The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty

From different ongoing Anthropocene discussions and theories, this short book drives a clear argument and claim about the relation between racism, colonialism and the effects of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene is highly gendered. Yusoff’s arguments are vital in understanding the terms and stages of the Anthropocene especially in understanding indigenous studies and landscapes. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None has clear arguments that may help art practices on decolonisation in various indigenous territories that strongly relate to non-human worlds. 

A Third University is Possible offers a refreshing theoretical framework and interpretation of the issues of university education, decolonisation and activism. The writer, la paperson (K. Wayne Yang), proposes that a university ‘is an assemblage of machines and not a monolithic institution’ that has colonial history and purposes, yet it can also be subverted to produce decolonising subjects. Taking inspiration from Third Cinema and Black filmmaking assemblages, worlding theory and Deleuzian posthumanism, the book explores decolonial ‘possibilities’ in various indigenous and black schools and colleges in the US, Kenya and India and presents the seminal idea of ‘scyborg’ which is a ‘decolonising agent of technological subversion’ operating within the Third University itself in order to break down the ideological machine. 

The infamous and incendiary essay ‘Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art, It’s a White Thing!’ was originally written to accompany an artwork and prize entry into the 20th Telstra National Aboriginal Arts Award. It was a shattering of orthodoxy. The award had previously been reserved for ‘authentic’ Indigenous art, framed in ethnographic terms. Then, in 2003, Richard Bell’s Scienta E Metaphysica (Bell’s Theorem), or ‘Aboriginal Art It’s a White Thing’ took the prize with a repudiation of its very terms. It was a work that either had to win, or be banned. The text offers a polemical and mock art-historical analysis of ‘Aboriginal Art’, with the argument that as an industry and anointed artistic genre it is a White-determined artefact. While the essay speaks to a particular historical moment, it remains a vital critique and a seriously good read. 

Art historian T. J. Demos repurposes recent art history by interweaving the chronicles of socially engaged artistic practices with environmental activism and political ecology. Departing from the well-known pioneering names such as the Harrisons and Bonnie Sherk, the author describes the entanglement of art and ecology through the perspectives of indigenous communities, denouncing the very Western gaze that informed the UN’s understanding of ecology, one that rarely acknowledges ‘post-colonial concerns and the inequality between so-called post-industrial nations and those in the Global South’. The book unfolds around the urgencies that global warming is causing and offers an incredible array of examples of artists who engage in long-term projects, such as Amy Balkin, Superflex and Pedro Reyes. Many of the featured projects are also part of the Visible network, like the projects by Maria Thereza Alves and Mabe Bethônico. 

In terms of curriculum from a non-Indigenous perspective, The Rainbow Serpent can hardly be omitted. Through at least the 1990s, Indigenous stories and experiences were entirely absent from the mainstream primary school curriculum in Australia. National and local histories were a matter of colonial explorers and prosaic local inventions such as the ‘stump jump plough’. However, at least in Queensland, nestled somewhere in almost every children’s library was a copy of The Rainbow Serpent.

Robert Nichols’s Theft is Property does the work of explicating the confounding gaps, paradoxes and convenient impossibilities by which settler colonial violence does its day-to-day work. This book is not specific to artistic practice per se. However, its political analysis is highly useful in comprehending the institutional structures amid which contemporary art is often bound up – particularly so in European and White Anglophone contexts. The titular essay ‘Theft Is Property!’ is an indispensable resource. It places radical European 18th century critiques of property alongside critiques made by Indigenous authors, and breathtakingly demonstrates the shortcomings of some of the most heralded European emancipatory efforts. 

Often an outsider has keener insight into a society’s fundamental structures than many of those raised in its midst. Eric Michaels was an American who died in Australia in 1988, where he counts among the AIDS dead. Working as an ethnographer in the Yuendumu community, he witnessed the emergence of the 1970s and 1980s market for Aboriginal art, and is counted among its keenest observers and critics. Essays such as ‘Bad Aboriginal Art’ remain indispensable in their unflinching view of the contradictions and colonial neurosis of white Australian attitudes to Indigenous art production. Unbecoming is Michaels’s AIDS diary. From his Brisbane hospital bed Michaels casts a dispassionate and often disgusted eye across the Australian Bicentennial celebration, queer cultures at the colonial crossroads, and the strange habits of second-hand furniture salesmen. Particularly memorable is a Foucauldian take on the Australian ‘tidiness’ discourse and historical erasure – from the grime beneath his hospital table in the infectious diseases ward to white-painted rocks at Yuendemu. 

This slender volume deftly pinpoints the precise historical nexus of raw colonial expropriation and the aesthetics of ethnographic display in Queensland, Australia. Co-edited by Indigenous historians Michael Aird, Paul Memmott and Mandana Mapar, Wild Australia brings together the surviving images of the eponymous ethnographic show that toured the east coast in 1892/93. In an unsurprising historical twist, the self-taught ethnographer Archibald Meston, who produced the show, also became the self-appointed state ‘Protector’ of Aboriginal People during the infamous period of ‘The Act’.

This special issue of the long-running un Magazine marks just part of a wave of resurgent Indigenous and anticolonial thought and artistic practice in Australia in recent years. The contributions range across poetry, ficto-criticism, interviews and essays with vivid purpose and immediacy. The transcript of a multimedia conference presentation of the Ara Iritija archive by Rene Kulita is published together with audience dialogue, lists of colonial landowners and proprietors sit alongside photographic artworks by Julie Gough, and Genevieve Greives speaks personally and autobiographically of urban-based Indigenous practice.