Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Extremities of Empire: Two Settler-Colonial Cities in Comparative Perspective
2 Settler-Colonial Cities: A Survey of Bodies and Spaces in Transition
3 "This Grand Object": Building Towns in Indigenous Space [Melbourne, Port Phillip]
4 First Nations Space, Protocolonial Space [Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1843-58]
5 The Imagined City and Its Dislocations: Segregation, Gender, and Town Camps [Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1839-50]
6 Narratives of Race in the Streetscape: Fears of Miscegenation and Making White Subjects [Melbourne, Port Phillip, 1850s-60s]
7 From Bedlam to Incorporation: First Nations Peoples, Public Space, and the Emerging City [Victoria, Vancouver Island, 1858-60s]
8 Nervous Hybridity: Bodies, Spaces, and the Displacements of Empire [Victoria, British Columbia, 1858-71]
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
An innovative study that reconceptualizes the frontier as urban space by comparing the lives of Indigenous peoples and settlers in two colonial cities.
Penelope Edmonds is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Urbanizing Frontiers is a fine example of comparative colonial
history. This sort of history requires research in multiple
locations often separated by vast distances, engagement with the
historiographical contours of at least two countries, and a
conceptual language to bridge them. ...[it shows] rich and
compelling evidence or the insightful analysis which is developed
with reference to postcolonial, feminist and spatial theory....
Urbanizing Frontiers is a sophisticated monograph, carefully
crafted and impressive in scope. It deserves a wide readership in
indigenous studies, colonial history, urban history and historical
geography, while also making an important and timely contribution
to both Australian and Canadian history.
*Aboriginal History, Vol 35*
Edmonds argues for a redefinition of perhaps the most contested
idea in settler colonial historiography: that of the frontier….and
offers a devastating indictment of the urban biopolitics of settler
colonialism and their effect on Indigenous society.
*Settler Colonial Studies, Issue 1*
Taking as her case studies Victoria on Canada’s west coast and
Melbourne, Australia, Edmonds makes a compelling case for the ways
in which urban and indigenous histories are deeply entwined..[with]
insightful placements of the potlatch and the corroboree alongside
the grid and the picturesque ... the urban stories she tells are
rich, complex, and densely critical ... Urbanizing Frontiers is an
outstanding contribution to the nascent literature on urban
colonialism and indigenous peoples.
*Pacific Historical Review*
This is an important book, a must read not only for scholars in
Native studies, but for urban historians as well. Indeed, I found
myself excitingly quoting from it and footnoting it while preparing
a manuscript before I could sit down and systematically read it for
the purposes of this review ... One of the strengths of this book,
indeed, is Edmonds’ nuanced analysis of gender. We not only see
indigenous women in a wide variety of roles in both places from
oyster traders to victims of sexual abuse, we also see how critical
gender was in the discursive construction of place
*Australian Historical Studies*
Urbanizing Frontiers sheds much-needed light on the spatial
mobility of the developing settler colonial city where ‘mutual,
albeit uneven, interactions, of colonization and Indigenization
were, for a short time part of the tenor of the early
settler-colonial landscape’. Edmonds is truly interdisciplinary in
her research and conceptualisation of these two sites and she makes
an important contribution to the understanding of Australian and
Canadian history, as well as the other discourses of colonialism,
race and urban geography.
*History Australia*
An excellent work of comparative colonial history...the casual
reader of British Columbian or Australian history as well as the
academic of urban studies, policy, urban geography, colonial,
gender and race history should consider reading this book.
*Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire, Vol.
XLVlI, Autumn/automne 2012*
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