Symbolic Violence: Pacific Islander Labourers and Photography

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Australian South Sea Islanders split along class lines, with time-expired and ticket-holders labourers aspiring to enter the white petty bourgeoisie. Their carte-des-visite portraits depict them in three-piece suits and crinoline dresses. Since the debate on the Pacific labour trade has been dominated by the question of whether the trade was akin to slavery, these images have been overlooked by historians and activists as they do not show clear evidence of physical violence and coercion. Drawing on the theories of class and racial domination developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, this article examines photographic portraiture of Islanders in the press in the period from 1890 to 1906. In the press, photographs of the gentleman Islander served to mock their taste and morality. Considered in the context of its public circulation, portraiture of would-be petty bourgeois Islanders was the expression of a silent but no less effective form of domination that cloaked colonial violence through the language of cultural refinement and legitimate taste. Violence against Islanders was, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, symbolic violence: it was based on the primal power of demeanours and conspicuous consumption to mask exploitative economic relations.