Jacqueline Leckie

Despite our mythology of benign race relations, Aotearoa New Zealand has a long history of underlying prejudice and racism. The experiences of Indian migrants and their descendants, either historically or today, are still poorly documented and most writing has focused on celebration and integration. Invisible speaks of survival and the real impacts racism has on the lives of Indian New Zealanders. It uncovers a story of exclusion that has rendered Kiwi-Indians invisible in the historical narratives of the nation.

New Zealand's History of Excluding Kiwi-Indians

Invisible

Angela Wanhalla

Angela McCarthy

In contrast to much scholarship on cross-cultural encounters, which focuses primarily on contact between indigenous peoples and ’settlers’ or ’sojourners’, this book is concerned with migrant aspects of this phenomenon – whether migrant-migrant or migrant-host encounters – bringing together studies from a variety of perspectives on cross-cultural encounters, their past, and their resonances across the contemporary Asia-Pacific region. Organised thematically into sections focusing on ’imperial encounters’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ’identities’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and ’contemporary citizenship’ and the ways in which this is complicated by mobility and cross-cultural encounters, the volume presents studies of New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Vanuatu, Mauritius and China to highlight key themes of mobility, intimacies, ethnicity and ’race’, heritage and diaspora, through rich evidence such as photographs, census data, the arts and interviews. Demonstrating the importance of multidisciplinary ways of looking at migrant cross-cultural encounters through blending historical and social science methodologies from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers and historians with interests in migration, mobility and cross-cultural encounters.

Migrant Cross-Cultural Encounters in Asia and the Pacific

Jacob Edmond

Henry Johnson

Recentring Asia forces the reader to rethink the centre not as a single site towards which all is oriented, but as a zone of encounter, exchange and contestation.

Histories, Encounters, Identities

Recentring Asia

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji’s indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages, workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within colonial worlds and practices. The “community within” the asylum is a feature in Leckie’s study, with attention to patient agency to show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds, confinement, and constraints—ranging from straitjackets to electric shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the community, and that “reading” asylum archives sheds new light on race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji. Exploring the meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define normality and abnormality and also how communities respond. Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a reality for all in postcolonial societies.

Jacqueline Leckie

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