'Hundreds of white supremacist working-class Australians settled in Paraguay at the end of the nineteenth century, establishing a community there called Colonia Cosme. In the poetry and song of their newspaper, the Cosme Monthly, these settler colonialists reflected on the racial and class dynamics of their community, imagining affinities between their community, the defeated American Confederacy, and the White Australia policy that would accompany Australian Federation at the turn of the century. Blackface minstrelsy in particular played an important role in the colony’s cultural life, helping to establish a retrograde sense of belonging in a place largely inhospitable to their efforts. This essay considers how the Australians in Paraguay used genre and medium to fix racist identifications at the heart of their colonial culture.'
Source: Abstract.
