ABSTRACT
Indigenising transnationalism requires a rejection of the term transnational itself or at least demands that it be far more precisely deployed. The complementary approaches presented by Tony Ballantyne and Alan Lester particularly underscore how colonial and anti-colonial networks were mutually constituted. The stories of Te Rangihiroa and Yolŋu-Macassan journeys are linked by the scientific and colonial anxieties around hybridity which they both reflect and challenge. Indigenous cultures were already mobile, connected and adaptive prior to their confrontation with colonizing powers. The new forms of networks they created in the context of European and American imperialism should thus be understood as an extension of pre-existing mobility and exchanges. Treating Indigenous mobility and networks seriously means placing them analytically on the same footing as those of 'Western' origins. Antoinette Burton suggests that if Indigenous 'travelling figures' were critics of colonial modernity, mobility seems too narrow an explanation for their criticism; criticism, in turn, seems too anodyne a category through which to understand.
