Tracing the Plantation Archipelago in Australia and the Pacific with Dashiell Moore

Part of Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney convened by Mary Roberts and Nicholas Croggon, presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.

Thursday 30 October, 2025 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom Join via Zoom

A presentation on artistic and literary representations of plantations across Australia, Vanuatu and Fiji, and the archipelagic logic of power that undergirds them.

Illuminated address presented to Edward W. Knox, Esq., the General Manager of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company Limited, for fifty years service, 1864 to 1914; photograph and printed material; and wooden box, 1894-1928, 1956. Image courtesy of the Mitchell Library.

In this paper, I trace historical and imaginative connections between twentieth and twenty-first century artistic and literary representations of blackbirding and sugarcane plantations in Australia, Vanuatu, and Fiji. I refer to, among others, the works of writers and artists such as Grace Mera Molisa, Shireen Malamoo, Jasmin Togo-Brisby, Nancy Cato, Faith Bandler, Manisha Anjali, and others. Drawing on Tracey Banivanua Mar’s and Evelyn Araluen’s respective critiques of settler-colonial structures, I trace out the archipelago as a logic of power that informs how we remember and connect experiences of plantation labour. The archipelago contextualises a defining rhetorical move in these connections: the diffraction of an individual perspective towards a fictional composite of collective experiences, a response to the enclosure and circumscription of lived and emotional engagement within indentured labour practices. 

This paper comments particularly on how these archipelagic logics determine the rhetorical question of slavery, while noting that these logics reflect a wider carceral imaginary that interconnects national and transnational contexts. This talk therefore forms a single part of a wider research project investigating archipelagic connections across representations of convictism, settler-colonialism, indenture, and offshore detention in Australian and Pacific literatures. 

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Dashiell Moore

Dashiell Moore is an ARC DECRA Fellow in English at the University of Sydney. His research is in the fields of world literature, island studies, and postcolonial theory, with a particular geographical concentration in Australia, the Caribbean and Oceania. A key focus of his work is on inter-colonial intersections in literary production, which was the subject of his recent monograph, The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean (OUP 2024). He is currently exploring further research in literary representations of the carceral archipelago as a DECRA Fellow, and due to commence a Roderick Visiting Fellowship at James Cook University in 2025.