui vit depuis presque vingt ans en Angleterre et qui, à l’âge de trente-sept ans, se retrouve en instance de divorce; il emmène alors leur fils, Leo, qui est âgé de sept ans, dans une folle escapade qui les mène du Danemark en Espagne, sans but apparent. Toutefois, au fil des épisodes, Yasin se souvient de moments essentiels de son existence passée, fait progressivement le deuil, non seulement de son couple, mais aussi de ses parents, morts quelques années plus tôt.

17Ainsi, la vieille Peugeot 504 qui leur sert de véhicule, dans cet itinéraire qui confine parfois au pélerinage sans jamais trouver explicitement de destination, devient, outre un moyen de transport, un lieu de remémoration, un laboratoire du souvenir. C’est le déplacement qui, tout comme dans On the Road de Kerouac ou dans les road movies allemands des années 1970, finit par dessiner les contours de l’être. A cet égard, le titre du roman est une référence équivoque, puisqu’elle appartient à deux cultures différentes: d’une part, les djinns de l’enfance soudanaise; d’autre part, la légende danoise qui veut que les soucis soient pareils à des lutins maléfiques (des « nisses ») qui vous hantent et vous suivent même en voyage. Il découle de ce double schéma une exploration de la mystique de la transe telle qu’elle est développée dans plusieurs textes classiques du soufisme et qui accompagne, en le métaphorisant, le travail de mémoire et de hantise noué au long du texte.

18 Florence D’SOUZA: The Transports of James Tod in Rajasthan

19James Tod (1782-1835) spent twenty-two years in India, from 1800-1822. He published two texts about his experiences in India: (a) Annals & Antiquities of Rajasthan in 2 volumes, 1829 & 1832; (b) Travels in Western India, 1830 posth. Since Tod was an enthusiastic traveller, this paper first looks at the bright side of Tod’s transports in Rajputana—his appreciation of the natural beauty of various spots in Rajasthan and his passion for historical information to the point of making wild, unfounded hypotheses to explain certain historical phenomena. Then attention is paid to the darker side of Tod’s transports in Rajasthan—the problems of physical travel at that time due to rigorous climate conditions, difficult terrains and Tod’s delicate health. Also, the constraints on Tod’s optimism in his role as British political agent, caused by resistance to new British policies among the Rajputs and distrust of Tod among his British colonial superiors. The paper concludes with the ambivalence of Tod in British colonial India, since he developed for and received from his Rajput associates a genuine, reciprocated affection, while never ceasing to be, at all times, committed to the furthering of British rule and interests.

20Teresa GIBERT: Pragmatism, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Japanese-Canadian Narratives of the WWII Forced Evacuation from the Pacic Coast

21Pragmatic, ethical and aesthetic purposes are simultaneously combined in the narratives depicting the decreed mass removal of Japanese Canadians from their Pacific Coast homes during World War II. When dealing with this extremely painful travel experience, Canadian writers of Japanese ancestry have adopted a pragmatist approach that stresses—rather than contradicts—reciprocally reinforcing ethical and aesthetic values. By emphasizing the elements of beauty, pleasure and harmony that are essential in any artistic creation, such authors have both enhanced moral reflection on the part of their audience and strengthened the practical efficacy of their factually grounded works of fiction.

22All these writers are keen on providing accurate representations of a traumatic journey they were involved in, either directly or through the memoirs of the members of their families who were forced to undertake it. In their writings there are recurrent descriptions of evacuees standing on railway platforms while being insulted and threatened by vociferous crowds. These migrants generally remain silent after boarding CPR trains with their remaining possessions crammed into the single suitcase that each person is allowed to carry as luggage on the trip eastwards. But as Japanese-Canadian novelists have narrated the same events from various perspectives and focused on different aspects of their ordeal, their accounts are far from being uniform. Their literary texts are marked by the categories of genre, gender, and ethnicity, as well as by the personal attitudes of each individual author.

23 The characters portrayed express a wide range of feelings: hope, patience, calmness, serenity, resignation, fear, shame, distress, bitterness, and anger. They invariably miss the ocean, which they mentally connect with their past freedom, and some of them manage to soothe their emotional wounds when the landscape of the prairies brings them memories of their beloved sea. Some of these displaced people find comfort in the magnificent scenery that is ironically set up as the physical background to the hardships suffered. Unable to move on unrestrained once they have reached their destination in the internment camps or in the ghost towns where they have been relocated, others resort to fantasy in order to escape through imaginary voyages that release them from their otherwise unbearable situation.

24 Nelly GILLET: Patricia Ledyard’s ‘Ferry Tales’: Transports around the Tongan Islands

25American-born writer Patricia Ledyard reached the shores of the Tongan island of Vava’u in 1949 and spent the rest of her life there. Her expatriation led the way to an emotional and cultural discovery: crossing the Pacific ocean was part of her quest for a different life. Her three books, between autobiographical novels and anthropological accounts, tell the process of endearment between the American woman and the Polynesian people, the inspiration behind her writing.

26A key character in the story, Tofua the ferry bears a multifaceted symbolical meaning. As a means of transport in and out the archipelago, it represents a place of transition; and when it brings new books or visitors, it becomes the link with the outside world. And when Queen Salote embarks upon it, it becomes the scene for a fervent emotional transport. Patricia Ledyard herself experienced this synchronism between the movements of the body and the movements of the heart for it was on the ferry that she met her future husband, Farquhar Matheson. In Tonga also, means of transports can lead to emotional transports.

27 Evelyne HANQUART-TURNER: ‘The Kanyakumari Tales’ or An Indian Decameron? Anita Nair’s Ladies Coupé

28In this ‘novel in parts’, her second major fictional work, Anita Nair rejuvenates the old ploy used by Chaucer and Boccacio before him, to turn it into a fairly realistic Indian set up. The symbol of the train, so often loaded with positive connotations in Indian fiction is once more an important instrument of modernity confronting traditional values.

29An enclosed space nevertheless providing a temporary escape from the pressure of social mixity, the ladies’ coupé is the focal space in which the heroine of the frame story can see the dilemma of her life-story evolve towards a resolution, as she shares in the life-experience of her travel companions. This provides the opportunity for humour and pathos in the multiple and diverse questioning of women’s condition in contemporary India proposed by Anita Nair’s percipient eye and ironic though warm pen.

30 Louise HARRINGTON: ‘The Train Nation’.The Railway as a Leitmotif in South Asian Literature

31In literature, railways are frequently considered to have the ability to produce nations and are thought to have been a major component in the emergence of the Indian nation in particular. This idea that the railways of India somehow founded a nation or nationalism is highly contradictory due to the fact that they were introduced by British imperialism and were denounced as propagating evil by the father of the nation himself, M. K. Gandhi. The tide of humanity that gives rise to a community on the railway along with the unavoidable political influence as a result of national events are significant in establishing a distinct and complex relationship between the railway and the nation in South Asia. The train and the train station emerge as being at once all-inclusive and marginal, a home yet also a site of stark divisions, namely in the form of caste prejudice, which is something that the nation emulates on a larger scale. By examining a diverse range of works in South Asian literature, including Kim by Rudyard Kipling, Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and The Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories, the power of the railway to represent the various facets of the nation on a localised level is both apparent and undeniable.

32 Barbara HELLY: AZIKWELWA! (We Will Not Ride!): Minibus Taxis in South Africa: Political and Social History of an Anomaly

33This presentation will give an analysis of the present situation in the South African taxi industry. This kind of semi-public and not-yet-industrialized transportation system also exists in other countries where infrastructures and public services are underdeveloped, but in South Africa, it has long been part of the struggles during the apartheid era. It used to be both a distinctive feature of the urban segregation and a weapon for all kinds of boycott campaigns.

34 What has become of this system, ten years after the end of the official apartheid regime?

35The paper will first present the social, historical and political origin of this means of transport because minibus taxis cannot be understood without thinking of the large scale expropriation of the black population and the creation of black reserves for cheap labor around the cities. South African taxis and township life are entirely inseparable in the country.

36Using the example of a few boycotts in the apartheid era, we will then assess the needs and hopes of the population as regards to this question of transport. That will also help see if there were any changes since 1994: if there were none in the huge territorial segregation still prevailing in the country, there have been attempts to some restructuring of this informal sector of the economy. And that will bring us to a conclusion on what the present government is doing under the policy of recapitalization and Black Economic Empowerment.

37 Lloyd JOHNSON: Transportation and Travel in the Southern Backcountry: St. David’s Parish, South Carolina in Eigh teenth Century British America

38This paper explores the experiences and impressions European travelers had of the early Southern Backcountry with a focus on St. David’s Parish in eighteenth century South Carolina. Beginning with the settlement of the South Carolina backcountry in the 1730s and continuing to 1800, this study represents the impressions Europeans had of the landscape, and environment, as well the people who inhabited the upper Pee Dee region of the South Carolina backcountry. This paper utilizes information gleaned from public records, diaries, travel accounts, and early colonial newspapers to uncover how travel and transportation directly contributed to the development of commerce and trade, as well as early towns in this region of the Southern backcountry of British America.

39It was the roads, bridges, ferries, and the rivers that provided the physical linkages that connected the backcountry inhabitants of British America to the Charleston merchants and the Atlantic World. Physical linkages enabled this region of the South Carolina backcountry to reach the market centers of Charleston, and Georgetown.

40This paper explores how transportation improvements strengthened the social network at the local level by allowing people quicker access to local service centers. Such as country stores, taverns, the church, polling places, and the muster field. With more roads being constructed in St. David’s Parish, it enabled farmers and planters to transport grain to the local mills, and ship indigo to Charleston. This also led to the development of frontier towns, Cheraw and Long Bluff, places settled in the 1740s that began to take on characteristics of towns by the 1770s. This paper also explores how vice such as taverns and houses of prostitution on the frontier developed near ferry crossings where people in early British America congregated.

41 Matt KIMMICH: Lost (and Found) in Translation: Crossing Borders in the Novels of Salman Rushdie

42Migrancy is one of the central recurring motifs in Salman Rushdie’s œuvre, and many of his protagonists are transported individuals in one sense or another. As these characters are “translated” (to use Rushdie’s metaphor), they are de- and then recontextualised and thus change in transit. Such acts of translation do not necessarily constitute a loss, however; the characters may also gain something, and at the very least they may achieve a freedom they lacked before. These migrants are put in a position to fashion for themselves new, imaginary homelands whose histories they can co-author, rather than being passively inscribed in their nations’ History. At the same time, the migrant characters in the novels often fall victim to the dominant discourse’s powerful myths of roots, which find expression in religious fundamentalism, interethnic strife and war. The paper highlights a number of instances of transport in Rushdie, discussing what his migrant characters lose or gain in translation. It concludes on a consideration of Rushdie’s post-The Moor’s Last Sigh novels, as his fictions have been transported from their earlier locations (India, Pakistan and England) to the (for Rushdie) new world, the United States— which in the novels becomes a symbolic migrants’ homeland.

43 Patricia KRUS: Rewritings of the Middle Passage in 20th Century Caribbean Literature

44St Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott has famously described in Joycean terms the weight of history on the Caribbean imagination as a nightmare from which its peoples are trying to awake, a nightmare which finds its source in the forced transportation of millions of African slaves to the New World colonies. The burden imposed by this violent history of displacement and enslavement is still felt in the contemporary Caribbean as local writers, critics and poets try to develop an aesthetic capable of exploring the scars of colonialism. Moreover, these scars are shared both by descendants of slaves and descendants of masters. Yet the obsession with the region’s history can lead to what Walcott has called ‘a literature of recrimination and despair, ... or a literature of remorse’. Contemporary Caribbean authors acknowledge the dual burden of a past as torturer or victim, a burden they seek to understand in the rewriting of some of the most painful episodes of their region. This paper proposes to look at the reconstruction of the Middle Passage in a number of Caribbean novels. In particular I will concentrate on George Lamming’s (Barbados) portrayal of the psychological imprisonment of both master and slaves in his novel Natives of My Person, set on a slave ship. I will also examine the rediscovery of the Middle Passage as a formative step in identity building in Michelle Cliff ’s (Jamaica) novels Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven.

45 Florence LABAUNE-DEMEULE: The Magic Seeds of One’s Way in the World and The Enigma of Arrival: The Symbolic Use of Transports in V. S. Naipaul’s Later Fiction

46As travelling is one of the most crucial themes in V. S. Naipaul’s fiction, the means of transport used to travel are just as important since they are necessary for the discovery of new places. They are linked both to the dynamics of travelling and to the traveller’s arrival in new loci. Travelling does not only introduce changes. It is the very moment and place where changes occur, where one can pass from one state to another, with all the complexity and difficulties it entails—in terms of logistics, language and emotions, for instance.

47Whether one considers novels like A Way in the World, whose purpose is to insist on displacement, or The Enigma of Arrival, which draws the reader’s attention to the final place of destination, all of Naipaul’s later books of fiction (The Enigma of Arrival, A Way in the World, Half a Life and Magic Seeds) stress the importance of different means of transport: walking (even marching), driving cars (especially four wheel drives), sailing across oceans, flying different kinds of aircraft, travelling by train, etc., all have a symbolic meaning.

48Although the main impact of such diverse means of transport will be analysed with the purpose of showing that they are intricately (and obviously) linked with the notions of space and time, the privileged relationships between travelling and point of view (either perceptual or conceptual) will be highlighted in this study.

49Then, travelling and writing being profoundly interdependent in Naipaul’s later fiction this analysis will show that the symbolic meaning of means of transport is linked to the creative process: travelling is often what spurs the writer to go on with his literary activity: writing is then introduced as the artist’s (mostly the writer’s) journey through life and the kind of transport used may symbolically affect the writing process by creating hindrances or by stimulating literary creation which, in its turn, takes the reader to unknown shores in emotional transport.

50 Benaouda LEBDAI: ‘Olaudah Equiano’s ‘Interesting’ Route’

51Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative is a classic in what is commonly defined in literary studies: ‘slave narratives’. This fascinating text has been studied to keep the memory of the slave trade alive, to show the horror of such a human trade, to emphasize the suffering of the greatest human displacement ever. The research perspectives have mainly targeted the knowledge of what life was like under slavery. Stories of slaves narrated from the inside are indeed of great importance to study such humiliating human experiences. As a slave, Olaudah Equiano has succeeded to free himself, not by escaping from his master but by buying his own self, thus becoming his own master. Literate, he has fought to abolish slavery and he has succeeded to live an integrated life among the British, marrying an Englishwoman, writing his memoirs. Olaudah Equiano has inspired many critical studies. These studies have been interested in looking into his spiritual quest as he has become a Christian Methodist. His new adopted religion has saved his soul, after a life without freedom. My proposition for the conference on transport will move away from this approach of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography. I propose to revisit The Interesting Narrative by working on the literality of his text. My paper will therefore concentrate on the travels, forced or not, on what he has seen, what he has described in his narrative in terms of scenery and human relationships. I shall analyse the way he has described his ‘transports’ and portrayed the places he has seen, knowing that he has travelled extensively within the 18th century British Empire, from Africa to England to the West Indies, back to Africa then to Jamaïca, to America, but also to France and Spain. I shall study the narrative text in terms of style and power of evocation by relating the words used to the psychological situation of the described moment, enhancing thus the literary quality of the text, its power to convey such ‘particular’ trips. I shall investigate into the routes and the transport (s) he has taken, forced or desired. Through this approach, I shall analyse the fascinating route of a man who should have stayed in his mother country, Nigeria.

52Cécile LEONARD: ‘To be born again, first you have to die’: Westbound Air Transports as Initiation Rites in Salman Rushdie’s Novels

53One of Rushdie’s recurring images features Indian migrants on an airplane en route to Great Britain. The inaugural scene of The Satanic Verses may be well known, but several similar crossings are to be found in The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground beneath her Feet, too. Such East-West passages recall what Edward Said had once described as the ‘voyage in’: the ex-colonised sets foot on the ex-colonizer’s land and responds to the very colonial gesture. This paper shows how Rushdie’s writing tends to represent those crossings in terms of initiation rites, which contribute to create and consolidate postcolonial identity. Thanks to the celestial environment and to the limbo-like nature of the aircraft, the migrant crosses imaginary frontiers (images of membranes or moulting skin abound) and experiences profound metamorphoses. The structure of initiation (separation, transition and reintegration) works as the framework through which characters achieve their political and individual coming-of-age.

54 Stephen LITTLE and Julian HINE: Changing Track: Repositioning the Irish and Australian Railways in the National Consciousness

55This paper explores the development of rail systems in Ireland and Australia. The paper highlights the different trajectories of both systems and charts the experiences and influences of Empire and Commonwealth on both. In Australia the rail system was developed as a way to promote nation building and overcome isolation while in Ireland both prior to and after partition the system enabled access to ports thereby not only fuelling migration but improving levels of accessibility between different parts of rural Ireland and town and country. The paper also describes the role of the rail system in making travel to new worlds possible and the way in which systems developed in both ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds to encourage population movements and dispersal and social cohesion. Growing levels of car dependence since the 1960s and the movement of freight from rail to road has had a significant impact on how public transport is used. This is illustrated by comparison between Northern Ireland and Australia. Deregulation and privatisation have also meant that commercial pressures have had a significant impact on the operation of rail in the days of post Empire. The paper also highlights the ways in which this redefinition of public communication technology and infrastructure, not only confined to the rail industry, has impacted on travel culture and the perception of public transport infrastructure.

56 John McLEOD: Orphia in the Underground: postcolonial London transport

57London transport has been at the heart of diasporic life for many postwar migrants and their descendents from the once-colonised countries: first, as a major employer of migrant labour and, later, as a significant imaginative location in fictions of what I call ‘postcolonial London’. The vignette of Orphia’s descent into the London Underground to find her lover in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) is one of several examples in fictions of postcolonial London where the underground rail system is used as a figure of diasporic trauma and transformation—examples which also include Lord Kitchener’s 1950s calypsos of London and Hanif Kureishi’s film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988). This essay engages with these three aforementioned examples to show how, as Sam Selvon once put it, ‘working the transport’ has been at the heart of the imaginative and social rescripting of London as a site of stubborn diasporic accommodation and postcolonial flux. As I argue, the Underground railway system has been imaginatively appropriated often to signify new diasporic movements of peoples and cultures initially subterranean and surreptitious, driven underground by the cold reception of an intolerant capital city—movements which, as Rushdie’s example suggests, determinedly produce the metamorphosis of the city at large through the creative kinesis of their cultural endeavours.

58 Olivette OTELE: Seamen in Bristol and the lure of slaving voyages

59Aboard slave ships life was a microcosm of tragedy, survival and sometimes friendship. It was generally thought that the ripple effect of the wealth of slave trade was the reason why many people sought fortune on the other side of the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. About 2,108 slaving voyages set out from the city of Bristol between 1698 and 1807. The city is considered to have been the foremost slave port in the world from 1730 to 1744. This paper is an attempt to understand men who embarked despite ill-treatment, disease, death and disappointment on ships weighing between 27 and 420 tons and carrying what was referred to as ‘black cargoes’. These men did not always receive their wages. Some were discharged in the Caribbean and a few were enslaved on the North African coast. They seemed to have had neither economic power nor political influence and yet they were key players in both the expansion of the slave trade and the abolition movement. An analysis of evidence—logbooks, accounts of sailors, muster rolls and family of crew letters—may shed further light on the subject.

60 Bruce SMITH: Politics and Management Issues Affecting the Nineteenth Century Colonial Railways of New Zealand

61In the British colony of New Zealand the issue of transport was, in the public mind, primarily associated with access and prosperity. This was a huge bone of contention in the public sphere. ‘Without motion there is no life’ was a favourite slogan of Samuel Vaile, the leading railway reformer of the period. An economic downturn in the 1880s brought the colony to the point where its national debt, about a third of which had been spent on building State railways, became a millstone around its neck. At the same time, political control of the state railways was increasingly seen as inept and a fertile field for patronage and jobbery, with the service poor and overly expensive. The largely conservative Government of the day consequently decided in 1887 to follow the example of several Australian colonies and install a Board of Commissioners to run the railways. The new Commissioners were to have almost complete managerial autonomy, being answerable only to the whole of Parliament.

62Despite a struggle of wills developing between Vaile, the widely disliked Joseph Maxwell, General Manager of Railways, and the politicians, the Government sidestepped public opinion and in 1889 appointed Maxwell as one of the new Railway Commissioners. In 1890, however, a Liberal Government was elected which believed that State railways should be controlled again directly by the people, for both idealistic reasons and control and access to patronage. Additionally, Labour supporters wanted greater union power and revenge for the Commissioner’s (especially Maxwell’s) role in the local failure of the 1890 Australasian Maritime Strike. After a protracted political struggle, the Liberals finally reasserted political control of Railways at the end of 1894, removing the Commissioners altogether.

63 Candace WARD: ‘Transports of Feeling: Constructions of the Black Man of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Literature’

64One of the more provocative transatlanticisms in eighteenth-century literature is the emigration of the Man of Feeling from British drawing rooms—as represented by heroes like Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, and Laurence Sterne’s Yorick—to the Great Houses of Britain’s Caribbean sugar colonies. But whereas critics typically focus on the White man of feeling in abolitionist literature of the period—in particular his role as an ameliorating (and supposed civilizing) force in novels like Sarah Scott’s History of Sir George Ellison—in this paper I examine a different kind of Black subject represented in sentimental discourse, a character I refer to as the Black man of feeling. Two key texts of the long eighteenth century are central to this study: Aphra Behn’s now canonical Oronooko (1688) and William Earle’s lesser known Obi, or the History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800), the sentimentalized account of Jack Mansong, a runaway slave who became the ‘Terror of Jamaica’ in the 1770s. The Black man of feeling, I argue, assumes a position unique in sentimental literature: whereas traditional heroes of sensibility appear emasculated by their capacity for emotion, the Black man of feeling becomes exaggeratedly masculine. This active sensibility creates a unique but problematic space in which these Black heroes operate: not only does their hypermasculinity conform to proslavery views of Black people as physically stronger and more robust than Whites, but their rebellious activities heighten fears of Black insurgence. Ultimately the texts’ sympathetic treatment of the Black man of feeling cannot contain the anxieties generated by their presence, and the texts are transported to the ‘safer’ ground of violent spectacle, a site on which the feeling bodies of Oroonoko and Mansong are displayed, dismembered, and redistributed, violent responses to the sentimental construction of Black masculinity.