Uncle Tom in the White Pacific: African-American performances of the “slave sublime” in late-colonial Australasia

In the late nineteenth century, a number of travelling African-American entertainment troupes gave performances evoking the suffering of slaves to audiences in the British settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand. These performances consisted chiefly of Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays and concerts of so-called jubilee songs. A significant portion of the Australian and New Zealand public responded sentimentally to these performances. In this article, I ask why and how this was possible given that the late 1800s was a period of hardening attitudes towards “Coloured” peoples in this part of the “White Pacific.” Why did so many Australasian settlers respond sentimentally to African-American performances of what Paul Gilroy would call the “slave sublime”? My answer is that sentimentality about African-American suffering in another place and time actually reinforced the hardening of settler attitudes towards Indigenous peoples close to home. In so arguing, I seek to relate the existing literature on “Black cultural forms” to new work on settler colonialism in late-colonial Australasia. I also take issue with those who suggest that sentimental cultural forms were no longer significant in the late 1800s, showing that they continued to play an important social and cultural role.