This section contains 8,142 words (approx. 28 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: Attwood, Bain. Introduction to Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, edited by Bain Attwood and John Arnold, pp. i-xvi. Bundoora, Victoria: La Trobe University Press, 1992.
In the following excerpt, Attwood considers the theoretical issues surrounding white European interpretation of the Aborigine.
This [essay] is concerned with European Australians and our ways of knowing ‘the Aborigines’. In particular it considers both Aboriginalism1 as a mode of discourse which, like Edward Said's ‘Orientalism’,2 produces authoritative and essentialist ‘truths’ about indigenes, and which is characterised by a mutually supporting relationship between power and knowledge, as well as other forms of knowledge characterised by non-oppressive discursive practices, which I will call post-Aboriginalist. Aboriginalism exists in at least three interdependent forms: first, as ‘Aboriginal Studies’—the teaching, research or display of scholarly knowledge about indigenes by European scholars who claim that the indigenous peoples cannot represent themselves and must therefore be represented by experts...
This section contains 8,142 words (approx. 28 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |