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Need I Repeat? : Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Postcolonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2010... 2010 Need I Repeat? : Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Postcolonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang
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Notes

  • Epigraph:
    Sergeant Hall was remarkably progressive in his ideas particularly for a policeman. He understood it was necessary to raise the level of the debate.
    Raise it? Raise it from the level of troublesome indigenous fauna, of vermin control, of eradication and slaughter; raise it to the level of animal husbandry.
    ...
    And need I repeat radical, progressive thoughts of the time?
    -Kim Scott, Benang, pp. 75-76

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature Nathanael O'Reilly (editor), Youngstown : Cambria Press , 2010 Z1748637 2010 anthology criticism

    'The primary objectives of the essay collection are to emphasize, highlight, and examine the postcolonial nature of Australian literature. Within postcolonial studies, literature from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean is often privileged, causing the literature of settler societies such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand to be ignored. This collection provides ample evidence that Australian literature is indeed postcolonial literature, that it deserves more recognition as such, and that postcolonial reading strategies provide immensely fruitful methods for analyzing Australian texts. Moreover, the collection seeks to fill a gap in postcolonial studies.
    Essay collections focusing on the postcolonial nature of national and regional literatures have previously been published; however, Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature is the first collection to focus exclusively on Australian literature as postcolonial literature and the first collection of essays on Australian literature in which all the contributors write from a postcolonial theoretical perspective. It is thus a groundbreaking work that makes an important contribution to both Australian literary studies and postcolonial studies.

    'Narrow definitions of "postcolonial" that exclude settler colonies such as Australia not only serve to marginalize rich bodies of literature and literary criticism, they also ignore and/or obscure the fact that there are many kinds of postcolonialism, many types of postcolonial societies, and many ways for texts to be postcolonial. Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, as a body of work, insists that Australian literature is postcolonial literature and deserves equal status with the literature of other postcolonial nations' (Publisher website).

         Youngstown : Cambria Press , 2010     pg. 157-183
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Works about this Work

Biopolitical Correspondences : Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity Michael R. Griffiths , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 20-42) 'How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with what Michel Foucalt called biopolitics? Biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population - often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian representations and imaginaries. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault's identification of these two forms of power, 'the disciplining of individual bodies...and the regularization of life processes of aggregate human populations' has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of 'the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized', and the resultant 'colonial order of things' (4).' (Author's introduction, 20)
Biopolitical Correspondences : Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity Michael R. Griffiths , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 20-42) 'How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with what Michel Foucalt called biopolitics? Biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population - often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian representations and imaginaries. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault's identification of these two forms of power, 'the disciplining of individual bodies...and the regularization of life processes of aggregate human populations' has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of 'the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized', and the resultant 'colonial order of things' (4).' (Author's introduction, 20)
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Last amended 20 Jul 2011 14:32:36
157-183 Need I Repeat? : Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Postcolonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benangsmall AustLit logo
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