Frontier Skirmishes: Half-Castes, Hoaxes and White Aboriginals in Contemporary Australian Paraliterary and Literary Discourse

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Russell Brian West-Pavlov
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2006 to 2011
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 21398322

This project takes contemporary debates over the Australian colonial frontier as symptoms of deeper cultural concerns in Australian society. It investigates a number of related discursive `frontier skirmishes¿, debates which manifest still unresolved unease about the relationship between White Australia and indigenous society,focussing on recent `border-blurring¿ figures such as¿ `mixed-blood¿, `inauthentic¿ indigenous artists,¿ white writers and artists who have hoaxed indigenous art or fiction¿ the figure of the `white Aboriginal¿ in recent fiction¿ the `half-caste¿ protagonists of the `Stolen Generations¿These debates are read in the light of a number of prominent 1990s controversies, commonly known as `the history wars¿, in which by conservative historians suggested that frontier clashes between Aboriginals and white settlers were less brutal than claimed by critical historians in the 1970s and 1980s. These paraliterary and literary phenomena can be interpreted as displacements into the cultural realm of frontier conflicts wars along the borders of white colonial settlement. Long since terminated as real armed conflicts, these erstwhile skirmishes none the less continue to resonate in the consciousness of white Australia. The project suggests that the contemporary debates are primarily but not merely of symbolic character. They are projections onto the cultural plane of erstwhile settler-native conflicts, discursive configurations massively present in the public sphere, and thus continue to influence policy decisions in areas such as funding for indigenous organizations, the legal proceedings over land-rights claims, or legislation such as mandatory sentencing which principally targets indigenous people.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants