Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 ‘The Shadows of Black People Who Have Disappeared’ : Alekos Doukas's Interpretation of the Dying Native Fantasy
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Between the late 1920s and early 1960s, Alekos Doukas (1900–62), a Greek migrant and writer, engaged with the widely held belief that Australia's Indigenous people were a doomed race. By focusing on letters, articles, and fictional writing by Doukas – all of which were written in Greek – this article brings together histories of migration and histories of settler colonial thinking about Aboriginal people. Although, as we show, the pessimistic racialist views he expressed in them were largely consistent with the view that Aboriginal people were in a state of racial decline, his views also shifted, we argue, under the influence of a Marxist analysis of colonialism and his fleeting encounters with Aboriginal people. Doukas' writings show how the dominant story of Aboriginal racial decline could be learnt, confirmed, revised, and at times idiosyncratically interpreted by non-Anglo migrants living in Australia.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 53 no. 4 2022 25494069 2022 periodical issue

    'At the end of the last century, Ann Curthoys outlined the history of ‘two distinct yet connected public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture’ in Australia. The first revolved ‘around the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’, and especially the issue of how to grapple with the lingering effects of past colonialisms. The second centred on immigration and the challenge migrants – particularly non-Anglo migrants – have presented to Australian society at large. Curthoys argued that in public commentary and within numerous scholarly fields, including history, these debates were kept largely separate until the 1988 Bicentenary and its celebration of multicultural Australia, which included Indigenous people amongst the country’s broader diversity. Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy to Federal Parliament in 1996 pushed these debates into ‘uneasy conversation’ with each other as her public rhetoric frequently attacked both Indigenous people and migrants from Asia as groups who, in her view, were unable to assimilate. Curthoys argued that the two debates ‘can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct’, but rather must be situated within an understanding of Australia as a ‘society which is colonising and decolonising at the same time’. ‘All non-Indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike’, wrote Curthoys, ‘are beneficiaries of a colonial history. We share the situation of living on someone else’s land’. (Editorial introduction)

    2022
    pg. 584-602
Last amended 1 Dec 2022 11:31:38
584-602 ‘The Shadows of Black People Who Have Disappeared’ : Alekos Doukas's Interpretation of the Dying Native Fantasysmall AustLit logo Australian Historical Studies
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