Writing/reading a life : the rhetorical practice of autobiography

This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and autobiographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the catalyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of language in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the instability of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography.

Occupy this: a dialogic derive

This dialogue is the text-based component of an evolving performative multi-media lecture. By re-reading Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, in relation to the global Occupy movement and the rise of social media, we ask: in what ways does the proliferation of digital imagery enable and limit this recent form of political activism? By subjectively responding to selective quotations from Debord's writing, we link the triumvirate of global capitalism, public space and digital technology, producing commentary on the displacement imposed by contemporary 'spectacular' technologies, the networked 'technical image' and the politics of public space.

Reading race, aboriginality in Australian children`s literature

This text looks at the ways in which Australia's indigenous peoples have been, and continue to be, represented in books for children. These varying representations have helped to colour the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of different generations of Australians.

Feminists re-reading Bourdieu: old debates and new questions about gender habitus and gender change

There is a revival of interest in Bourdieu's work and this article examines dominant trends within feminist re-engagements. It considers the insights into gender identity afforded by ‘habitus’ and ‘social field’, distinguishing between analyses of 'gender habitus', and the potential of habitus and social field for feminist analysis of change. Feminist responses to Bourdieu continue to be divided on the extent to which social field structure determines habitus, and there is a tendency to represent the relationship as too seamless and coherent. Drawing on debates within recent feminist sociology, notably the work of Lois McNay and Lisa Adkins, this article argues instead for greater acknowledgement of the instability of gender norms and the contradictory effects of crossing different social fields. A feminist rethinking of the relationship between gender change, habitus and social field is suggested, which arises from a more contextual analysis of the varying degrees of correspondence between habitus and field. This addresses the co-existence of change and continuity in gender relations and identities, and aims to move such debates beyond questions of either freedom or reproduction.

Strange reading: Keith Windschuttle on race, Asia and White Australia

In his recently published book, The White Australia Policy, Keith Windschuttle accuses academic historians of errors of fact and judgement in their accounts of white Australia. This article examines these claims of exaggeration and distortion with particular reference to the nature and meaning of race, racism and representations of Asia in Australian history. The article rejects Winschuttle's sweeping claim that academic historians have sought to make Australia appear a much more racist society than the historical record would suggest.

Identity territory: Pamela Allen's picture books in the Australian psyche

Parsons examines the dialogic space of the picture book reading, and its co-opting of the authority of the "significant other" in relation to Pamela Allen's picture books. Mapping Australian identity theory in Allen's picture books involves recognizing Australian-ness as both formed and performed at a point of intersection between colonial, migrant, and patriarchal tropes. Each of these tropes is readable through the dynamics of theater semiotics, and each is mirrored by child maturation as embodied by a movement toward adult authority.

Reading scripture from a hermeneutic of rape

In order to construct a basis for reading the Bible from a hermeneutics of rape it is argued that this experience is endemic within religious com munities and defines how those who are affected experience and speak about God. Contemporary scholarship has recognized the important work done by communities of readers in constructing the meaning of texts. Those who have been affected by rape constitute an important interpretative community who will approach scriptural texts on the basis of their experience. While the personal experience of rape is dif ficult to articulate, and thus makes the construction of a hermeneutical position hard to describe, the social location of those affected by rape is more easily analysed. From an understanding of this social location it is possible to construct a hermeneutics of rape, both in relation to those scriptural texts in which rape imagery is explicit and also in regard to those in which abusive power is less evident but no less dangerous. The article concludes that while a shared social location does not generate unitary interpretations it nevertheless should be considered as a highly significant feature of the encounter between the reader and the text.

There's no place like home : unhomely moments in three postcolonial picture books

One of the principal strands of postcolonial theory and critical practice is the interrogation of received versions of colonial history. This paper investigates the extent to which three contemporary picture books, Gavin Bishop's The House that Jack Built, John Marsden and Shaun Tan's The Rabbits, and Thomas King and William Kent Monkman's A Coyote Columbus Story, mobilise postcolonial strategies in their representations of place. In particular, it focuses on how postcolonial textuality unsettles and transgresses notions of "homeliness" in narratives involving the displacement of colonised and colonising peoples. As the shifting power relations of colonialism render unhomely what has previously been homely (especially for colonised peoples), so they involve a contrary move in which unhomely spaces are changed into simulacra of lost or abandoned homes. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's formulation of materialist historiography, Homi Bhabha describes what he terms 'the unhomely moment' as that in which personal and psychic histories intersect with the violent dislocations of colonialism. This paper will argue that such unhomely moments shape the visual and verbal narratives of The House that Jack Built, The Rabbits and A Coyote Columbus Story, all of which deal with the trauma which occurs when cultures previously geographically and psychically distant are brought into close contact with each other. Written to and for children who are citizens of postcolonial cultures, these texts disclose the unease which persists in contemporary societies where colonial histories are rehearsed and revisioned. However, the paper will argue that the three texts position readers in quite different ways; for instance, while the verbal text of The Rabbits constructs an implied author capable of speaking for the colonised and offering readers a very circumscribed subject position, Thomas King's narrative in A Coyote Columbus Story engages in a dialogic playfulness which allows readers to adopt a variety of reading positions. For each text, some key representations of unhomely moments will be considered, and the paper will explore the extent to which they construct forms of temporality which negotiate the space between history and its significances within crosscultural and intercultural formations.