A Moreton-Robinson
Biographic Data
| ID | 15598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Moreton-Robinson |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Moreton-Robinson |
| SIGNATURE | MORETON-ROBINSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queensland University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4599-0007 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 86 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Monuments, Place Names and Black Lives Matter: Memorialising Captain James Cook
In this article I consider how the body of the historical figure Captain James Cook is available for consumption and commemoration every day on Indigenous lands connected by the Pacific Ocean. Consuming Cook’s memorialised body is a discursive form of cannibalism. As I have argued elsewhere, the complex relations between objects and people by which national identity, relationships and values are expressed do so within an order of things discursiv…
Incommensurable sovereignties
Indigenous sovereignties in First World locations are not grounded in the logic of capital despite attempts to rationalise them as such. In this chapter, I argue that the continuing disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty operates through the racial logics of state sovereignty’s incommensurable ontology. I demonstrate how Indigenous sovereignties challenge the philosophical premises of state sovereignty as these different forms do not share the same …
Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies
Introduction: Gender and Indigeneity
This special section on 'Gender and Indigeneity' highlights important new work by scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Hawaii. Together they challenge understandings of gender, sexuality, nature, land and bodies imposed under conditions of colonisation, and they do so by highlighting histories and ontologies not framed by the presence of colonising powers. At the same time, these authors also point to the inherent lim…
Race, Gender and Aesthetics: Representations of Indigeneity in the Artwork of Brownie Downing
This article examines the ceramic artwork produced in the 1940s and 1950s by Viola Edith Downing, also known as Brownie Downing. I focus specifically on representations of Australian Aboriginal children, and also consider how Native American and Native Hawaiian children are portrayed on ceramic plates. These plates were purchased for display in the home often as tourist souvenirs that marked the holiday experience. I argue that representations of…
Engaging the White Possessive
In this issue of Kalfou, my book The White Possessive: Power, Property, and Indigenous Sovereignty receives attention from three scholars whose work I admire and respect. George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics was seminal in conceptualizing the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty, while Fiona Nicoll’s From Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Australian National …
National Indigenous Research Knowledges Network (Nirakn)—Some Reflections and Learnings
This paper outlines the historical and policy context of the Australian Research Council funded National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN). Key learnings from four years of NIRAKN’s existence are set out, followed by a review of the higher education sector’s Indigenous research capacity building initiatives more generally
Unspeakable Things: Indigenous Research and Social Science
Aboriginal peoples historically know the social sciences as a form of violence, part of the naming and claiming of Aboriginal peoples, their lands and histories for the colonizers. From the 1800s to 1958, tens of thousands of Aboriginal individuals were taken from their homes and families and exhibited, while craniometry was used to ‘scientifically’ prove the inferiority of Aboriginal peoples, so justifying genocide and forcible assimilation. Tod…
Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach
In this article I examine how white possession functions ontologically and performatively within Australian beach culture through the white male body as lifesaver, surfer, and soldier. I draw on Butler’s idea of performativity in that a culturally determined and historically contingent act that is internally discontinuous is only real to the extent that it is repeated. Raced and gendered norms of subjectivity are iterated in different ways throug…
Virtuous Racial States: The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
In this article, I demonstrate how patriarchal white sovereignty deploys virtue to dispossess Indigenous peoples from the ground of moral value by focusing on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This will be explicated through analysing the introduction and four key rights areas that were contested by Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, and looking at core elements of their subsequent endorsement …
The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Ro…
I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging And Place In A Postcolonizing Society
In the first chapter, I examine how Indigenous ontological relations to land are incommensurate with those developed through capitalism and they continue to unsettle white Australia’s sense of belonging which is inextricably tied to white possession and power configured through the logic of capital and profound individual attachment.
Discursive Nature of Citizenship: Indigenous sovereign rights, racism and welfare reform
Citizenship is more than a status associated with a bundle of rights; it is also the formal contract by which the sovereignty of a nation is extended to the individual in exchange for being governed. Who can and who cannot contract into this status and what rights are able to be exercised is also shaped by who possesses the nation. In this article it is argued that citizenship operates discursively to contain Indigenous people’s engagement with t…
Transnational Whiteness Matters
The collection contributes to transnational whiteness debates through theoretically informed readings of historical and contemporary texts by established and emerging scholars in the field of critical whiteness studies. From a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, the book traces continuity and change in the cultural production of white virtue within texts, from the proud colonial moment through to neoliberalism and the global war on terror in…
Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa's Testimony
(2007). Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa’s Testimony. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 81-93
We shall fight them on the beaches: Protesting cultures of white possession
The way in which the patriarchal white sovereignty is exercised through protest is explored in relation to a space of everyday culture. The events at Cronulla is argued to be a protest which had rules and was a form of organised violence underpinned by a rationality of possession although it is described as riots because of the unruly behaviour of predominately white males
Towards a new research agenda: Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous sovereignty
Indigenous sovereignty as an area of study is usually analysed by legal scholars and political theorists who locate it within a judicio-political framework. This article is offered as a work in progress to stimulate sociological thinking about Indigenous sovereignty in a different way. The article considers recent work in Whiteness studies in Australia and abroad, as well as literature using Foucault's idea of the relationship between race, sover…
When the Object Speaks, A Postcolonial Encounter: Anthropological representations and Aboriginal women's self-presentations
As an Aboriginal woman currently reviewing feminist literature in Australia, I have found that representations of Aboriginal women's gender have been generated predominantly by women anthropologists. Australian feminists utilise this literature in their writing and teaching and accept its truths without question; the most often quoted ethnographic text is Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (1983a).1 Feminists' lack of critical engagement with…
Feminism and the politics of difference
Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies
1992). Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 7, No. 15, pp. 5-10
Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty
In June 2007, the Australian federal government sent military and policy into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory on the premise that sexual abuse of children was rampant and a national crisis. This article draws on Foucault's work on sovereignty and rights to argue that patriarchal white sovereignty as a regime of power deploys a discourse of pathology in the exercising of sovereign right to subjugate and discipline Indigenous peopl…
Introduction: Critical Indigenous Theory
Aileen Moreton-Robinson introduces the essays in the Critical Indigenous Theory section of the journal
Towards a new research agenda: Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous sovereignty
Indigenous sovereignty as an area of study is usually analysed by legal scholars and political theorists who locate it within a judicio-political framework. This article is offered as a work in progress to stimulate sociological thinking about Indigenous sovereignty in a different way. The article considers recent work in Whiteness studies in Australia and abroad, as well as literature using Foucault's idea of the relationship between race, sover…
Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty
In June 2007, the Australian federal government sent military and policy into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory on the premise that sexual abuse of children was rampant and a national crisis. This article draws on Foucault's work on sovereignty and rights to argue that patriarchal white sovereignty as a regime of power deploys a discourse of pathology in the exercising of sovereign right to subjugate and discipline Indigenous peopl…
Unspeakable Things: Indigenous Research and Social Science
Aboriginal peoples historically know the social sciences as a form of violence, part of the naming and claiming of Aboriginal peoples, their lands and histories for the colonizers. From the 1800s to 1958, tens of thousands of Aboriginal individuals were taken from their homes and families and exhibited, while craniometry was used to ‘scientifically’ prove the inferiority of Aboriginal peoples, so justifying genocide and forcible assimilation. Tod…
When the Object Speaks, A Postcolonial Encounter: Anthropological representations and Aboriginal women's self-presentations
As an Aboriginal woman currently reviewing feminist literature in Australia, I have found that representations of Aboriginal women's gender have been generated predominantly by women anthropologists. Australian feminists utilise this literature in their writing and teaching and accept its truths without question; the most often quoted ethnographic text is Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (1983a).1 Feminists' lack of critical engagement with…
We shall fight them on the beaches: Protesting cultures of white possession
The way in which the patriarchal white sovereignty is exercised through protest is explored in relation to a space of everyday culture. The events at Cronulla is argued to be a protest which had rules and was a form of organised violence underpinned by a rationality of possession although it is described as riots because of the unruly behaviour of predominately white males
Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa's Testimony
(2007). Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa’s Testimony. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 81-93
Introduction: Critical Indigenous Theory
Aileen Moreton-Robinson introduces the essays in the Critical Indigenous Theory section of the journal
Discursive Nature of Citizenship: Indigenous sovereign rights, racism and welfare reform
Citizenship is more than a status associated with a bundle of rights; it is also the formal contract by which the sovereignty of a nation is extended to the individual in exchange for being governed. Who can and who cannot contract into this status and what rights are able to be exercised is also shaped by who possesses the nation. In this article it is argued that citizenship operates discursively to contain Indigenous people’s engagement with t…
Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies
1992). Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 7, No. 15, pp. 5-10
Monuments, Place Names and Black Lives Matter: Memorialising Captain James Cook
In this article I consider how the body of the historical figure Captain James Cook is available for consumption and commemoration every day on Indigenous lands connected by the Pacific Ocean. Consuming Cook’s memorialised body is a discursive form of cannibalism. As I have argued elsewhere, the complex relations between objects and people by which national identity, relationships and values are expressed do so within an order of things discursiv…
Introduction: Gender and Indigeneity
This special section on 'Gender and Indigeneity' highlights important new work by scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Hawaii. Together they challenge understandings of gender, sexuality, nature, land and bodies imposed under conditions of colonisation, and they do so by highlighting histories and ontologies not framed by the presence of colonising powers. At the same time, these authors also point to the inherent lim…
Race, Gender and Aesthetics: Representations of Indigeneity in the Artwork of Brownie Downing
This article examines the ceramic artwork produced in the 1940s and 1950s by Viola Edith Downing, also known as Brownie Downing. I focus specifically on representations of Australian Aboriginal children, and also consider how Native American and Native Hawaiian children are portrayed on ceramic plates. These plates were purchased for display in the home often as tourist souvenirs that marked the holiday experience. I argue that representations of…
Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty
In June 2007, the Australian federal government sent military and policy into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory on the premise that sexual abuse of children was rampant and a national crisis. This article draws on Foucault's work on sovereignty and rights to argue that patriarchal white sovereignty as a regime of power deploys a discourse of pathology in the exercising of sovereign right to subjugate and discipline Indigenous peopl…
Introduction: Critical Indigenous Theory
Aileen Moreton-Robinson introduces the essays in the Critical Indigenous Theory section of the journal
Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies
1992). Masking gender and exalting race: Indigenous women and commonwealth employment policies. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 7, No. 15, pp. 5-10
Feminism and the politics of difference
When the Object Speaks, A Postcolonial Encounter: Anthropological representations and Aboriginal women's self-presentations
As an Aboriginal woman currently reviewing feminist literature in Australia, I have found that representations of Aboriginal women's gender have been generated predominantly by women anthropologists. Australian feminists utilise this literature in their writing and teaching and accept its truths without question; the most often quoted ethnographic text is Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (1983a).1 Feminists' lack of critical engagement with…
We shall fight them on the beaches: Protesting cultures of white possession
The way in which the patriarchal white sovereignty is exercised through protest is explored in relation to a space of everyday culture. The events at Cronulla is argued to be a protest which had rules and was a form of organised violence underpinned by a rationality of possession although it is described as riots because of the unruly behaviour of predominately white males
Towards a new research agenda: Foucault, Whiteness and Indigenous sovereignty
Indigenous sovereignty as an area of study is usually analysed by legal scholars and political theorists who locate it within a judicio-political framework. This article is offered as a work in progress to stimulate sociological thinking about Indigenous sovereignty in a different way. The article considers recent work in Whiteness studies in Australia and abroad, as well as literature using Foucault's idea of the relationship between race, sover…
Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa's Testimony
(2007). Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa’s Testimony. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 81-93
Transnational Whiteness Matters
The collection contributes to transnational whiteness debates through theoretically informed readings of historical and contemporary texts by established and emerging scholars in the field of critical whiteness studies. From a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, the book traces continuity and change in the cultural production of white virtue within texts, from the proud colonial moment through to neoliberalism and the global war on terror in…
Discursive Nature of Citizenship: Indigenous sovereign rights, racism and welfare reform
Citizenship is more than a status associated with a bundle of rights; it is also the formal contract by which the sovereignty of a nation is extended to the individual in exchange for being governed. Who can and who cannot contract into this status and what rights are able to be exercised is also shaped by who possesses the nation. In this article it is argued that citizenship operates discursively to contain Indigenous people’s engagement with t…
The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty
The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Ro…
I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging And Place In A Postcolonizing Society
In the first chapter, I examine how Indigenous ontological relations to land are incommensurate with those developed through capitalism and they continue to unsettle white Australia’s sense of belonging which is inextricably tied to white possession and power configured through the logic of capital and profound individual attachment.
Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach
In this article I examine how white possession functions ontologically and performatively within Australian beach culture through the white male body as lifesaver, surfer, and soldier. I draw on Butler’s idea of performativity in that a culturally determined and historically contingent act that is internally discontinuous is only real to the extent that it is repeated. Raced and gendered norms of subjectivity are iterated in different ways throug…
Virtuous Racial States: The Possessive Logic of Patriarchal White Sovereignty and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
In this article, I demonstrate how patriarchal white sovereignty deploys virtue to dispossess Indigenous peoples from the ground of moral value by focusing on the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This will be explicated through analysing the introduction and four key rights areas that were contested by Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand, and looking at core elements of their subsequent endorsement …
Unspeakable Things: Indigenous Research and Social Science
Aboriginal peoples historically know the social sciences as a form of violence, part of the naming and claiming of Aboriginal peoples, their lands and histories for the colonizers. From the 1800s to 1958, tens of thousands of Aboriginal individuals were taken from their homes and families and exhibited, while craniometry was used to ‘scientifically’ prove the inferiority of Aboriginal peoples, so justifying genocide and forcible assimilation. Tod…
National Indigenous Research Knowledges Network (Nirakn)—Some Reflections and Learnings
This paper outlines the historical and policy context of the Australian Research Council funded National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network (NIRAKN). Key learnings from four years of NIRAKN’s existence are set out, followed by a review of the higher education sector’s Indigenous research capacity building initiatives more generally
Engaging the White Possessive
In this issue of Kalfou, my book The White Possessive: Power, Property, and Indigenous Sovereignty receives attention from three scholars whose work I admire and respect. George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics was seminal in conceptualizing the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty, while Fiona Nicoll’s From Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Australian National …
Incommensurable sovereignties
Indigenous sovereignties in First World locations are not grounded in the logic of capital despite attempts to rationalise them as such. In this chapter, I argue that the continuing disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty operates through the racial logics of state sovereignty’s incommensurable ontology. I demonstrate how Indigenous sovereignties challenge the philosophical premises of state sovereignty as these different forms do not share the same …
Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies
Introduction: Gender and Indigeneity
This special section on 'Gender and Indigeneity' highlights important new work by scholars from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and Hawaii. Together they challenge understandings of gender, sexuality, nature, land and bodies imposed under conditions of colonisation, and they do so by highlighting histories and ontologies not framed by the presence of colonising powers. At the same time, these authors also point to the inherent lim…
Race, Gender and Aesthetics: Representations of Indigeneity in the Artwork of Brownie Downing
This article examines the ceramic artwork produced in the 1940s and 1950s by Viola Edith Downing, also known as Brownie Downing. I focus specifically on representations of Australian Aboriginal children, and also consider how Native American and Native Hawaiian children are portrayed on ceramic plates. These plates were purchased for display in the home often as tourist souvenirs that marked the holiday experience. I argue that representations of…
Monuments, Place Names and Black Lives Matter: Memorialising Captain James Cook
In this article I consider how the body of the historical figure Captain James Cook is available for consumption and commemoration every day on Indigenous lands connected by the Pacific Ocean. Consuming Cook’s memorialised body is a discursive form of cannibalism. As I have argued elsewhere, the complex relations between objects and people by which national identity, relationships and values are expressed do so within an order of things discursiv…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (17 works) · Indigenous (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Sovereignty (8 works)