Approaching Whiteness
Introduction by Anne Brewster and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey link to bios
© all rights reserved
The field of critical whiteness studies has been established for over a decade in North
America and Europe, with Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (1992) being one of the foundational texts. During the decade
following the publication of this book, critical whiteness studies proliferated in North
America across a wide range of fields including literary studies, cultural studies, legal
studies, feminist and masculinity studies, sociology and critical pedagogy studies.
Labour historians and historians of slavery, in particular, have had a key role in its
development by tracing the socio-economic (as well as corporeal) profiles of
‘whiteness’. The comparatively longer presence of critical whiteness studies in North
America and Europe has meant that the field has a longer history of critical discussion
about its methodologies and modes of critique.
In Australia it is now approaching a decade since the publication of foundational texts
such as Ghassan Hage’s White Nation (1999) and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’
up to the White Woman (2000). Whereas in the US critical whiteness studies has been
largely focused on whiteness in relation to African-Americans and HispanicAmericans, in Australia it has historically been defined in relation to indigenous
people and very visibly shaped by Indigenous scholars such as Moreton-Robinson,
Wendy Brady and Lillian Holt. Their work has consolidated the multidisciplinary
field of Australian critical whiteness studies and points to the close relationship in
Australia between indigenous studies and critical whiteness studies. The current
phase of Australian critical whiteness studies is that of consolidating a presence
within the Academy, applying its analyses of white privilege in diverse cultural
arenas, commonly in readings of popular culture, anthropology, media studies,
history, film, feminist, queer and masculinity studies.
We felt that the Australian field is due for a moment of critical reflection. After more
than a half-decade of Australian critical whiteness studies we wanted to gauge its
relevance outside the academy, bring into focus its tools of critique, methodologies
and the theoretical assumptions that underpin this emergent multidisciplinary field.
Consequently, this special issue of Australian Humanities Review contains a variety
of styles and thematic and methodological concerns, from film-making, history
writing, whiteness in the ‘suburbs’, the dissemination of critiques of whiteness
through art, the reading practices of ‘white readers’, and the politics of ‘whitening’
histories.
We were especially interested in the impact of whiteness and whiteness studies in
creative practices outside the Academy. We are very pleased to include an essay by
Rolf De Heer in which he accounts for his role as a white filmmaker in working on
the award winning films Ten Canoes (winner of Prix spécial du Jury Un Certain
Regard 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival) and The Tracker (2002) LINK TO ESSAY.
In both of these films, whiteness is ‘made strange’ through different filmic
techniques. De Heer writes that he had come across issues of whiteness when working
with Indigenous people on another project n 1992. Back then he realised that a
particular film project would not get off the ground unless he “threw off the shackles
of my white privileged existence and approached things in a manner consistent with
their way of doing things”. In relation to Ten Canoes De Heer points out that working
with the community at Ramingining meant that he had to rethink his usual film
making practices and that his whiteness, his ways of going about organising his film
making (including negotiating with his cast and writers, directing the action) all came
under scrutiny. His account of how whiteness operates in this process is directed not
only at an account of making these particular films, but at filmmaking and other
creative practices more generally. De Heer’s essay provides an insight into how
‘whiteness’ constitutes a methodological challenge for film makers in Australia. It is
also, we might add, a challenge that might be taken up further in critical analyses of
Australian film.
Artist Adam Hill critiques whiteness from another perspective in his interview with
Indigenous Historian Vicki Grieves LINK TO ESSAY. Grieves and Hill discuss his
life experiences, his depictions of Australian political life in his art work and in
particular, his sense of whiteness as being inextricably linked with territorial,
‘pioneer’ racism in ‘multicultural’ suburbs like Penrith (near Sydney), where he grew
up. Grieves and Hill discuss two of his paintings from his exhibition “A SIGN OF
THE CRIMES”, held at the Mori Gallery in Sydney in May 2006. Grieves draws
attention to the ways that Hill’s art directly tackles whiteness in the form of
governmentality and territoriality, in his depiction of landscapes, roads, (as lines of
demarcation, vanishing points) and clouds which Hill describes as “a metaphor for
“government”, that is, white, looming overhead, casting an ominous shadow. In later
works there are seven, representing five states and two territories”. In Hill’s art
whiteness is concomitant with racism and dispossession. Hill’s paintings manifests
this co-presence by giving whiteness a status in ‘thing-ness’, manifesting structural
dominance, everydayness and blindness in everyday objects and symbols like road
signs, post office boxes, clouds, buildings, sheep. We are pleased to include
reproductions of two his paintings in this issue.
Philip Morrissey LINK TO ESSAY discusses the function of the child in Phillip
Noyce’s film The Rabbit Proof Fence and its return from exile by socio-political
strategies of whiteness and ethnocidal processes of colonisation. He places this film in
the context of other films featuring child characters such as To Kill a Mockingbird,
The Night of the Hunter and The Sound of Music and in the context of various writers’
(such as Daisy Bates) depictions and summations of the removal of half-caste
indigenous children from their families. He characterises the figure of the child as
simultaneously helpless and powerful and argues that the indigenous child actors in
The Rabbit Proof Fence have a theurgical function in ‘delivering half-caste children
from the netherworld to which Australia once tried to exile them’.
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey discusses the biopolitical management of Indigenous people
within the contemporary nation through an analysis of white liberal discourse on
Reconciliation LINK TO ESSAY. She looks specifically at the image of the nation as
family and the pedagogic nationalist argument for extending the ‘white’ family to
include Aboriginal kin and to ‘bind Aboriginality to whiteness’. She analyses how a
wide range of indigenous life narratives (including those by Morgan, Russell,
Pilkington-Garimara, Lalor, Scott and Brown, Kinnane, Simon and Randall) describe
familial relations between white and indigenous family members. She argues, in her
formulation of the phrase ‘kin-fused Reconciliation’, that a liberal ‘extended family’
model of the Nation is assimilationist.
In his account of Australian critical whiteness studies, Joseph Pugliese suggests that it
is ‘still characterised by an Anglocentricity that fails to situate whiteness within
larger, transnational relations of racialised power’ LINK TO ESSAY. Consequently,
his essay aims to focus on and complicate non Angloceltic histories affiliated with
whiteness, taking the diasporic histories and racialised genealogies of Calabrese
Australians as an example. He returns to the village of his birth, Spilinga, Calabria, in
a fictocritical mobilisation of anecdote, family oral histories and cultural fragments, in
order to investigate of the lived histories of ‘otherwise invisible and unspoken
transnational and diasporic spectres’.
In relation to the role of critical whiteness studies in literary studies, Alison
Ravenscroft analyses the white reader as a ‘reading effect’ LINK TO ESSAY. She
suggests that the reader who identifies as/aspires to whiteness fantasises him/herself
as the seeing one who is not seen by the other. She draws on bell hooks’ discussion of
‘black looking’ to analyse the effect of indigenous writers, conversants and
commentators assuming a black subject position and returning the gaze to become
’the seer, our interlocutor, seeing, writing us’. Ravenscroft finds that critical
whiteness studies in Australia sometimes overlooks the complexity of the
relationships between reader and writer and that this relationship is central to
questions of identity and dialogue.
We look forward to the many different directions that this field will head in over the
course of the next decade.
Anne Brewster is Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of New
South Wales. Previous contributions to AHR include an essay “Writing Whiteness:
the Personal Turn” LINK IS HERE: http://0www.lib.latrobe.edu.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-June2005/brewster.html
Fiona Probyn-Rapsey is a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies
at the University of Sydney. Previous contributions to AHR include an essay on Rolf
De Heer’s film The Tracker: LINK IS HERE: http://0www.lib.latrobe.edu.au.alpha2.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-December2005/Probyn.html