A01=Alison Ravenscroft
australian
Australian Feminist Historians
Author_Alison Ravenscroft
Autobiographical Act
Blackface Minstrelsy
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
Category=JBSL1
copjec
cross-cultural aesthetics
Deborah Bird Rose
Elliot's Story
Elliot’s Story
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethics of looking in postcolonial contexts
field
Gaunt's Eyes
Gaunt’s Eyes
George Street
Hazel Brown
Hessian Sack
Holes Places
indigenous
indigenous epistemologies
joan
literary criticism Australia
men
Nice Coloured Girls
Night Cap
Perverse Enjoyment
Post-war German Literature
Postcolonial Eye
Postwar German Literature
racialised spectatorship
reader
RITA
Salt Water
Sea Water
subject
Term Magic Realism
Uncanny Australia
visual
visual culture studies
white
White Readers
White Subject
White Women's Desire
whiteness theory
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138261495
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
