AustLit

'This article problematises settler colonial theory and critical whiteness studies and their role in supporting advocacy scholarship, or scholarship purporting to uphold Indigenous political aspirations. It examines the conceptual reliance of these paradigms on binarised, orthodox representations of Indigeneity and the role of these representations in supporting particular “pro-Indigenous” political priorities, such as decolonisation. By way of example, a retrospective engagement with Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black–White Relations in Australia is offered. I argue that this text’s representation of all non-Indigenous people as “white” and “guilty” perpetrators constructs Indigenous people as “black” and (by implication) “innocent” victims. The circumscription of Indigeneity delimits the terms by which Indigenous people can articulate their interests in the dialogue proffered as evidence of decolonisation, thus rendering the dialogue a monologue. Underscoring the power of this monologue, a Métis critique of Indigenous cultural-nationalist anti-colonial movements is called upon to argue that those who employ orthodox representations of Indigeneity put their commitment to an ideological position above a negotiation of alternatives. Consequently, the task of theorising decolonisation is diminished, and those we seek to support in our scholarship remain marginalised in our representations of them.' (Publication abstract) 

'Australian Indigenous studies: research and practice is an important and timely intervention into the scholarship currently informing the design and delivery of Indigenous studies in school curricula. Aimed primarily at school teachers and guided by the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority and the Australian Institute for School Teaching, the book offers a critical response to the ideological orthodoxies evident in both contemporary Indigenous studies curricula and approaches to teaching Indigenous students and their dependence on one-dimensional, culturally over-determined representations of ‘the Indigenous’ as they are promulgated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. These representations and their continued reproduction — across various educational, governmental and other sites — typically construct indigeneity as radically different from and incommensurate with its non-Indigenous other, and it is this static binaristic notion of indigeneity that Australian Indigenous studies challenges. In making its alternative case for intercultural Indigenous studies, the book calls upon readers to complicate conventional understandings of indigeneity as a mode of identity construction and to recognise that it is simultaneously informed and made ambiguous by location-specific cultural, historical and other experiences, diverse intersubjective interactions and other intersecting layers of identity.'  (Introduction)