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International Workshop "Plantation Lives, Gender, and Material Culture: Queen Emma’s Networks and the (Post)Colonial Anglo-German Pacific"
17-19 June, University of Bonn (Regina-Pacis-Weg 3, 53113 Bonn) and Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne (Cäcilienstraße 29-33, 50667 Cologne)
During her lifetime, Emma Kolbe/Forsayth/Farrell (née Coe, 1850–1913), known as ‘Queen Emma of New Guinea’, was one of the most powerful private individuals and economically successful entrepreneurs in the Pacific – a woman of colour in a world dominated by men. Owning more than 60,000 hectares of plantations in New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville and various smaller islands (a region at that time occupied by the German Empire), Emma Kolbe traded not only in copra, cotton and other natural produce but also people – for whose transport she also maintained ships. Kolbe's main residence, Gunantambu in Kokopo, was considered the social hub of the Gazelle Peninsula, from where she controlled her large networks including family members (siblings, children and husbands), trading partners, and politicians. These networks, which stretched from New Guinea to Samoa, the USA and Australia, also facilitated the sale of artefacts and natural history specimens, yet another means of financing the expansion of her businesses. At the end of the nineteenth century, many German and European ethnographical museums acquired artefacts collected and sold by Queen Emma’s sister Phoebe and her husband, Richard Parkinson (Buschmann 2023).
Using the figure of ‘Queen Emma’ and her networks as a starting point, this international workshop seeks to examine practices of coerced labour and forced migration and pays special attention to gendered lives on plantations in the Western Pacific (including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Pohnpei, and Queensland) and the means to gain knowledge about these lives today. The material traces and histories of these in the Anglo-German Western Pacific and in PNG in particular at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century will be a key focus. Participants are invited to explore topics such as the formation of varying (and at times competing) notions of indigeneity, of self and other, gendered protocols, and regional, national, and transcolonial trade and personal affiliations. The workshop is also interested in questions pertaining to the legacies of these processes, how they are remembered today and the (textual, embodied, material, visual, sonic) archives available to study them. The workshop thus aims at fostering an interdisciplinary exchange among scholars who work on Pacific history, dependency studies, women’s history, gender studies, life writing, missionary history, social and cultural anthropology, provenance research, and museum and heritage studies.
Pre-Conference Book Talk "Indenture, Blackbirding and Women’s Cultures of Resistance in the Western Pacific"
16 June, 6 pm, Global Heritage Lab (Poststraße 26, 53111 Bonn)
The book talk, organized by the ARC discovery grant project “Unfreedom, Voices, Redress: Plantation Cultures of the Western Pacific” in cooperation with the Global Heritage Lab, will discuss recent publications by a writer, an artist and a historian. The three invited guests will engage in the question how indenture, blackbirding and other forms of dependency re-ordered the Western Pacific after slavery was abolished in the British Atlantic and in the US. It furthermore wants to pay special attention to not only Pacific but also Pacific women’s voices to shed light on the history of vast numbers of Indian, Pacific and Melanesian peoples displaced through (forced) migration and laboring on plantations that emerged in contexts of British (and German) colonial endeavors.
The three books discussed in this session are:
- Margaret Mishra, Women, Indenture, and Resistance (Oxford UP, 2026)
- Kirsten McGavin, Untethered: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Papua New Guinea (Kokomo Ink, 2025).
- Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Ungeographic (Pâtaka Art + Museum, 2025)
Pre-Conference Exhibition Opening "Liquid Archive" by Jasmine Togo-Brisby
16 June, 8:00 pm, Global Heritage Lab (Poststraße 26, 53111 Bonn)
What memories does water hold?
Drawing on her own family history, Jasmine Togo-Brisby’s exhibition Liquid Archive explores memory, colonial histories, and healing. Through photographs and the video work Mother Tongue (2020), she creates an immersive experience. The film shows the artist together with her mother and daughter at the wreck of the Don Juan — a ship connected to so-called “blackbirding,” the violent abduction of Pacific Islanders and their forced labour on sugar plantations in Australia.
Across generations, histories persist: in the body, in the image, and in the sea as a “liquid archive” in which loss, resistance, and care are embedded. The photographs expand this narrative. Submerged in the sea, the women’s bodies become memorials to colonial violence, while also asserting resilience, survival and healing.
"Liquid Archive" is on show from 17 June to 6 September 2026, opening hours: WED–SUN 2-6 pm.
This event is organized by the ARC discovery grant project “Unfreedom, Voices, Redress: Plantation Cultures of the Western Pacific” in cooperation with the Global Heritage Lab.
The exhibition is part of the research-exhibition project "Knowing Plants. Ecologies of Memory and Practice" at the Global Heritage Lab, University of Bonn.
BCDSS Juneteenth Lecture "I, Too, Sing America" by Tsitsi Ella Jaji
18 June, 6 pm, University of Bonn (Regina-Pacis-Weg 3, 53113 Bonn)
This lecture commemorates Juneteenth as a living tradition of freedom and memory. This year's talk by Tsitsi Ella Jaji (Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry, Duke University) will consider collaborations between Black poets and concert musicians who have long practiced this tradition. Reaching from the Jubilee Singers of Fisk, Hampton, and Tuskegee through the many settings of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry, across songs with lyrics of the Harlem Renaissance we will arrive at contemporary works, including Jaji’s own lyrics based on fugitive slave advertisements which Shawn Okpebholo set to music in his Grammy-nominated piece, Songs in Flight. The relationships forged between poet and composer, singers and accompanists, audience and performers, and even forums such as this Juneteenth gathering continue to animate the duty to memory, le devoir de memoire, a testament to the relevance of this holiday 250 years after the founding of the United States. The impact of slavery was felt across the Americas, and not only the coasts but also the interior of Africa, and networks spanning Europe and Asia. It is fitting, then that the music we consider emerges from all of these sites. This talk will culminate in group singing, as the audience joins Jaji in singing "Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing," an anthem composed by the brothers James Weldon Johnson (poet) and Rosmond J. Johson.
This event is a cooperation between the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), the North America Studies Program of the University of Bonn, and the AmerikaHaus e.V., and organized by Luvena Kopp (BCDSS).
