The colonial entanglement, 1905–1945

Palmer, Jack

doi:10.4324/9781315122366-5

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Forestalling the guilt attendant upon the massacre of peoples who were simply resisting the theft of their ancestral territories, the first settlers justified their actions through discourses which "removed Aborigines from the European's sphere of moral custody." 3 Constructing "primitive" peoples as morally and intellectually defective, closer to animals than civilized human beings, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century racial theoreticians provided timely support for "the crudely homicidal eliminationism" 4 on which the success of Australia' s colonization would rely. For if, as the men of science suggested, the life of a "savage" was a "life devoid of value," the extermination of Native tribes who obstructed colonial expansion could hardly be regarded as cause for moral censure.…”

Section: à à àmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Collingwood–Whittick¹

2018

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: à à àmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Collingwood–Whittick¹

2018

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…35 Since 2000 scholars such as Palmer and Straus have criticized the Convention for excluding homosexuals. 36 Feindel in 2005 argued for a redefinition of genocide to include 'sexual orientation'. 37 A legal extension of group categories seems necessary to consider; moreover the social meanings of genocide are not reducible to law.…”

Section: The Meaning Of Genocidementioning

confidence: 99%

Genocide and Global Queer Politics

Waites

2017

Journal of Genocide Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents a critical analysis of the relationship between the concept genocide and global queer politics, offering an original mapping and examination of the discourse of genocide in this respect. Starting from the beginnings of genocide discourse with Lemkin and the Genocide Convention, existing literature is analyzed to reveal circumscribed usage in relation to nonheterosexual lives. The methodology combines analysis of genocide discourse with case studies. The article maps and analyzes the historically shifting form of genocide discourse, including through attention to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and demonstrates how the patriarchal and heteronormative origins of this discourse continue to have effects which exclude queer people. This analysis is developed, in particular, in relation to the absence of sexuality, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity as group categories in the United Nations Genocide Convention. Interwoven with this analysis of discourse, case study analysis is used in relation to 3 Nazi Germany, Uganda and The Gambia to establish genocidal processes focussed on homosexuality in each. The scope of claims for anti-homosexual genocide is thus extended in Nazi Germany and Uganda, and such a claim is initiated in The Gambia-while appreciating the complex relation of 'homosexuality' to African identities. It is also argued that new definitions of groups from the Rwanda Tribunal represent openings for some kinds of queer politics. The concluding section then draws on the discourse analyses of Foucault and postcolonial studies to initiate discussion of the potential discursive effects of invoking genocide in relation to homosexuality or queer politics, in particular contexts. It is argued that a greater consciousness of genocide in queer analysis and politics would be desirable, even while the existing terms of genocide discourse must be contested.

show abstract

“…Such was the extent of the violence, and the degree of official agency, there is a compelling case for it to be considered genocide (Richards, 2008). Regardless of whether it constitutes state sanctioned genocide, or "societally-led genocide", it is clear nonetheless that there was considerable public support for a policy of extermination (Palmer, 2000). There is a growing awareness, that claims such as those made by Keith Windshuttle (2003) that "there was nothing on the Aborigines' side that resembled frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance of any kind" are flawed (p. 26).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Australian children’s picture books, the Frontier Wars, and Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces

Baguley,

Kerby,

Bedford

et al. 2023

HEJ

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Frank Uhr and Debra O’Halloran’s Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain (2019) is one of the few children’s picture books that explore the Australian Frontier Wars. In terms of message, the author and illustrator subsume First Nations’ resistance into the nation’s broader celebration of its participation in foreign wars. In terms of medium, they use the overwhelmingly conservative genre of picture books to deradicalise a potentially controversial topic, one that they frame using Joseph Campbell’s conception of the monomyth. Campbell’s development of the monomyth, widely referred to by his major work The hero with a thousand faces (1949/2008) was drawn from his sustained academic study of comparative mythology. He found a similar pattern emerging in a multitude of story forms, fairy tales, songs, and sonnets, and within sacred writings, dreamings, and monologue accounts. The canonical narrative arc of the hero’s journey has three core elements. It begins as the hero receives a ‘call to adventure’ and leaves the ordinary world (Separation or Departure). He or she enters an extraordinary world that requires engagement in a range of trials and challenges (Initiation), before returning home to the ordinary world, irreversibly transfigured (Return). Multuggerah and the Sacred Mountain is framed by this trajectory, thereby ensuring a familiarity that belies the reader’s lack of knowledge as to its origin. The author and illustrator thereby avoid too overt a challenge to the ideological and genre-based expectations of their readers.

show abstract

The colonial entanglement, 1905–1945

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Genocide and Global Queer Politics

Australian children’s picture books, the Frontier Wars, and Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About