Rags to riches: Aboriginal identity as deficit

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) provided generous funding support

Our Stories are our Survival

Our stories are our survival centres on the continuity of Wiradjuri culture. It is a celebration of storytelling and the joys of life within an Aboriginal Australian community. It offers an alternative to the commonly told stories of Aboriginal disadvantage. Using sport as a lens, the book brings to light the continued strength of Aboriginal culture. It places contemporary representations of Aboriginal people and communities into historical context and calls for readers to rethink what they know about Australian Indigenous communities. Bamblett places a high value on Wiradjuri storytelling and includes testimony from within the community. As a member of the Erambie community he has been given unparalleled access to stories and photographs. His love of community shines throug

Straight-line stories: Representations and Indigenous Australian identities in sports discourses

There is an increasing body of literature, and awareness, of the nature of deficit discourse and its contribution to the essentialising of Indigenous identity. Through an analysis of sports writing since the 1960s, this paper explores how such discourses can develop. Sport, however, has another attribute: it is the avenue by which Aborigines and Islanders have earned and demanded the respect of non-Aboriginal Australia; it has given them a sense of worth and pride, especially since they have had to overcome the twin burdens of racism and opposition on the field. It has shown Aborigines and Islanders that using their bodies is still the one and only way they can compete on equal terms with an often hostile, certainly indifferent, mainstream society (Tatz and Tatz 2000:33). In the aftermath of civil rights victories, the politics of �victimhood� became the predominant methodology of black advocacy and the reigning paradigm of public policy thinking (Pearson 2007:26)

Introduction

This book is based on a workshop, ‘The difference that identity makes’, held in July 2016 at the Sydney campus of New York University, on Gadigal land. The workshop was one event in a longer research program, Australian Cultural Fields, a series of related inquiries into the sociology of contemporary Australian culture. One line of inquiry was to consider the significance of Indigeneity in Australian cultural fields. We take the concept of cultural field from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu while acknowledging that, as a settler–colonial society, Australia is different from France, the object of Bourdieu’s influential study La Distinction (Bourdieu 1984). The distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous was not considered by Bourdieu and it has rarely figured in studies inspired by his cultural sociology. In Australia the distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous has become highly significant, in a variety of ways that compel our attention. We ask: how has it become significant, in the production and consumption of culture in Australia, to make the distinction Indigenous/non-Indigenous? In preparing our participants for this question, we broke it down into a series of illustrative and more particular questions: What is Indigeneity? Who has it? What is racism? And who has responsibility for it? What is ‘Indigenous music’? And what is its relationship to ‘Australian music’? How should a museum or art gallery present artefacts that are ‘Indigenous’? Does such an institution require Indigenous curators to do this properly? Why? How should sporting teams refer to the fact that some team members understand themselves to be ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Torres Strait Islander’ Australians? What is ‘Indigenous television’? How has the assertion of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction affected the field of ‘heritage’? The answer that emerged from the workshop papers is that the currency of this distinction has enabled the formation of a distinct Indigenous ‘cultural capital’

The Difference Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields

Through the struggles of Indigenous Australians for recognition and self-determination it has become common sense to understand Australia as made up of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and things. But in what ways is the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction being used and understood? In The difference identity makes thirteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous academics examine how this distinction structures the work of cultural production and how Indigenous producers and their works are recognised and valued. The editors introduce this innovative collection of essays with a pathfinding argument that 'Indigenous cultural capital' now challenges all Australians to re-position themselves within a revised scale of values. Each chapter looks at one of five fields of Australian cultural production: sport, television, heritage, visual arts and music, revealing that in each the Indigenous/non-Indigenous distinction has effects that are specific

The Difference Identity Makes

This book is a product of the project ‘Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics’ supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (DP140101970). The project was awarded to Tony Bennett (Project Director, Western Sydney University), to Chief Investigators Greg Noble, David Rowe, Tim Rowse, Deborah Stevenson and Emma Waterton (Western Sydney University), David Carter and Graeme Turner (University of Queensland) and to Partner Investigators Modesto Gayo (Universidad Diego Portales) and Fred Myers (New York University)

Discourse, deficit and identity: Aboriginality, the race paradigm and the language of representation in contemporary Australia

Deficit discourse is expressed in a mode of language that consistently frames Aboriginal identity in a narrative of deficiency. It is interwoven with notions of 'authenticity', which in turn adhere to models of identity still embedded within the race paradigm, suffering from all of its constraints but perniciously benefiting from all of its tenacity. Recent work shows that deficit discourse surrounding Aboriginality is intricately entwined within and across different sites of representation, policy and expression, and is active both within and outside Indigenous Australia. It thus appears to exhibit all the characteristics of what Foucault has termed a discursive formation, and its analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach. Developing research overseas on the prevalence and social impact of deficit discourse indicates a significant link between discourse surrounding indigeneity and outcomes for indigenous peoples. However, while there is emerging work in this field in Aboriginal education, as well as a growing understanding of the social impact of related behaviours such as lateral violence, the influence of deficit discourse is significantly under-theorised and little understood in the Indigenous Australian context. This article will problematise the issues and explore theory and methods for change