When the United Nations General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 13 September 2007, it introduced into the international legal lexicon a new dimension to the concept of self-determination. The declaration emphasizes indigenous peoples’ distinctive rights to land, culture, language, and collective identity, as well as their equal rights of…

In Bengal the Dalits (or former untouchables) still remain almost completely invisible in the narratives of pre-Partition violence that broke out in 1946 and post-Partition migration and rehabilitation that took place in 1947-48. This happened because Dalit organisations in East Bengal remained in alliance with the Muslim League and they did not immediately migrate in…

I am writing a monograph titled Mirrors on the Land that aims to trace, in word and image, people’s relationships with New Zealand’s lakes from Māori settlement to the present. In this seminar I set out the scope and aims of my work, explain why I think it matters, and describe my progress. I discuss…

The merchant vessel Edwin Fox wasexceptional for being unexceptional. It was old fashioned even before its keel was laid down in Thomas Reeves’s shipyards near Calcutta in 1853. It was neither large nor fast, and had none of the prestige of the great tea and opium clippers that captured the public imagination in the mid-nineteenth…

In 1866, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker congratulated James Hector on the recent opening of the Colonial Museum, writing ‘I am heartily glad you have started the Museum at Wellington; there is nothing like a Museum and gardens to screw money out of the public for science. Every shilling we have here has been through the…

The famous savant Pavel Josef Šafařík proposed a six-layer system for linguistic classification: he divided the Jazyk (language) into mluvy, the mluva into řeči, the řeč into nářeči, the nářeč into podřeči, and the podřeč into různořeči. These terms enjoyed popularity among mid-nineteenth-century Slavists. Classificatory taxonomies also became objects of patriotic contestation: one celebrated dispute…

The call for papers for Dragon Tails 2019 – the 6th Australasian conference on Chinese diaspora history and heritage (20-23 November 2019) – has been extended to 31 May 2019. The Dragon Tails Association is now accepting submissions for its biennial conference, which will be hosted by Wai-Te-Ata Press at the Victoria Unversity of Wellington. Conference theme:…