Abstract
Indigenous bodies, artefacts and material cultures have largely been represented in the public sphere in ways that reflect and reinforce colonialist understandings of Aboriginality. This essay examines how discourses which position European whiteness in a place of primacy in direct contrast with an Indigenous ‘other’ continue to prevail in the contexts of museums, the art world and the tourism industry. Keywordsthe colonial gaze; othering; politics of representation
Highlights
Throughout Australia’s history, Aboriginal bodies, artefacts and material culture have been deployed extensively in the service of colonialism
While there is a plurality of colonial discourses of Aboriginality, the political-ideological intention behind them “allows them to be correlated as a congruent system of representation” (Bhabha, cited in Morris 1992, p. 74), one that delimited accepted constructions of Aboriginality
As Langton writes of settler culture: The most dense relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors
Summary
Throughout Australia’s (white) history, Aboriginal bodies, artefacts and material culture have been deployed extensively in the service of colonialism. Europeans constructed the Aboriginal body in ways that allowed them to mitigate and reconcile the ambivalence and contradictions of the colonial project (Bhabha, cited in Morris 1992).
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