Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Resistance: The Refusal of Australia's First Peoples “to fade away or assimilate or just die”

During the first century of Australia's colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims' best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia's Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia's biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott's Benang and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction

Indigenous Visibility/Invisibility in Australia.

Coll : Racisme et EugénismeInternational audienceno abstrac

Not Just Telling Stories : Racial Propaganda in British Imperial and Colonial Australian Literature for Children

International audienceno abstrac

Indigenous Visibility/Invisibility in Australia.

Coll : Racisme et EugénismeInternational audienceno abstrac

Not Just Telling Stories : Racial Propaganda in British Imperial and Colonial Australian Literature for Children

International audienceno abstrac

Not Just Telling Stories : Racial Propaganda in British Imperial and Colonial Australian Literature for Children

International audienceno abstrac

Autopsy of an Afrikaner Childhood: J. M. Coetzee’s Ethical and Psychological Stock-Taking in Post-Apartheid South Africa

When Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life was first published in 1997, critics’ responses to it betrayed a certain perplexity as to how exactly the text should be treated. Coetzee’s own characteristic evasiveness when asked whether his book should be regarded as a genuine autobiographical account of his early life, or simply his latest work of fiction, did nothing to dispel the ambiguity surrounding the precise nature of the document he had produced. Starting from the premise that–critical uncertainty and the author’s own enigmatic pronouncements notwithstanding–Boyhood is indeed a bona fide memoir, the article scrutinises this text for the evidence it yields of what has motivated Coetzee’s surprising decision to write the story of his childhood self.As Charlotte Heinritz reminds us ‘The author of an autobiography never just “tells stories about his life,”’ and Coetzee is no exception. Written in the climate of profound psychic upheaval, emotional turbulence and moral stock-taking that characterised the first years of post-Apartheid South Africa, Boyhood is, I argue, driven by a desire on the author’s part to set the record straight about the kind of white South African that he is.Hitherto known for his refusal to make explicit political statements about his position on the situation in South Africa, Coetzee is at pains, throughout this record of his early life, to portray both his complex and conflictual relationship with his own caste, the Afrikaners, and the intense moral discomfort that racial segregation caused him from his earliest years. The ‘intention of self-presentation’ that, Heinritz suggests, almost always lies behind the particular memories that the autobiographical author selects, is, in Coetzee’s case, an intention to show that he is the product of what Albert Memmi refers to in his Portrait du Colonisateur as an ‘historically impossible situation’, someone whose life was de-formed by the implacable ideological system under which he grew up

Biomapping indigenous peoples : towards an understanding of the issues

International audienceWhere do our distant ancestors come from, and which routes did they travel around the globe as hunter–gatherers in prehistoric times? Genomics provides a fascinating insight into these questions and unlocks a mass of information carried by strands of DNA in each cell of the human body.For Indigenous peoples, scientific research of any kind evokes past – and not forgotten – suffering, racial and racist taxonomy, and, finally, dispossession. Survival of human cell lines outside the body clashes with traditional beliefs, as does the notion that DNA may tell a story different from their own creation story.Extracting and analysing DNA is a new science, barely a few decades old. In the medical field, it carries the promise of genetically adapted health-care. However, if this is to be done, genetic identity has to be defined first. While a narrow genetic definition might be usable by medical science, it does not do justice to Indigenous peoples’ cultural identity and raises the question of governmental benefits where their genetic identity is not strong enough.People migrate and intermix, and have always done so. Genomics trace the genes but not the cultures. Cultural survival – or revival – and Indigenous group cohesion are unrelated to DNA, explaining why Indigenous leaders adamantly refuse genetic testing.This book deals with the issues surrounding ‘biomapping’ the Indigenous, seen from the viewpoints of discourse analysts, historians, lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, museum curators, health-care specialists, and Native researchers