[URBANTH-L]CFP: Visual Cultures and Colonialism: Indigeneity in Local and Transnational Imagery (Australia)

[Angela Jancius]

Visual Cultures and Colonialism: Indigeneity in Local and  
Transnational Imagery
Location: Australia

A growing body of postcolonial research has established the  
importance of visual imagery in creating and popularizing ideas about  
race and cultural difference. Visual representation of Indigenous  
peoples circulated from local to transnational contexts,  
participating in colonial networks of global exchange and defining  
relations of power. One strand of analysis has revealed the  
complicity of Western scopic regimes and imperialism, tracing the  
ways that visual cultures express the colonizers' expanionist gaze.  
Another seeks to emphasise the role of Indigenous peoples within this  
relationship, identifying culturally distinct visual traditions and  
the reformulation of new media such as photography and museum  
exhibitions. Descendant re-valuation of the colonial archive is  
inverting colonial exhibitory practices and spectacle, producing new  
meanings through re-contextualisation of these images. This  
conference aims to bring together research and thinking on visual  
cultures and indigeneity that attends to local specificity as well as  
the global circuits of visual discourse, illuminating both colonial  
processes and attempts at declonisation.



Dr Liz Conor
Dr Jane Lydon


Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies

Tel: 61 3 9905 4200


Email: cais at arts.monash.edu.au
Visit the website at http://arts.monash.edu.au/cais/conference/index.php