Nervous landscapes : race and space in Australia

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    15 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    It almost goes without saying that racial segregation, by its very nature, is a spatial practice. It is about the separation of people in space and the rules and devices that are set up to achieve this. A segregated society necessitates a segregated landscape and one of my premises in this chapter is that the policies and practices of segregation could not be implemented in Australia until the white colonial state had achieved substantial cadastral control over land. This chapter is interested in the ways in which an Indigenous minority's presence in and movement through a colonial landscape is spatially controlled or constrained by the colonisers. But it is also concerned with ways in which Indigenous people have been able to subvert that system of spatial control, transgressing its numerous finely drawn boundaries, poaching on its preserves, tweaking the nerves of a spatial system which was inherently tense with racial foreboding, paranoia, longing and deprivation. The colonial landscape in Australia was a spatial regime that was always, to borrow Michael Taussig's term, a 'nervous system'.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationMaking Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity
    EditorsTracey Banivanua Mar, Penelope Edmonds
    Place of PublicationU.K.
    PublisherPalgrave
    Pages103-128
    Number of pages26
    ISBN (Print)9780230221796
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

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