Frontier Skirmishes: Half-Castes, Hoaxes and White Aboriginals in Contemporary Australian Paraliterary and Literary Discourse

边境冲突：当代澳大利亚准文学和文学话语中的混血种姓、恶作剧和白人原住民

• 批准号: 21398322
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Russell Brian West-Pavlov
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Englisches Seminar
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2005-12-31 至 2010-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/21398322?language=en
• 关键词: Frontier; Skirmishes; Half; Castes; Hoaxes

This project takes contemporary debates over the Australian colonial frontier as symptoms of deeper cultural concerns in Australian society. It investigates a number of related discursive `frontier skirmishes¿, debates which manifest still unresolved unease about the relationship between White Australia and indigenous society,focussing on recent `border-blurring¿ figures such as¿ `mixed-blood¿, `inauthentic¿ indigenous artists,¿ white writers and artists who have hoaxed indigenous art or fiction¿ the figure of the `white Aboriginal¿ in recent fiction¿ the `half-caste¿ protagonists of the `Stolen Generations¿These debates are read in the light of a number of prominent 1990s controversies, commonly known as `the history wars¿, in which by conservative historians suggested that frontier clashes between Aboriginals and white settlers were less brutal than claimed by critical historians in the 1970s and 1980s. These paraliterary and literary phenomena can be interpreted as displacements into the cultural realm of frontier conflicts wars along the borders of white colonial settlement. Long since terminated as real armed conflicts, these erstwhile skirmishes none the less continue to resonate in the consciousness of white Australia. The project suggests that the contemporary debates are primarily but not merely of symbolic character. They are projections onto the cultural plane of erstwhile settler-native conflicts, discursive configurations massively present in the public sphere, and thus continue to influence policy decisions in areas such as funding for indigenous organizations, the legal proceedings over land-rights claims, or legislation such as mandatory sentencing which principally targets indigenous people.

这个项目将当代关于澳大利亚殖民边界的辩论作为澳大利亚社会更深层次的文化担忧的症状。它调查了一些相关的杂乱无章的“边境小规模冲突”，这些辩论表现出对白人澳大利亚人和土著社会之间关系的尚未解决的不安，重点关注最近的“模糊边界”人物，如“混血”、不真实的土著艺术家、欺骗土著艺术或小说的白人作家和艺术家、最近小说中的“白人原住民”形象、“斯托伦世代”中的“半种姓”主人公。这些辩论是根据20世纪90年代一些突出的争议来解读的，这些争议通常被称为‘历史战争’，保守派历史学家在报告中表示，土著居民和白人定居者之间的边境冲突没有批评历史学家在20世纪70年代和80年代声称的那么残酷。这些副文学和文学现象可以被解释为沿着白人殖民定居点边界的边境冲突和战争的文化领域的置换。这些昔日的小规模冲突早已被终止为真正的武装冲突，但仍继续在白人澳大利亚的意识中产生共鸣。该项目表明，当代的辩论主要是但不仅仅是象征性的。它们是昔日定居者-土著冲突的文化层面的投射，是公共领域大量存在的话语配置，因此继续影响着诸如为土著组织提供资金、关于土地权主张的法律诉讼或主要针对土著人民的强制性判刑等立法等领域的政策决定。