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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Aboriginal Performance as War by Other Means in the Nineteenth Century,
single work
criticism
The author has focussed this paper 'on what happens when the people framed as possessions refuse to co-operate and insist on constructing their own identities and ontologies and assert their authority, not only in the past, but also in the present...'Note: Includes bibliography
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[Review Essay] : The Postcolonial Eye : White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race,
single work
review
— Review of The Postcolonial Eye : White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race 2012 single work criticism ;'The first chapter of Alison Ravenscroft’s The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race begins with a description of a photograph, property of the South Australian Museum, series AA346. This photograph is one of thousands taken during the Board for Anthropological Research’s Harvard and Adelaide Universities’ 1938 expedition. In it, two Murri girls stare at us, one with a shaved head, the other wearing a card marked ‘N1474’. What we see in this photograph, the violence of colonial history, is striking, but equally (perhaps more) striking, Ravenscroft suggests, is what we fail to see. “Who were these girls and what happened to them after the camera closed its eye and the photographer turned away?” she asks (7). Although we can see signs of colonial subject formation—exemplified by the name ‘N1474’—no matter how closely we look, we cannot see the girls’ fate, nor the fate of the researcher behind the camera, the one “who looked upon an image from which he excluded himself but in which he was implicated nevertheless” (7). Furthermore, “How [are we] to bring such a scene into writing?” Ravenscroft asks, implicating herself (as well as us, as readers of cultural studies and co-viewers of this photograph) in the categorical violence perpetrated by the invisible photographer (7).' (Introduction)