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Notes
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Epigraph:
Sergeant Hall was remarkably progressive in his ideas particularly for a policeman. He understood it was necessary to raise the level of the debate.
Raise it? Raise it from the level of troublesome indigenous fauna, of vermin control, of eradication and slaughter; raise it to the level of animal husbandry.
...
And need I repeat radical, progressive thoughts of the time?-Kim Scott, Benang, pp. 75-76
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Biopolitical Correspondences : Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 20-42) 'How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with what Michel Foucalt called biopolitics? Biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population - often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian representations and imaginaries. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault's identification of these two forms of power, 'the disciplining of individual bodies...and the regularization of life processes of aggregate human populations' has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of 'the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized', and the resultant 'colonial order of things' (4).' (Author's introduction, 20)
-
Biopolitical Correspondences : Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 20-42) 'How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with what Michel Foucalt called biopolitics? Biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population - often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian representations and imaginaries. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault's identification of these two forms of power, 'the disciplining of individual bodies...and the regularization of life processes of aggregate human populations' has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of 'the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized', and the resultant 'colonial order of things' (4).' (Author's introduction, 20)
Last amended 20 Jul 2011 14:32:36
157-183
Need I Repeat? : Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Postcolonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang
Subjects:
- Benang : From the Heart 1999 single work novel
- Capricornia : A Novel 1938 single work novel
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