Visual Cultures and Colonialism: Indigeneity in Local and Transnational Imagery
A growing body of postcolonial research has established the importance of visual imagery in creating and popularizing ideas about race and cultural difference. Visual representation of Indigenous peoples circulated from local to transnational contexts, participating in colonial networks of global exchange and defining relations of power. One strand of analysis has revealed the complicity of Western scopic regimes and imperialism, tracing the ways that visual cultures express the colonizers' expanionist gaze. Another seeks to emphasise the role of Indigenous peoples within this relationship, identifying culturally distinct visual traditions and the reformulation of new media such as photography and museum exhibitions. Descendant re-valuation of the colonial archive is inverting colonial exhibitory practices and spectacle, producing new meanings through re-contextualisation of these images. This conference aims to bring together research and thinking on visual cultures and indigeneity that attends to local specificity as well as the global circuits of visual discourse, illuminating both colonial processes and attempts at declonisation.Program
The Visual Cultures and Colonialism Conference will take place between Friday 2nd May and Saturday 3rd May 2008.
A public lecture is scheduled for Thursday 1st May at the Koorie Heritage Trust commencing at 6:00pm. Light refreshments will be served.
The conference dinner will take place on Friday 2nd May - at a venue to be advised.
Click here for the final program (word) pdf format
Registration
You may register for this event by downloading the Registratiaon Form from the following link and faxing or mailing your details to the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies. Registration will also be available in the morning before sessions begin on 2nd and 3rd May.
Please complete the registration form (pdf format ).
Keynote Speakers
Public Lecture
Thursday 1st May, 6.00pm - 7.00pm
Ross Gibson
Research Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at UTS, author of South of the West (1992), EXCHANGES: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australia and the Pacific (1996 edited) and Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002), and films CAMERA NATURA (1985) and WILD (1993)
"Vision and Disintegration"
Europeans colonised Australia at a time when their sense of vision was undergoing extraordinary redefinition. This is the cognitive revolution that Jonathan Crary describes so thoroughly in Techniques of the Observer. For the white people, vision was being mechanically enhanced and organised for scientific, economic and self-assertive purposes. Prioritised and technologised this way, vision became disintegrated from the other senses and was set apart and 'regarded' as preeminent. Up till this juncture, of course, indigenous people were living an entirely different and germane history of the senses.
While the indigenous societies suffered a methodical disintegration from outside, the Europeans benignly disintegrated their own world from inside. By this I mean the settlers separated and elevated vision above all the other senses. This must have seemed a good idea to most colonists at the time. It must have seemed inevitable, efficient and triumphant.
There's no denying how damaging the realignments of the senses were for indigeneity -- particularly in the way new regimes of vision locked around Aboriginal people till they became treated as moribund objects rather than dynamic subjects, even so, amidst the catastrophe, a few people did seem to sense, now and then, the richness and difference of indigenous cognition, especially the multi-sensory perceptions that engendered the nuanced, indigenous understanding of the environment.
In my presentation I will examine a few moments when the possibility of re-integrating vision into the full array of senses was comprehended by some settlers.
Friday 2nd May, 9.30am -10.30am
Frances Peters-Little
'History's Like Water': Finding our own level after Howard
Frances Peters-Little, a Kamilaroi/Uralarai woman, Research Fellow and
Deputy Director, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian
National University, Producer/Writer of the ABC award winning documentary
'TENT EMBASSY' (1992) and Director/Writer of SBS’s 'VOTE YES for
Aborigines' (2007).
Saturday 3rd May, 9.30am -10.30am
Chris Healy
'Forgetting Abo Art'
Chris Healy teaches cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include; From the Ruins of Colonialism (1997), Cultural Studies Review (co-ed. 2002-6), South Pacific Museums (co-ed., 2006) and Forgetting Aborigines (in press 2008).
Abstracts
Accommodation
A number of Accommodation options are available in the vicinity of the Koorie Heritage Trust. Including:
Kingsgate Hotel
131 King St., Melbourne
Cost between $55-$139
www.kingsgatehotel.com.au
Enterprize Hotel
44 Spencer St., Melbourne
Cost between $77-$190
www.hotelenterprize.com.au
Jasper Hotel
489 Elizabeth St., Melbourne
Cost around $190
Contact telephone number: 1800 468 359
Venue
The Koorie Heritage Trust
295 King Street, Melbourne.
Tel: +61 3 8622 2600
Fax: +61 3 9602 4333
Email: info@koorieheritagetrust.com
Website: www.koorieheritagetrust.com
For further enquiries, please contact
Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies
Tel: 9905 4200
Fax: 9902 0321