A01=Alison Ravenscroft
australian
Author_Alison Ravenscroft
Autobiographical Act
Blackface Minstrelsy
Category=DS
Category=DSA
Category=DSB
Category=DSBH
Category=GTM
Category=JBSL
Category=JBSL1
Category=NHTQ
copjec
Deborah Bird Rose
Elliot's Story
Elliot’s Story
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
field
Follow
Gaunt's Eyes
Gaunt’s Eyes
George Street
Hazel Brown
Hessian Sack
indigenous
joan
men
Nice Coloured Girls
Night Cap
Perverse Enjoyment
Post-war
Post-war German Literature
Postcolonial Eye
Postwar German Literature
reader
RITA
Sea Water
subject
Term Magic Realism
Uncanny Australia
visual
white
White Reader
White Subject
White Women's Desire
Wo
Younger Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409430780
- Weight: 521g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 22 Mar 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Informed by theories of the visual, knowledge and desire, The Postcolonial Eye is about the 'eye' and the 'I' in contemporary Australian scenes of race. Specifically, it is about seeing, where vision is taken to be subjective and shaped by desire, and about knowing one another across the cultural divide between white and Indigenous Australia. Writing against current moves to erase this divide and to obscure difference, Alison Ravenscroft stresses that modern Indigenous cultures can be profoundly, even bewilderingly, strange and at times unknowable within the terms of 'white' cultural forms. She argues for a different ethics of looking, in particular, for aesthetic practices that allow Indigenous cultural products, especially in the literary arts, to retain their strangeness in the eyes of a white subject. The specificity of her subject matter allows Ravenscroft to deal with the broad issues of postcolonial theory and race and ethnicity without generalising. This specificity is made visible in, for example, Ravenscroft's treatment of the figuring of white desire in Aboriginal fiction, film and life-stories, and in her treatment of contemporary Indigenous cultural practices. While it is located in Australian Studies, Ravenscroft's book, in its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of race and whiteness and engagement with European and American literature and criticism, has far-reaching implications for understanding the important question of race and vision.
Alison Ravenscroft is in the English Department in the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University, Australia.
