The Aboriginal Intervention in Colonial Discourse: Challenging White Control of Cross-Racial Intersubjectivity

Danica Cerce

doi:10.17576/gema-2018-1801-03

Abstract

Written against the background of critical whiteness studies, the article deals with the poetry of Romaine Moreton and Alf Taylor, two contemporary Aboriginal voices who are not yet widely recognised, although their work is powerful and compelling. They both use their medium to explore various aspects of indigeneity and to intervene in the public dynamics of racial separation. In their attempt to instil agency for the postcolonial Indigenous subject, they challenge what Sara Suleri (2003) calls “the static lines of demarcation” between colonial power and disempowered culture – the assumptions about such binary oppositions as domination and subordination, centre and margin, self and other, upon which the logic of coloniality often stands. In convening a cross-racial public, the rhetoric of the two poets’ critique generates a discursive guilt in non-Indigenous readers and foregrounds the need for the intersubjectivity of race; that is, a zone of mutual respect and cooperation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Highlights

Much of the drama of colonialist relations and the postcolonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place within vast areas of “representation and resistance” (Ashcroft, Gareth & Tiffin, 2003, p. 85). Texts, such as anthropologies, histories and literary works have played a major role in both establishing whites as authoritative in relation to nonwhite subjects and in the processes of decolonisation
The verse of Moreton and Taylor is perhaps among the most illustrative of this claim. Their critical exposure of the institutional and historical processes and logics that have retained the Australian Indigenous population in the web of hegemonic power, deeply engages both “the target publics,” which – according to Michael Lipsky (1968) – has the capability of putting into effect the political goals of the protest eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021 group, and the “reference publics,” all those who are supportive of the “protest goals” (p. 1146)
In an accusatory and disconcertingly direct poem in clipped line lengths, “No Names,” Taylor reveals his deep concern about numerous deaths in custody. He is critical of nonIndigenous Australians, who are aware of the shocking statistics, given that “the chains / of silence/ have been / broken” (Moreton, Taylor & Smith, 2000, p. 110), but do not react to them

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Much of the drama of colonialist relations and the postcolonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place within vast areas of “representation and resistance” (Ashcroft, Gareth & Tiffin, 2003, p. 85). Texts, such as anthropologies, histories and literary works have played a major role in both establishing whites as authoritative in relation to nonwhite subjects and in the processes of decolonisation The latter have involved “a radical dismantling of European codes and a postcolonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses” The verse of Moreton and Taylor is perhaps among the most illustrative of this claim Their critical exposure of the institutional and historical processes and logics that have retained the Australian Indigenous population in the web of hegemonic power, deeply engages both “the target publics,” which – according to Michael Lipsky (1968) – has the capability of putting into effect the political goals of the protest eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021 group, and the “reference publics,” all those who are supportive of the “protest goals” Their critical exposure of the institutional and historical processes and logics that have retained the Australian Indigenous population in the web of hegemonic power, deeply engages both “the target publics,” which – according to Michael Lipsky (1968) – has the capability of putting into effect the political goals of the protest eISSN: 2550-2131 ISSN: 1675-8021 group, and the “reference publics,” all those who are supportive of the “protest goals” (p. 1146)

DEMISTIFYING WHITENESS IN THE POETRY OF ROMAINE MORETON

Findings

CONCLUSION