{"id":775,"date":"2014-09-02T13:03:19","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T01:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/?p=775"},"modified":"2014-09-21T12:17:31","modified_gmt":"2014-09-21T00:17:31","slug":"book-strikes-right-anti-colonial-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/2014\/09\/02\/book-strikes-right-anti-colonial-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Book strikes right anti-colonial note"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"white<\/a>A book by an English & Media Studies staff member has been described as \u201ca powerful statement of anti-colonialism\u201d by an international reviewer.
\nIn a review just published in Ariel: A review of international English literature, Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley\u2019s 2012 book White Vanishing is called \u201ca valuable document within the arena of Australian cultural historiography\u201d.
\nWhite Vanishing is a longitudinal critical survey of a prevalent trope within Australian culture, the \u2018lost in the bush\u2019 myth. The book argues for reading this mythology (popularised in movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock) differently to literal or nationalistic interpretations, by focusing on its often overlooked racial, gendered and colonialist ideology.
\nThe reviewer, Australian fiction writer Giulia Giuffr\u00e8, notes White Vanishing is \u201cwell researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic,\u201d containing \u201ca great deal of useful material and thought-provoking arguments\u201d as well as insights that are \u201cperceptive and shaming\u201d. It is also, Giuffr\u00e8 notes, something of a \u201cjuggernaut\u201d.
\nDr Tilley, surprisingly, agrees with the latter criticism. \u201cAbsolutely, it\u2019s a warship of a book \u2013 and in a way it had to be. It\u2019s putting an argument that although not controversial within particular academic circles is not likely to be at all popular with many Australians. It\u2019s suggesting that the common characterisation of Australian culture as favouring \u2018fairness\u2019 might be better understood in terms of fairness of skin than fairness in treating others. If you\u2019re going to make a critique like that you need your evidence thoroughly marshalled. So my aim with the book was to put the supportability of the argument beyond doubt \u2013 and then elsewhere in other ways I can have the liberty of perhaps expressing it in more subtle terms.\u201d
\nDr Tilley also agreed that the book was inherently anti-colonial. \u201cAbsolutely the book has a political stance \u2013 everything is political, including academic research and, as I point out in the book, creative writing, film, theatre and media. My argument is that any kind of creative or discursive output is enhanced if it recognises its political stance consciously, rather than pretending neutrality.\u201d
\nDr Tilley said that, since the book\u2019s publication, she had noticed some shifts in public understanding of the \u2018lost in the bush myth\u2019 in Australia. \u201cThere have now been some fantastic artistic and creative deconstructions of the myth, particularly in the theatre. Sisters Grimm\u2019s The Sovereign Wife used parody to skewer the \u2018lost in the bush myth\u2019 in ways that were much more entertaining than my book \u2013 but culturally speaking, we need both forms of engagement with our mythology, the detailed deconstruction and the lampooning, and each contributes to the possibility and the interpretation of the other.\u201d
\nWhite Vanishing is published by Rodopi and available at: http:\/\/www.rodopi.nl\/senj.asp?BookId=CC+152<\/a><\/p>\n

Post-script! Another review of White Vanishing (in the journal Critical Race and Whiteness Studies) has just been published and is available at:\u00a0http:\/\/www.acrawsa.org.au\/files\/ejournalfiles\/212Iyer20141.pdf<\/a>\u00a0 Reviewer\u00a0Sumedha Iyer of\u00a0The University of New South Wales says White Vanishing is “engaging and rigorous in its analysis, and does a great deal to fill the epistemological gap in disappearance mythology in Australian literature.\u00a0Even for readers who are not au fait with literary textual analysis or whiteness theory, Tilley\u2019s book makes it easy to trace the insidious and enduring\u00a0inheritance of the white vanishing trope in terms of its origins in the oppressive function of colonialism.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A book by an English & Media Studies staff member has been described as \u201ca powerful statement of anti-colonialism\u201d by an international reviewer. In a review just published in Ariel: A review of international English literature, Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley\u2019s 2012 book White Vanishing is called \u201ca valuable document within the arena of Australian cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,1,91,99,13,66],"tags":[128,111],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-expressive-arts-subject","category-media-subject","category-research","category-theatre","category-wellington-campus-campus","tag-critical-race-theory","tag-research-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":843,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions\/843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.massey.ac.nz\/expressivearts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}