Essentialism,Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity

This paper is about how the discourses of white intellectuals operating in Aboriginal Studies create a knowledgeable gaze which seeks to police the cultural practices through which Aborigines produce themselves. Aborigines have become the focus of a gaze which analyses, questions, and problematises their resistances and even their identities. Determining the boundaries of Aboriginal authenticity has become the preoccupation of some European intellectuals whose concern with situating the culture of Aborigines is at the expense of acknowledging the positioning power of their own cultural practices. This paper seeks to reverse this knowledge-power relationship by focusing on discourses operating in Aboriginal Studies and the effects of power created by the custodial pastoral roles which some white intellectuals have taken on.