Australian Afterlives of Atlantic Slavery: Belatedness and Transpacific American Studies

Abstract

This paper takes up the concept of the "afterlife" in order to reflect upon the logics of exclusion, belatedness, and succession that have characterised key interventions in transpacific American Studies. That transpacific American Studies might be thought of as "belated" is less to do with the actual chronology of the field than with the way that even early, ground-breaking scholars situated themselves in the field on the one hand and the way that others have engaged and, at times, celebrated the fantasised atemporality of the region itself on the other.