White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art

Ian McLean (University of Tasmania)

White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
6 April 1998
Pages
216
ISBN
9780521584166

White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art

Ian McLean (University of Tasmania)

This book investigates how identities have been constructed in Australian art from 1788 to the present. Ian McLean shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has since settlement been in a dialogue (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialogue is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. Beginning with a discussion of how Australia was imagined by Europeans before colonisation, McLean traces the representation of indigeneity through the history of Australian art, and the concomitant invention of an Australian subjectivity. He argues that the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. McLean considers artists and their work within a cultural context, and also provides a contemporary theoretical and critical context for his claims.

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