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Keynote Speakers

Professor Ann Curthoys

Keynote Address/Public Lecture: 'White British, and Genocidal'
Venue: Charles Pearson Theatre, University of Melbourne
Date: Thursday 4 December 2008
Time: 6.30pm

My title pays homage to Catherine Hall, noted scholar of the 'new imperial history' especially in her path-breaking book, Civilizing Subjects. The title echoes that of her earlier book, White, Male, and Middle Class, which explored through a series of essays the connections between racial identity, gender identity, and the operations of class. I want to explore these too. In addition, I want to tease out the connections and dissonances historically between white identities and British identities, and the relationship of both of these to the destructive impact of colonization in the Australian colonies. I want to consider where historical responsibility lies for the enormous destruction of life and society wrought by the process of colonization (the British authorities? the settlers? colonial governments?), and to investigate further the relationship between racial identity and colonizing practice. Considering these questions means thinking about the ways in which the three distinct fields of whiteness studies, the 'new' Imperial history, and comparative genocide studies currently relate to one another, and the possibilities for further dialogue between them in the future.

Ann Curthoys is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and was the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University from 1996 to November 2008. From 17 November she will be an ARC Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her major project is a study of the complex and changing three-way relationship between the British imperial authorities, the British settlers, and Indigenous peoples in the Australian colonies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Ann was educated at the University of Sydney (BA Hons, 1967), Sydney Teachers' College (Dip. Ed., 1967), and Macquarie University, Sydney (PhD, 1973). Earlier in her career she taught Women's Studies at ANU and History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has written about many aspects of Australian history, including Aboriginal-European relations, racially restrictive immigration policies, Chinese in colonial Australia, journalism, television, and 'second wave' feminism. She also writes about historical theory and historical writing. Her books include Freedom Ride: A freedomrider remembers (2002), winner of the Stanner Prize; (with John Docker) Is History Fiction? (2005); and (with Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly) Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People (2008).

She is currently writing a short book with Ann McGrath for UNSW Press called How to Write History that People want to Read.

Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Keynote Address: 'Writing off Indigenous Sovereignty: White possession within the United States' Whiteness Studies literature'

The field of Whiteness studies is not a uniquely white enterprise, African Americans have commented on and written about whiteness since the early 1800s (Bay 2000). African American scholarship has been influential, particularly the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and more recently Toni Morrison whose seminal text Playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (1992) challenged the naturalized whiteness of American literature by illuminating how the omnipresence of African Americans has historically shaped it. She exposes the embedded racial assumptions that enable whiteness to characterize itself in the literary imagination in powerful and important ways. In her analysis of Hemmingway's To Have and to Have Not, Morrison illustrates how black men and women were positioned as inferiors within his texts to prop up white masculinity (Morrison 1992:76). Morrison further suggests in Black Matters that the African American presence has also 'shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the [USA] culture' (2002:266). Indigenous peoples are outside the scope of Morrison’s analysis. Through the centering of the African American presence, Native American texts that have challenged, resisted and affected the American literary imagination, politics, history and the Constitution remain invisible. This silence is an interesting discursive move considering that the best selling novels within the USA in the late eighteen century were captivity narratives. And as Native American legal scholar Raymond Williams argues it was the positioning of Indians as incommensurable savages within the Declaration of Independence that enabled 'the Founders' vision of America's growth and potentiality as a new form of expansionary white racial dictatorship in the world' (Williams 2005:35-7). The most valuable contribution of Morrison’s work for my purposes is her thesis that ‘blackness’, whether real or imagined, services the social construction and application of whiteness in its myriad forms. In this way it is utilised as a white epistemological possession. Her work opens up a space for considering how this possessiveness operates within the whiteness studies literature to displace Indigenous sovereignties and render them invisible.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is a Geonpul woman from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia. She is Professor of Indigenous Studies at Queensland University of Technology. Prior to this appointment she taught Women's Studies at Flinders University and Indigenous studies at Griffith University and the University of South Australia. Her works in progress is an edited collection with Dr Maryrose Casey and Dr Fiona Nicoll entitled Transnational Whiteness Matters, Lexington Books, Lexington (USA) and a book on white possession.

Professor Moreton-Robinson has been involved in the struggle for Indigenous rights at local, state and national levels and has worked for a number of Indigenous organisations. She was the founding President of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association which can be accessed at www.acrawsa.org.au. Her research interests include Whiteness, Gender and Race within Law, Nation, Society and Knowledge Production and she has published in journals and anthologies in Australia and abroad. Professor Moreton-Robinson is recognised as one of Australia's leading theorists in the field of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies.

Select Publications
Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (University of Queensland Press, 2000); (editor), Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005); (editor) Sovereign Subjects: the Manifestation of Indigenous Sovereignty (Allen & Unwin, 2007); 'Terra Nullius and the Possessive Logic of Patriarchal Whiteness: Race and Law Matters', in Changing Law: Rights, Regulation and Reconciliation, edited by Rosemary Hunter and Mary Keyes (Ashgate, 2005); 'Whiteness Matters: Implications of Talkin' up to the White Woman', Australian Feminist Studies 21(50), 2006.

Professor Lynette Russell

Keynote Address: 'Race Incarnadine: The Fluidity of Nineteenth-century Categories of Race, Colour and Competency'

This paper is drawn from research on nineteenth century maritime industries and the role played by Aboriginal seamen. The paucity of historical sources documenting these lives has presented both challenges and opportunities. Perhaps the most unexpected and interesting consequence has been the enabling of space in which to imagine the lives and labours of these roving mariners. My approach is built on a theoretical framework which interrogates conventional understandings of racial categories and cross-racial relations and is indebted to whiteness and post-colonial studies. The categories of race and colour like the ocean itself are shown be fluid and fluctuating. At times the sea acts as a mirror in which we can see the reflection of life on land reversed and inverted, other times it is a lens which sharpens our focus. The great American author Hermann Melville emphasized that the sea was a 'great highway, where you meet more travelers'. After his time whaling in the Pacific, he observed that ships were manned by multi-racial crews; travelers from all over the world. They were European, American, Australian-native and colonial.

From the perspective of Australia little research has been done on Aboriginal participation in pelagic-whaling. Generally Indigenous people are depicted as unwitting victims of British colonialism and by the mid-nineteenth century many Aboriginal people in south-eastern Australia had been rounded up onto missions or government stations. At sea Indigenous men were judged not on the basis of their skin colour but rather on the basis on their skills and expertise. William Lanné, the so-called 'last Tasmanian Aboriginal man' first went whaling in 1851, the same year Melville published Moby Dick. Melville's writings on shipboard race relations and friendships has particular pertinence and value. Lanné, his relative Henry Whalley and their compatriot Walter George Arthur all joined the chequerboard crews of Pacific whalers, where they escaped the miseries of the Government run Oyster Cove station where death and deprivation prevailed. This paper explores how race, colour, competency and colonialism can be re-configured and re-considered through an engagement with whiteness theory and, a biographical approach to the lives of Lanné and others pitched against the rich tapestry of materials offered in Melville’s whaling novels.

Lynette Russell is hold the Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, where she also Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She trained as an archaeologist before turning to historical and Indigenous studies and the application of post-colonial theory. She has published widely in the areas of archaeological theory, Aboriginal history, post-colonialism and representations of race. She has been a visiting fellows at a number of institutions including Cambridge University, the University of British Columbia and Klagenfurt in Austria. She is currently working on a new book on Indigenous workers in the early whaling and sealing industry.

Select Publications
A Little Bird Told Me (Allen and Unwin, 2002); Savage Imaginings: historical and contemporary representations of Australian Aboriginalities (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001); (editor), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Interactions in Settler Colonies (Manchester University Press, 2001); (editor), Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia (University of Hawaii Press, 2006); (with Margery Fee) '"Whiteness" and "Aboriginality" in Canada and Australia: Conversations and Identities', Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007).

Associate Professor Matt Wray

Keynote Address: 'Whiteness Studies and Boundary Theory: New Contributions and Future Research'

This paper briefly traces the development of whiteness studies in the United States from 1990 to 2008. I begin by focusing on the variety of theoretical engines that powered whiteness studies in this early period and track their influence across the humanities & social sciences. I do so in part by offering a first-hand account of the Making and Unmaking of Whiteness Conference at UC Berkeley in 1997. I then offer my assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of these early approaches, before taking up the question of the relatively recent influence of boundary theory on whiteness studies. After a brief explication of boundary theory and its significance for whiteness studies and for ethnoracial research more generally, I survey some of the recent contributions in both US and international contexts and put forth several lines of inquiry for future research.

Matt Wray is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University. Wray's research and teaching areas encompass race and ethnicity, medical sociology, and cultural sociology. He completed his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000 and spent the following academic year as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is a former editor of the internet journal, Bad Subjects (eserver.org/bs) and co-editor of the Bad Subjects Anthology from NYU Press. Wray is currently researching and mapping the sociological dimensions of suicide in Las Vegas as a 2006-2008 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University.

Select Publications
Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2006); "That Ain't White: The Long and Ugly History of 'Trash' Talk." American Sexuality Magazine. (May 2007); Brander Rasmussen, Birgit, Eric Klinenberg, Irene Nexica, and Matt Wray, eds. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke University Press, 2001; Wray, Matt and Annalee Newitz, eds. 1997. White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge, 1997).

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