Aileen M. Moreton-Robinson

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, sovereignty and war.

Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory: A Methodological Tool

Abstract In this article I outline an Australian Indigenous womens standpoint theory. I argue that an Indigenous womens standpoint generates problematics informed by our knowledges and experiences. Acknowledging that Indigenous womens individual experiences will differ due to intersecting oppressions produced under social, political, historical and material conditions that we share consciously or unconsciously. These conditions and the sets of complex relations that discursively constitute us in the everyday are also complicated by our respective cultural differences and the simultaneity of our compliance and resistance as Indigenous sovereign female subjects.

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 of the Declaration.

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.

WHITENESS MATTERS: Implications of Talkin’ up to the White Woman **. I wish to thank Goldie Osuri, Suvendi Perera and Fiona Nicoll for their constructive comments on this paper.View all notes

In the year 2000 my little black book Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism was published by the University of Queensland Press. The book has been reprinted twice and has sol...

Witnessing the Workings of White Possession in the Workplace: Leesa’s Testimony

Possession is one of those little words with lots of meanings: ownership, rights, containment, domination and control. In Australia, taking possession of Indigenous lands and people by the British Crown meant a proprietary right was exercised under its law. The Crown ‘owned’ and continues to ‘own’ the land inhabited by its subjects and confers on them proprietary rights that are intangible and tangible. The colonists were formally deemed to be property owning subjects through their relationship to the Crown irrespective of whether or not they came in chains. For the development of civil rights had occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century and was instrumental in changing the nature of the feudal system to one of mercantile capitalism. Civil rights were composed of those necessary ‘for individual freedom — liberty of person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and conclude valid contracts and the right to justice’.3 This contractual relationship between white subjects and the Crown is the foundation upon which the colony and subsequent nation was built as a white possession. Since the Mabo decision, it has become popular within legal discourse to argue that Indigenous people too were subjects of the crown under British law. However, this ‘fact’ of British subject-hood was disputed by the colony of New South Wales, which turned that status into one of ward-ship setting the precedent for subsequent governments to follow.4 Indigenous people have never been recognised as property owning subjects in our own right as Indigenous peoples and this continues in current law and policy. Native title is not Indigenous sovereignty as it is nothing more than a bundle of rights to hunt, gather and negotiate as determined by Australian law. Indigenous ownership of the territory, now called Australia, constituted more than a bundle of rights long before it was colonised by white men. The refusal to recognise us as property owning subjects is one of the reasons why our existence has always

Unmasking Whiteness: A Goori Jondal's Look at Some Duggai Business

Since invasion and subsequent colonisation, Australia has a history of preferring and privileging people who have white skin. As I have remarked elsewhere: Whiteness in its contemporary form in Australian society is culturally based. It controls institutions, which are extensions of White Australian culture and is governed by the values, beliefs and assumptions of that culture and its history. Australian culture is less White than it used to be, but Whiteness forms the centre and is commonly referred to in public discourse as the ‘mainstream’ or ‘middle ground’ (Moreton-Robinson 1998:11).