RIS ID
109365
Abstract
The cultural politics of Australian colonialism revolve around discourses of paternalism and the ' protection' of Aboriginal people. Understanding how paternalism reproduces itself transgenerationally, and between whites and Aboriginal people, between subordinated groups, between women, is one way to approach its limits. Starting with this premise, I examine the ways in which paternalism reproduces itself, such that even today white paternalistic attitudes towards Aboriginal people and culture are pervasive. I focus here on Mary Ellen Jordan' s Australian memoir Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land (2005), which is critical of, and complicit with, the biopolitical power of paternalism and its accompanying rhetoric of 'protection ' . I read this memoir within the context of a broader, shifting genealogy of protection within Australian cultural history, teasing out some of the implications of the capacity of paternalism to mutate and to retain its cultural and political influence.
Publication Details
Probyn-Rapsey, F. (2007). Paternalism and complicity: or how not to atone for the 'Sins of the Father'. Australian Literary Studies, 23 (1), 92-103.