Domesticating settler colonization at the Art Gallery of South Australia
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2019
Authors
Hayat, Y.A.
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Journal article
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JOURNAL OF ASIA-PACIFIC POP CULTURE, 2019; 4(2):233-244
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This review mobilizes critical race and whiteness scholarship to question the curatorial intent underpinning the recent reimagining of "Australian Art" at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). This essay contends that culturally curated silences and privileged presentations of white settler domestication and domination tacitly perpetuate the foundational fiction of terra nullius. Captain James Cook proclaimed possession of the Eastern Coast of Australia in 1770. The presumption of terra nullius ("land belonging to no-one") was based on his belief that Indigenous peoples lived in a "state of nature" after determining the land was "uncultivated" and that the peoples did not display property rights as he knew and understood them.1 His decision afforded legal possession by defining First Nations peoples as part of the landscape-eventually classified as the property of state and territory governments.2 This appropriation of sovereignty denied Indigenous peoples political, economic and civil rights throughout Australia's history.
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Copyright 2019 Pennsylvania State University