Abstract
The paper explores the idea of settlement in each of its three major senses: as a place of human habitation; as a fixed and stable order of habitation; and as a political consensus reconciling fractious groups. Arguing that traditional accounts of settlement depend, with a kind of pastoral nostalgia, upon a view of abstraction and social complexity as in themselves harmful, it follows through the implications of the concept for ways of dealing with the stranger, and it uses a drawing by the nineteenth-century indigenous Australian artist Tommy McRae, done about 1890 and entitled Corroboree, or William Buckley and dancers from the Wathaurong people, to propose a counterfactual model through which a settlement with the stranger might be imagined.
Highlights
Cultural Studies has a way of thinking about strangers that goes something like this
It posits that we used to live in homogeneous, face-‐to-‐face communities in which we knew each other more or less intimately and strangers were readily identifiable outsiders; we live in communities of a different scale and mix where we are all structurally strangers to each other. (This is a restatement of Tönnies distinction between Gemeinschaft, community, and Gesellschaft, society.)[1] Second, it goes on to propose that our former habits of sociability and suspicion of strangers persist and are dysfunctional, tending to give rise to forced homogeneities and an ethnically-‐based politics of identity which undermine the political imperative of living with difference
It concludes that a cosmopolitan politics based on welcoming heterogeneity and overcoming parochial narrowness is the only ethically and pragmatically viable way of coping with the constitutive role of the stranger in our world
Summary
Cultural Studies has a way of thinking about strangers that goes something like this. The parish in which the vagrant Philip North is legally settled is required to have the care of him in order that he may cease to be a vagrant—a displaced or placeless person, a taxonomic anomaly In each of these cases settlement is a problem rather than the organic status that the law takes it to be. Buckley is multiply a stranger: in the white world from which he has escaped; in the Aboriginal world where he has a peripheral belonging; and in that world as it exists within the interstices of the white world Even within this community of dancers, there are partial insiders and outsiders: it is Buckley and the dancer to his left who occupy an anomalous space, a certain solitude in the midst of this group.
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