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“A swamp becomes the capital” : urban ecologies of empire in Suva (Fiji)
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Vandertop, Caitlin (2022) “A swamp becomes the capital” : urban ecologies of empire in Suva (Fiji). Shima, 16 (1). pp. 45-60. doi:10.21463/shima.152 ISSN 1834-6057.
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WRAP-“A-swamp-becomes-the-capital”-urban-ecologies-empire-Suva-(Fiji)-Vandertop-2022.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (789Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.152
Abstract
The nineteenth-century expansion of colonial port cities onto land reclaimed from the ocean generated both material and conceptual shifts in the relations between land and water. Focusing on the history of Suva, which was established as the British capital of Fiji in 1882, this article shows how, despite colonial accounts of successful efforts to ‘drain the swamp’, the city’s history has been narrativised as a series of urban disasters. From local critiques of the original unsuitability of ‘malarious swampland’ to indigenous oral accounts of the catastrophic consequences of abandoning hill forts, through to post- independence literary narratives of urban flooding, the reclaimed city has been imagined by its inhabitants as a shifting and precarious space whose terraqueous qualities undermine colonial narratives of a progressive ‘swamp to city’ trajectory. Showing how local accounts anticipate environmental concerns across coastal zones, this article proposes a ‘reclaimed’ urban method that connects colonial pasts to ecological futures, tracing the oceanic connections leading out from the Pacific city to other postcolonial sites.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races T Technology > TC Hydraulic engineering. Ocean engineering |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Reclamation of land -- Fiji, Colonial cities -- Fiji, Urban ecology (Sociology) -- Fiji | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Shima | ||||||
| Publisher: | Shima Publishing | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1834-6057 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 2022 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 16 | ||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 45-60 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.21463/shima.152 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 12 December 2022 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 12 December 2022 |
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