UNIT REQUIREMENTS AND EXPECTATIONS

This unit will be taught through a combination of lectures, screenings and seminars.  Each week, students will be required to relate the lecture material to relevant readings from the Unit Reader and prescribed texts.  Students should use the set seminar questions to orient their reading of relevant materials.

Recordings of lectures and lecture notes will be available on iLearn.

All students are expected to contribute to seminar discussions and, as this is a unit that explicitly taps into topical issues in the context of the Australian nation, students are expected to follow current developments in government policy, the media, and so on, and to related these developments to the issues under discussion.

Students are required: to attend all seminars; read the relevant readings from the Unit Reader; participate in class discussions; complete and submit all assessment tasks.

CLASSES

For lecture times and classes, please consult the MQ timetable website.

http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au. This website will display up-to-date information on your classes and classroom locations.

REQUIRED TEXT:

CUL321 READER: Racialised Punishment and the Construction of the Nation

Films:

Blackman’s Houses

Dhakiyarr vs the King

RECOMMENDED TEXTS: 

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)

Agamben, Giorgio, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Anderson, Warwick, The Cultivation of Whiteness (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002)

Ang, Ien, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas (eds.), Alter/Asians (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2000)

Bahbha, H, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)

Beaumont, Joan, Ilma Martinuzzi O’Brien and Matthew Trinca, Under Suspicion: Citizenship and Internment in Australia during the Second World War (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2008)

Blake, Thom, Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001)

Bonuto, Osvaldo, A Migrant’s Story (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994).

Burke, Anthony (2001) In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Annandale: Pluto Press)

Corlett, David, Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005)

Couchman, Sophie, John Fitzgerald and Paul Macgregor (eds.), After the Rush: Regulaiton, Participation, and Chinese Communities in Australia 1860-1940 (Fitzroy, Vic.: Otherland, 2004)

Crock, Mary, Ben Saul and Azadeh Dastyari, Future Seekers II: Refugees and Irregular Migration in Australia (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2006)

Cuneen, Chris, David Fraser and Stephen Tomsen, Faces of Hate: Hate Crime in Australia.  (Annandale: Hawkins Press, 1997)

Davis, Angela Y., Are Prisons Obselete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003)

de Certeau, Michel, The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

de Certeau, Michel, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

Donald, James and Ali Rattansi (eds.), 'Race,' Culture and Difference (London: Sage Publications, 1993)

Frankenberg, Ruth, The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters (London: Routledge, 1993)

Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality.  Trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990)

Giannacopuolos, Maria, “Tampa: Violence at the Border,” Social Semiotics, 15.1 (2005): 29-47.

Giannacopoulos, Maria, “Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty,” in S. Perera (ed.), Our Patch (Perth: Network, 2007.

Gleeson, Jane, M. A. Hamilton, G. Morgan, M. Wynne-Jones, Marrickville Backyards (Dulwich Hill: Marrickville Community History Group, 2001)

Grimshaw, Patricia et al, Creating a Nation (Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1994)

Hage, G,  White Nation (Annandale: Pluto Press, 1998)

Hall, Stuart, David Held and Tony McGrew (eds.), Modernity and Its Futures (Cambridge: Polity Press in Association with the Open University, 1992)

Heiss, Anita, Token Koori (Sydney: Curringa Communications, 1998)

Heiss, Anita, Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight): Publishing Aboriginal Literature (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003)

Hill, Mike (ed.), Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997)

Hodson, Michael, “Government Lies Again – Tiwi Islanders: ‘We’re all non-Australians’”  fromGreen Left Weekly http://www.greenleft.org.au and

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/562/562p7b.htm

hooks, bell, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990)

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), A Last Resort: A summary guide to the National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention (Sydney: HREOC, 2004)

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commisssion (HREOC), IsmaÎ -- Listen: National consultations on eliminating prejudice against Arab and Muslim Australians (Sydney: HREOC, 2001)

Jakubowicz, Andrew et al, Racism, Ethnicity and the Media (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1991994)

Leach, Michael and Fethi Mausouri, Lives in Limbo (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004)

Lygo, Iain, News Overboard: The Tabloid Media, Race Politics and Islam (n.p.: Southerly Change Media, 2004)

Nakayama, Thomas K. and Judith N. Martin (ed.), Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999)

Mitchell, D. T. and S. Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006)

Moores, Irene (ed.), Voices of Aboriginal Australia (Springwood: Butterfly Books, 1995)

Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Whitening Race (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004)

Morton-Robinson, Aileen, “The Possessive Logic of Patriachal White Sovereignty,” Borderlands ejournal 3.2 at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no2_2004/moreton-possessive.html

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, “The House that Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession,” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, 1 (2005): 21-29.

Osuri, Goldie, “Regimes of Terror: Contesting the War on Terror,” Borderlands ejournal 5.1 at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1/osuri.html

Osuri, Goldie and Bobby Banerjee, “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being Australian,” Social Semiotics, 14.2: 151-171.

Palombo, Lara, “Whose Turn Is It?  White Diasporic and Transnational Practices and the Necropolitics of the Plantation and Internment Camps,” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association e-journal, 3.1 (2007: 1-20.

Perera, Suvendrini, Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats, and Bodies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

Perera, Suvendrini, “The Impossible Refugee of Western Desire” at  http://www.lines-magazine.org/

Perera, Suvendrini, “What is a camp…? Borderlands 1.1 (2002), at http://www.boderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera.html 

Perera, Suvendrini, “A Line in the Sea: The Tampa, Boat Stories and the Border,” Cultural Studies Review 8 (2002): 11-27.

Perera, Suvendrini,“Whiteness and Its Discontents,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 20.2 (1999): 183-198

Perera, Suvendrini (ed.), Our Patch (Perth: Network, 2007).

Poynting, Scott, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins, Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other (Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004)

Pugliese, Joseph, “Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality,” Borderlands ejournal at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/pugliese.html

Pugliese, Joseph, “The Locus of the Non: The Racial Fault Line ‘of Middle Eastern Appearance,” Borderlands ejournal at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no3/pugliese.html

Pugliese, Joseph, “Each Death is the First Death,” HEAT, 6 (2003): 7-12.

Pugliese, Joseph, “Subcutaneous Law: Embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992,” The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 21 (2004): 23-34.

Pugliese, Joseph, “Asymmetries of Terror,” Borderlands ejournal at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1_2005/pugliese.html 

Pugliese, Joseph, “Diasporic Architecture, Whiteness and the Cultural Politics of Space,” in Sudeep Dasgupta (ed.), Constellations of the Transnational (Amesterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 23-50.

Roediger, D., Towards an Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994)

Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)

Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell, A World Without Bodies (Chicago: Brace Yourself Productions, 2002)

Spivak, G C, In Other Worlds (New York and London: Methuen, 1987)

Spivak, G C, The Post-Colonial Critic (London and New York: Routledge, 1990)

Thadenka, Learning to Be White (New York: Continuum, 2000)

Watson, Irene, “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities,” in Suvendrini Perera (ed.), Our Patch (Perth: Network, 2007), pp. 23-44.

Watson, Irene, “Buried Alive,” Law and Critique 13 (2000): 253-269.

LECTURES:

WEEK 1: Introduction: Racialised Punishment and the Construction of Nation

WEEK 2: Contested Histories and Aboriginal Sovereignties

WEEK 3: Whiteness

WEEK 4: The Racialisation of Punishment

WEEK 5: Aboriginal Law Versus Colonial Law

WEEK 6: The Racialisation of Crime and Cultural Panics

WEEK 7: The Camp and Histories of Internment

MID-SEMESTER BREAK: 3 to 20 April

WEEK 8: READING WEEK: NO CLASSES 20 to 24 April

WEEK 9: The Cultural Politics of Suburban Space and Ethnic Architecture

WEEK 10: "Fighting with Our Tongues": Indigenous Life Writing

WEEK 11: At the Border: Australia’s Refugees and Asylum Seekers 

WEEK 12: The Politics of Fear and Terror

SEMINAR SCHEDULE: N.B.: SEMINAR TOPICS RUN ONE WEEK BEHIND THE LECTURES

WEEK 1

No Seminar

Week 2

Introduction and assigning of seminar topics.

Readings: Michael Hodson, “Government Lies Again – Tiwi Islanders: ‘We’re all non-Australians’” from Green Left Weekly http://www.greenleft.org.au

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2003/562/562p7b.htm

Tony Birch, “The Last Refuge of the ‘un-Australian’”

Suvendrini Perera, “Girt by Sea”

WEEK 3

Contested Histories and Aboriginal Sovereignties

Screening: “Black Man’s Houses”

Readings: Ian Anderson, “Re-claiming Tru-ger-nan-ner: Decolonizing the Symbol”

Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities”

First Nations Interim National Unity Government, “Declarations of Independence Advanced at Brisbane Treaty Talks”

Murrawarri Republic, “Queen Recognises Murrawarri Republic”

1.Discuss what Anderson means when he says that Tru-ger-nan-ner signifies the “land empty of natives and the colonial period over.”

2.Discuss the problematic concepts of “authentic” and “hybrid” Aboriginals – with specific reference to Anderson’s essay and  Blackman’s Houses.

3.What needs to be done in order to recognise Aboriginal sovereignties?

4.Discuss the political, legal and cultural ramifications of Irene Watson’s call for Aboriginal sovereignties.

WEEK 4

Whiteness

Readings:  K. E. Supryia, “White Difference”

Ruth Frankenberg, “Thinking Through Race”

Anita Heiss, “Invisible Whiteness” and “My Best Friend is White”

1.How is whiteness “invisible”?  What are the key attributes of whiteness?

2.How is whiteness about power, privilege and institutionality?

3.What does Frankeberg mean by the “colour and power evasiveness” of whiteness?

4.How does, according to Frankenberg, whiteness normalise race privilege?

5.How does Hiess make whiteness visible in her poems?  What Black tactics does she deploy in order to counter-act white racism?

WEEK 5

The Racialisation of Punishment

Readings: Chris Cuneen, “The Nature of Colonial Policing”

Gerry Georgato, “The Burning Issue of Deaths in Custody: Aboriginal People Die 5 Times the Rate of Apartheid South Africa”

Natasha Robinson, “Black Sentences Soar as Juvenile Jails Become a ‘Storing House’”

Angela  Davis, “Race and Criminalization”

Angela Davis, “The Prison Industrial Complex”

1.Discuss in detail the nature of colonial policing?

2.How does the history of colonial policing fundamentally inform contemporary relations between Aboriginals and the law?

3.According to Davis, what is the relation between race and the punishment industry?  You must discuss, in particular, the connection between racialised minorities and the political economics of prisons.

4.Explain and discuss the “prison industrial complex” in the context of Australia’s Refugee Detention Centres.

WEEK 6

Aboriginal Law Versus Colonial Law

Readings: Irene Watson, “Buried Alive”

Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, “Just So: ‘The Law Which Governs Australia Is Australian Law’”

Screaning: Dhakiyarr vs the King

1. Define the legal concept of terra nullius and discuss in detail its impact on Australia’s Indigenous peoples.
2. Discuss Watson’s understanding of Aboriginal law and how it differs from European law.
3. How does white common law ensure the reproduction of colonial possession of the continent of Australia?
4. Discuss the collision of Aboriginal law and white colonial law in the context of Dhakiyarr vs the King.
5.  

WEEK 7

The Racialisation of Crime and Cultural Panics

Readings: Jock Collins et al, “Crime and Ethnicity in Australia: Myths and Realities”

Scott Pointing et al, “The Arab Other”

David Fraser et al, “Violence Against Arab Australians”

Joseph Pugliese, “The Locus of the Non: The Racial Fault-Line ‘of Middle Eastern Appearance,’” Borderlands e-journal 2.3 at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol2no3_2003/pugliese_non.htm.

1.What is problematic about the ethnic descriptor “of Middle Eastern appearance” as used by both the police and the media?

2.Discuss the relationship between issues of class, gender and ethnicity in Of Middle Eastern Appearance.

3.Discuss the role of government and the media in creating cultural panics about “ethnic crime” and “ethnic gangs.”

4.Explain what is at stake in the use of qualifiers like the term “ethnic” in the discussion of crime and criminal behaviour.

MID-SEMESTER BREAK: 3 to 20 April

WEEK 8: READING WEEK: NO CLASSES 20 to 24 April

WEEK 9

The Camp and Histories of Internment

Readings: Suvendrini Perera, “What is a camp…? Borderlands 1.1 (2002), at http://www.boderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/

David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic: Disability and the Making of an International Science”

“William Cooper: The Aboriginal Who Stood up to Hitler”

Osvaldo Bonuto, “’J’accuse’: Internment”

Lara Palombo, “Whose Turn Is It?  White Diasporic and Transnational Practices and the Necropolitics of the Plantation and Internment Camps”

1. Discuss the importance of the camp in the construction of the nation, its aliens and its borders, with reference to the Perera and Palombo essays.
2. What is the relation between 9/11 and the internment of aliens during World War II?
3. Discuss the use of science by politicians and the military in the internment and eventual extermination of people with disabilities in the context of the Nazi death camps, with reference to the Mitchell and Snyder essays.
4. What are the key issues that Bonuto’s story of internment exposes?
5. Discuss the contemporary interment of aliens (eg, refugees, people of  “Middle Eastern appearance,” and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba).

WEEK 10

The Cultural Politics of Suburban Space and Ethnic Architecture

Mirjana Lozanovka, “Abjection and Architecture: The Migrant House in Multicultural Australia”

Said and Souad Lahoud “It’s In the Blood: Culture and Identity and Their Suburban Backyard”

Joseph Pugliese, “A Topolitology of Mourning: Practices of Mourning and the Diasporic Transpositions of Space”

Joseph Pugliese, “Migrant Heritage in an Indigenous Context”

1. What is the relation between migrant architecture, hegemonic concepts of nation/identity and abjection?
2. Discuss the dismissal of migrant architecture, house styles and decoration in terms of “kitsch.”  Examine the value system operating in these acts of condescension.
3. How is the suburban backyard a site of resistance and a refuge against assimilation ideologies?
4. How is the home “a place for the body, a place for life?” Discuss in detail.
5. Discuss the significance of locating migrant heritage within an Indigenous context.

WEEK 11

 “Fighting with Our Tongues”: Indigenous Life Writings

Readings: Jackie Huggins, selections from Auntie Rita

Tess Allas, “A Stitch in Time”

William Ferguson and John Patten, “Cries from the Heart: Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!”

Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Tellin’ It Straight: Self-Representation within Indigenous Women’s Life Writings”

Jackie Huggins, “Auntie Rita’s File”

Anita Heiss, “Indigenous Writing and Identity”

1.Discuss the importance of the oral history genre in Auntie Rita.

2.Discuss the significance of the narrative weave of two voices in Auntie Rita.

3.What is the relationship between “life writing” and dominant histories as dramatised in Auntie Rita and as discussed by Heiss and Moreton-Robinson?

4.Discuss the history of white women’s role in the colonial subjugation of Aboriginals.

5.What are the tactics of resistance against colonial power as articulated by both Huggins and Moreton-Robinson?

WEEK 12

At the Border: Australia’s Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Screening: “The Man Who Jumped”

Readings: Suvendrini Perera, “A Line in the Sea: The Tampa, Boat Stories and the Border”

Joseph Pugliese, “The Recknoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third”

Ray Jackson, “An Open Letter to Kevin Rudd MP”

Ray Jackson, “Indigenous Leader to Asylum Seekers: ‘You are Welcome Here’”

Bianca Hall, “Overwhelming Majority of Boat Arrivals Deemed to Be Refugees”

Maria Giannacopoulos, “Tampa: Violence at the Border”

1.Discuss the historical roots of white Australia’s fear of  “alien invasions.”

2.Discuss the relation between Indigenous sovereignty, white colonial possession and Australia’s refugee crisis.

3.How does the mandatory imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers contravene Human Rights (as outlined by UN charters)?

4.Discuss the ethnicity of the refugees and asylum seekers imprisoned in Australian prisons. 

5.How can the mandatory imprisonment of refugees be seen as another form of racialised punishment?  Relate this to Angela Davis’ thesis on the racialised punishment industry and Australia’s use of the private company ACM to manage the prisons.

6.Discuss the role of law in the construction and maintenance of a regime of penal asylum for refugees and asylum seekers.

WEEK 13

The Politics of Fear and Terror

Readings: Goldie Osuri: “Regimes of Terror: Contesting the War on Terror”

Joseph Pugliese, “Asymmetries of Terror”

Suvendrini Perera, “Race Terror, Sydney, December 2005”

All three essays are in Borderlands ejournal available at:

http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol5no1.html

1. Discuss the parallels between contemporary political uses of fear and terror and the historical period of the Cold War.
2. What is at stake in the government and media fostering of a politics of fear and terror?
3. Why must the concept of “terrorism” be thought outside of eurocentric discourses and what is so often left unaddressed in western discussions of terrorism?
4. What needs to be done in order to begin to dismantle regimes of fear and terror?