Bøger af Liz Conor

This book untangles the connections between British industrialization and colonial expansion in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The addition of fossil fuels to the energy mix in this period drove overwhelming social and economic change in Britain, the north-east United States, and Europe, but it also had important and uneven consequences within a range of Euro-American colonies. Opening a new field of inquiry into fossil fuel-powered technologies and their critical role in colonial expansion, this book demonstrates how carbon-based economies dramatically accelerated the annexing of foreign lands and the extraction of their resources. Yet, while the use of coal on a commercial scale from the late 1700s powered an explosion of growth in manufacturing between 1760 and 1840 and these years coincided with the incursion and violence on colonial frontiers, the peripheries tended to rely on wood where they could. This intensification of animal and timber power complicated thenationalist narratives of coal-fired industrialization and economic development. A history of the meanings and ideas around carbon, fossil fuels, and their bearing within colonial expansion is increasingly relevant as rapid changes to climate bring into focus the legacy of carbonization in dispossession, sustainability, environmental, labor, and atmospheric relational histories.

Skin Deep looks at the preoccupations of European-Australians in their encounters with Aboriginal women and the tropes, types and perceptions that seeped into everyday settler-colonial thinking. Early erroneous and uninformed accounts of Aboriginal women and culture were repeated throughout various print forms and imagery, both in Australia and in Europe, with names, dates and locations erased so that individual women came to be as anonymised as 'gins' and 'lubras'. Liz Conor identifies and traces the various tropes used to typecast Aboriginal women, contributing to their lasting hold on the colonial imagination, even after conflicting records emerged. The colonial archive itself, consisting largely of accounts by white men, is critiqued. Construction of Aboriginal women's gender and sexuality was a form of colonial control, and Conor shows how the industrialisation of print was critical to this control, emerging as it did alongside colonial expansion. For nearly all settlers, typecasting Aboriginal women through name-calling and repetition of tropes sufficed to evoke an understanding that was surface-based and half-knowing: only skin deep.

Focusing on the city girl in the metropolitan scene, the 'Screen Struck Girl' in the cinematic scene, the beauty contestant in the photographic scene, the 'primitive' woman in the late colonial scene, and the flapper in the heterosexual leisure scene, this title shows how women's roles were intimately tied to the visual culture of the day.