The urban frontier and the abduction of the racialized body

Through a discussion of Nyungar artist Dianne Jones's photographic series Men's Business, this essay examines how Jones's images connect with themes of Aboriginality, occupation and place. Set in Perth, Kojunup and Northam, the series is a response by Jones as an Aboriginal woman to the representation of Aboriginal men in Australia around the Northern Territory Intervention. Drawing on Fanon's concept of racially marked bodies abducted from specific time and place, the essay argues that pervasive depictions of Aboriginal men as violent are having an impact throughout Australia. These negative depictions reignite the archive of colonialist imaginings of the black male body as ‘terror’ and a legitimized object for classification and dissection. Jones photographs the men in her family to reinscribe the specifics of locality and counter the effect of stereotypical perceptions. The essay explores how the images in Men's Business can be read as loaded ‘family portraits’, engaging with dominant racialized representations of family while foregrounding suburbia as the ‘urban frontier’ of contemporary place-making and place-taking. The exploration of locality and subjectivity in this analysis queries imperialist constructions of landscape and history central to the creation of Australian national identity

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