Cirrus@Austlit

'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.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'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)

The International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies '... is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field[,] the journal's epistemological framework encompasses but is not restricted to Sociology, Law, Literature, Psychology, Education, Anthropology, History, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Visual and Performing Arts, Cultural studies, Queer studies, Feminism, Human Geography, Environmentalism, Postcolonial studies and Race studies." (http://www.isrn.qut.edu.au/publications/internationaljournal/ last accessed 17/05/10)

'Some of Indigenous Australian's emerging and well-known critical thinkers examine the implications 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 and the ongoing loss of sovereignty.' Source: Back cover.

In this important and beautifully written book, Aileen Moreton-Robinson gives us a compelling analysis of white Australian feminism seen through Indigenous Australian women's eyes. She unpacks the unspoken normative subject of feminism as white middle-class woman, where whitemess marks their position of power and privilege vis-a-vis Indigenous women, and where silence about whitemess sustains the exercise of that power. And she examines the consequences of practices for Indigenous women and White women.' (Source: Preface, Talkin' Up to the White Women, 2000)

'Since invasion and subsequent colonisation, Australia has a history of preferring and privileging people who have white skin. As I have remarked elsewhere:

Whiteness in its contemporary form in Australian society is culturally based. It controls institutions, which are extensions of White Australian culture and is governed by the values, beliefs and assumptions of that culture and its history. Australian culture is less White than it used to be, but Whiteness forms the centre and is commonly referred to in public discourse as the ‘mainstream’ or ‘middle ground’ (Moreton-Robinson 1998:11).' (Extract)