Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia

This book explores how Aboriginal children and childhood are represented in Australian culture to reconcile Australians' conflicting attitudes toward the country's colonial past and potential post-colonial future. It demonstrates how representations of Aboriginal children and childhood serve a national project of representing settler-Australian values by obscuring colonial violence. It challenges common notions of Australian identity and settler-colonial sovereignty by analyzing how negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed.

Format: Hardback
Length: 230 pages
Publication date: 28 February 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book delves into a profound exploration of the intricate ways in which Aboriginal children and childhood play a central role in shaping Australia's cultural landscape, navigating the nation's complex relationship with its colonial past and envisioning its potential post-colonial future. By engaging with a wide range of representations across literature, film, governmental discourse, news, and infotainment media, the book reveals how these representations serve as a powerful tool for constructing and perpetuating settler-Australian values, often at the expense of acknowledging the historical violence of colonialism. Through a meticulous analysis of the ways in which certain negative aspects of Australian nationhood are concealed, rendered invisible, and repressed through practices of representing Aboriginal children and childhood, the book challenges prevailing notions of "shared understandings" regarding Australian-ness and settler-colonial sovereignty.

Drawing upon an innovative interdisciplinary framework that incorporates critical theory, post-colonial theory, literary studies, history, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, Representing Aboriginal Childhood offers a timely response to pressing questions revolving around the role of Indigenous children within settler nation-state formations. This book will appeal to scholars across sociology, social geography, collective memory, politics, and cultural studies, as it sheds light on the complex dynamics that shape contemporary Australia.

Weight: 600g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367568535