'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.' (Publication summary)
Table of contents
- Introduction: White Possession and Indigenous Sovereignty Matters
- Part I: Owning Property
- I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society
- The House That Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession
- Bodies That Matter on the Beach
- Writing Off Treaties: Possession in the U.S. Critical Whiteness Literature
- Part II: Becoming Propertyless
- Nullifying Native Title: A Possessive Investment in Whiteness
- The High Court and the Yorta Yorta Decision
- Leesa's Story: White Possession in the Workplace
- The Legacy of Cook's Choice
- Part III: Being Property
- Toward a New Research Agenda: Foucault, Whiteness, and Sovereignty
- Writing Off Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty
- Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of White Sovereignty
- Virtuous Racial States: White Sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
'In times of crisis I take comfort in the words of black women in whatever form, whether it’s poetry, fiction, memoir, academia, journalism or a Twitter feed. When a white police officer killed an African-American man on camera in May, and ignited the fury of the world, I found strength in the activism of Aboriginal women who continued to break through the stifling silences to shout black lives matter on our own shores too. The writing of black women is powerful because, as Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, although we come from a diversity of backgrounds and circumstances, we also share common experiences:
All Indigenous women share the common experience of living in a society that deprecates us. We share the experience of having different cultural knowledges.
We share in the experience of the continual denial of our sovereignties. We share experiences of the politics of dispossession. We share our respective countries’ histories of colonisation. We share the experience of multiple oppressions. We share in the experiences of living in a hegemonic white patriarchal society.
(Introduction)
'In a scintillating talk organised by Express Media (and available on YouTube), the Dharug/Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen speaks of the production of literature as historically being a dangerous place for Aboriginal people. I heard her say this around the time I was reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Penny van Toorn’s Writing Always [sic] Arrives Naked and Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker’s beautiful Lemons in the Chicken Wire. Araluen’s statement occupied my thinking for some months, and not just because I think it’s true. The essential aspect of resisting privilege, which white, middle-aged men like myself have been given in shedloads for free, is that the only way to address it is to continually have humbling experiences. And as we are unlikely to get such things from other white men – humiliation not being the same as being humbled – if we are not seeking out writers like Whittaker, Araluen or Moreton-Robinson, we’re making ourselves even more useless and obstructive than we already are.' (Introduction)
'In times of crisis I take comfort in the words of black women in whatever form, whether it’s poetry, fiction, memoir, academia, journalism or a Twitter feed. When a white police officer killed an African-American man on camera in May, and ignited the fury of the world, I found strength in the activism of Aboriginal women who continued to break through the stifling silences to shout black lives matter on our own shores too. The writing of black women is powerful because, as Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, although we come from a diversity of backgrounds and circumstances, we also share common experiences:
All Indigenous women share the common experience of living in a society that deprecates us. We share the experience of having different cultural knowledges.
We share in the experience of the continual denial of our sovereignties. We share experiences of the politics of dispossession. We share our respective countries’ histories of colonisation. We share the experience of multiple oppressions. We share in the experiences of living in a hegemonic white patriarchal society.
(Introduction)
'In a scintillating talk organised by Express Media (and available on YouTube), the Dharug/Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araluen speaks of the production of literature as historically being a dangerous place for Aboriginal people. I heard her say this around the time I was reading Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, Penny van Toorn’s Writing Always [sic] Arrives Naked and Gomeroi writer Alison Whittaker’s beautiful Lemons in the Chicken Wire. Araluen’s statement occupied my thinking for some months, and not just because I think it’s true. The essential aspect of resisting privilege, which white, middle-aged men like myself have been given in shedloads for free, is that the only way to address it is to continually have humbling experiences. And as we are unlikely to get such things from other white men – humiliation not being the same as being humbled – if we are not seeking out writers like Whittaker, Araluen or Moreton-Robinson, we’re making ourselves even more useless and obstructive than we already are.' (Introduction)
