Welcome to the Scottish Centre for Global History at the University of Dundee
The Scottish Centre for Global History brings together members of the School of Humanities and other academic schools at the University of Dundee with interests in the development of Global History. Our interests span the globe from India to South America, from Canada to South Africa and range from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
The painting above shows a Hindu princess committing suttee against the wishes of the Emperor Akbar but with his reluctant consent. 18th century By: Mohammad Rizā Naw’ī. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, images@wellcome.ac.uk, http://wellcomeimages.org
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- Next Global History talk: Professor Bruce Buchanan (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia) ‘The Civil Noise of Empire: Listening to Colonial Encounters in Australia and the Pacific, 1690-1790’
Scottish Centre for Global History presents Professor Bruce Buchanan (Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia) ‘The Civil Noise of Empire: Listening to Colonial Encounters in Australia and the Pacific, 1690-1790’
Room: Main Library Fairlie Room
Date(s): Wednesday, 09/05/2018
Time: 16:30-18:30
Sydney Cove (Image courtesy: Google Images)
ABSTRACT: On the 4th of June 1788, the infant British colony in Sydney Cove celebrated His majesty’s birthday with a 21-gun salute. As the gunfire reverberated around the harbour, colonists reflected on how this mighty noise was heard by both the European newcomers and Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants. What they heard is not in dispute, but the disparity in how they heard it encapsulates a deeper anxiety about the audible register of civility in cross-cultural encounters between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Islanders’ in the Pacific. In this paper, I will explore the audible implications of these anxieties expressed in a selection of British accounts of such encounters from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. I will argue that these anxieties were regularly assuaged not simply by recourse to the modulated civility of polite sound, but to the intrusive and often terrifying recourse to discordant noise. In arguing so, I want to complicate recent interpretations of European soundscapes that prioritise the cohesive force of purposive sound over the disruptive effects of intrusive noise. The audible context of early cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific and Australia demonstrates that mere noise – or what the European newcomers heard – played a significant role in purposive activities (such as the establishment of imperial authority). Moreover, the sounds of early colonial encounters – what the European newcomers listened to – often did not confirm shared meanings and speech communities but activated deep anxieties about their inability to communicate their superiority to the Indigenous inhabitants they encountered. In this way, I want also to question the value of historical analyses that continue to separate normative and purposive ‘sound’ from valueless and random ‘noise’.
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