Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation
Jennifer Loureide Biddle is Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture and Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of
Humanitarian Imperialism
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Published:February 2016
In 2007, the Australian government seized by compulsory acquisition seventy-three remote Aboriginal communities and townships to “stabilize and normalize” what was constructed as a national emergency humanitarian crisis. Chapter 1 models the so-called crisis of remote Aboriginal communities and the humanitarian imperialism of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) as based on “affective facts” (Massumi) and a new body politic of “feeling political together” (Berlant). It tracks how literacy has become a major humanitarian target and a national campaign to redress (purported) Aboriginal illiteracy is driving the cessation of bilingual education and the rights of Aboriginal children to learn and...
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