Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Blood Call and ‘Natural Flutters’ : Xavier Herbert’s Racialised Quartet of Heteronormativity
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'National belonging for Xavier Herbert was intimately tied to interracial sexuality. ‘Euraustralians’ (‘half-castes’) were for Herbert a redemptive motif that could assuage the ‘awful loneliness of the colonial born’ by which he hinted at the land claim of settler-colonials as spurious. Herbert’s exposure of the spectrum of interracial sex—from companionate marriage to casual prostitution to endemic sexual assault—in his novels Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975) was unprecedented and potentially game-changing in the administration of Aboriginal women’s sexuality under the assimilation era. But his deeply fraught masculinity was expressed through a picaresque frontier manhood that expressed itself through this spectrum of relations with Aboriginal women. For all his radical assertions of a ‘Euraustralian’ or hybrid nation, Herbert was myopic and dismissive of the women attached to the ‘lean loins’ he hoped it would spring from. He was also vitriolic about the white women, including wives, who interfered with white men’s access to Aboriginal women’s bodies. In this article I examine how Herbert’s utopian racial destinies depended on the unexamined sexual contract of monogamy and the asymmetrical pact to which it consigned white men and white women, and the class of sexually available Indigenous women, or ‘black velvet’, it rested on in colonial scenarios of sex.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cultural Studies Review Reprise vol. 23 no. 2 2017 13424389 2017 periodical issue

    'This issue includes a special section, guest edited by Liz Conor, that revisits, evaluates and repositions the figure of Xavier Herbert, a controversial Australian novelist and activist.

    'Elsewhere in this issue are two essays focused on question of language and culture. Michael Richardson writes about the complex relationships between political speechwriters and speechmakers, while Prithvi Varatharajan is concerned with the public utterances of contemporary Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, broadcast on Australian public radio. In a different register, Nicole De Brabandere explores the rich materiality of ordinary domestic figurines and dinnerware, while a contrasting sense of interiority pervades Vahideh Aboukazemi’s history of revolutionary Iran. And, as always, our reviews will repay your attention.' (Introduction)

    2017
    pg. 70-86
Last amended 23 Mar 2018 10:01:25
70-86 Blood Call and ‘Natural Flutters’ : Xavier Herbert’s Racialised Quartet of Heteronormativitysmall AustLit logo Cultural Studies Review
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