Abstract
Australia is a country that takes the problem of its ‘others’ very seriously. That is, in the global discourse of Australia as a nation, Australia performs its relationship to otherness in serious ways.1 Perhaps even more specifically, it could be said that Australia performs itself as a nation that is deeply concerned with otherness as a problem, and it does this as a way of creating an image of its self-composure. In shoring up its borders, literally and metaphorically, through languages that claim meanings about its others (and that therefore bring those others into being, often as immaterial others whose bodies do not matter), Australia produces a global sense of its own self-certainty. Australia produces itself as a nation that is strong and that can stand alongside other nations who also other their others. In this way, Australia is at its core aspirational, unsettled with its Antipodean sense of distant, ‘down-underness’, working hard to push that to the side so that it might perform itself as one of the same.
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Notes
See Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003)
Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, ‘“Racial Suicide”: The Re-licensing of Racism in Australia’, Race Class 39.1 (1997), pp. 1–19.
Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008), p. 5. Healy is building on the words of Marcia Langton.
Stephen Muecke, ‘Lonely Representations: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies’, Journal of Australian Studies 16.35 (1992), pp. 32–44, p. 43. Italics in original.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 5–6
Ghassan Hage considers these effects through the now well-established multicultural food fair that emerged in 1980s multicultural policies. See White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 117.
See Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge: 2004).
Kelly Jean Butler, Witnessing Australian Stories: History, Testimony, and Memory in Contemporary Culture (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2013), p. 25.
David Rowe and Deborah Stevenson, ‘Sydney 2000: Sociality and Spatiality in Global Media Events’ in Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (eds.) National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 197–214, p. 197.
Michael Cohen, Paul Dwyer and Laura Ginters, ‘Performing “Sorry Business”: Reconciliation and Redressive Action’ in Graham St John (ed.) Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 76–93, p. 85.
Catriona Elder, Angela Pratt and Cath Ellis, ‘Running Race: Reconciliation, Nationalism and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41.2 (2006), pp.181–200, p. 182. Italics in original.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 28.
Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
Michael Parsons, ‘The Tourist Corroboree in South Australia to 1911’, Aboriginal History 21 (1997), pp. 46–69, p. 46, p. 47–8.
Michael Parsons, ‘“Ah That I Could Convey a Proper Idea of this Interesting Wild Play of the Natives”: Corroborees and the Rise of Indigenous Australian Cultural Tourism’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2 (2002), pp. 14–26, p. 17.
Former Indigenous Tourism Australia Executive Chairman Aden Ridgeway quoted in Andrew Bain, ‘Destination Dreaming’, Australian Geographic 88 (October-December 2007), pp. 72–85, p. 75.
Rosita Henry, ‘Dancing Into Being: The Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park and the Laura Dance Festival’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 11.3 (2000), pp. 322–32, p. 329. This might be considered in comparison to Chris Healy’s discussion of walking the Lurujarri Heritage Trail north of Broome in Forgetting Aborigines, pp. 181–202.
Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 3, quoting Jonas Barish;and p. 33.
Maryrose Casey, ‘Carnivalising Sovereignty: Containing the Indigenous Protest within the “White” Australian Nation’, About Performance 7 (2007), pp. 69–84, p. 75.
Marcia Langton, ‘Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water: The Social and Spiritual Construction of Water in Aboriginal Societies’ in Bruno David, Bryce Barker and Ian J. McNiven (eds.) The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), pp. 139–59, p. 139, p. 159
Bruno David and Meredith Wilson (eds.) Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), pp. 253–69, pp. 263–4.
Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 3. My italics.
Patrick Wolfe, ‘On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 33.2 (1991), pp. 197–224, p. 198.
Gillian Cowlishaw, ‘Mythologising Culture Part 1: Desiring Aboriginality in the Suburbs’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 21 (2010), pp. 208–27, p. 212.
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© 2014 Bryoni Trezise
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Trezise, B. (2014). Becoming Other-wise: Remembering Intercorporeal Indigeneity Down Under. In: Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336224_3
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