Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Dr Aileen Moreton-Robinson "talks up" in this provocative interrogation of feminism in representation and practice. As a Geonpul woman and an academic, she provides a unique cultural standpoint and a compelling analysis of the whiteness of Australian feminism and its effect on Indigenous women.Through an extensive range of articles by non-white scholars and activists, she demonstrates the ways whiteness dominates from a position of power and privilege as an invisible and unchallenged practice. She illustrates the ways in which Indigenous women have been represented through the publications and teachings of white Australian women. Such renderings of Indigenous lives are in contrast to the many examples provided of life writings by Indigenous women themselves.Persuasive and engaging, Talkin' Up to the White Womanis a timely argument for the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives in developing the teachings and practices that impact on Australia's pluralistic society.

Aboriginal Women and Feminism

Talkin' Up to the White Woman

The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have their roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies literature is central to Moreton-Robinson's reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness--displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, thereby sidestepping thorny issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of how the prerogatives of white possession function within the role of disciplines.

Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

The White Possessive

Indigenous rights in Australia are at a crossroads. Over the past decade, neo-liberal governments have reasserted their claim to land in Australia, and refuse to either negotiate with the Indigenous owners or to make amends for the damage done by dispossession. Many Indigenous communities are in a parlous state, under threat both physically and culturally. In Sovereign Subjects some of Indigenous Australia's emerging and well-known critical thinkers examine the implications for Indigenous people of continuing to live in a state founded on invasion. They show how for Indigenous people, self-determination, welfare dependency, representation, cultural maintenance, history writing, reconciliation, land ownership and justice are all inextricably linked to the original act of dispossession by white settlers and the ongoing loss of sovereignty. At a time when the old left political agenda has run its course, and the new right is looking increasingly morally bankrupt, Sovereign Subjects sets a new rights agenda for Indigenous politics and Indigenous studies.

Indigenous sovereignty matters

Sovereign Subjects

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice. Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

Engagements in First World Locations

Critical Indigenous Studies

Whitening Race comes to fruition at a time in world history and global politics when questions about race require critical investigation and engagement. Since the 1990s international scholars have developed a powerful cultural critique by making whiteness an analytical object of research. Whiteness has become the invisible norm against which other races are judged in the construction of identity, representation, subjectivity, nationalism and the law. With its focus on Australia, the book engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia. Aileen Moreton-Robinson has brought together scholars from a range of disciplines: philosophy, cultural and gender studies, education, social work, sociology and literary studies. All engage critically with the location of the social and discursive construction of whiteness.

Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism

Whitening Race

This is an edited volume with contributions by leading scholars on the central epistemological, theoretical, political, and pedagogical questions and debates that constitute the discipline of Indigenous Studies. The volume emerges from a 2012 symposium hosted by the Indigenous Studies Research Network at Queensland University of Technology. The volume is organized into three sections: the first section includes essays that interrogate the embeddedness of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the essays in the second section explore the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section's essays are devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice. Moreton- Robinson's introductory essay provides a brief history of the discipline.

Chris Andersen

Brendan Hokowhitu

Linda Tuhiwai-Smith

Steve Larkin

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies is the first comprehensive overview of the rapidly expanding field of Indigenous scholarship. The book is ambitious in scope, ranging across disciplines and national boundaries, with particular reference to the lived conditions of Indigenous peoples in the first world. The contributors are all themselves Indigenous scholars who provide critical understandings of indigeneity in relation to ontology (ways of being), epistemology (ways of knowing), and axiology (ways of doing) with a view to providing insights into how Indigenous peoples and communities engage and examine the worlds in which they are immersed. Sections include: • Indigenous Sovereignty • Indigeneity in the 21st Century • Indigenous Epistemologies • The Field of Indigenous Studies • Global Indigeneity This handbook contributes to the re-centring of Indigenous knowledges, providing material and ideational analyses of social, political, and cultural institutions and critiquing and considering how Indigenous peoples situate themselves within, outside, and in relation to dominant discourses, dominant postcolonial cultures and prevailing Western thought. This book will be of interest to scholars with an interest in Indigenous peoples across Literature, History, Sociology, Critical Geographies, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Native Studies, Māori Studies, Hawaiian Studies, Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Race Studies, Queer Studies, Politics, Law, and Feminism.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson

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