The urban frontier and the abduction of the racialized body: Nyungar artist Dianne Jones's Men's Business

Abstract

Through a discussion of Nyungar artist Dianne Jones's photographic series Men's Business, this essay examines how Jones's images connect with themes of Aboriginality, occupation and place. Set in Perth, Kojunup and Northam, the series is a response by Jones as an Aboriginal woman to the representation of Aboriginal men in Australia around the Northern Territory Intervention. Drawing on Fanon's concept of racially marked bodies abducted from specific time and place, the essay argues that pervasive depictions of Aboriginal men as violent are having an impact throughout Australia. These negative depictions reignite the archive of colonialist imaginings of the black male body as ‘terror’ and a legitimized object for classification and dissection. Jones photographs the men in her family to reinscribe the specifics of locality and counter the effect of stereotypical perceptions. The essay explores how the images in Men's Business can be read as loaded ‘family portraits’, engaging with dominant racialized representations of family while foregrounding suburbia as the ‘urban frontier’ of contemporary place-making and place-taking. The exploration of locality and subjectivity in this analysis queries imperialist constructions of landscape and history central to the creation of Australian national identity.

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Notes

1. The Northern Territory Intervention was put forth as a government response to the ‘Little Children are Sacred Report: Report of the Northern Territory Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse 2007’, www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf. Approximately 600 soldiers were sent into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A raft of legislation titled the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill was passed through parliament to enable it to ‘intervene’ in Aboriginal communities. Implementation of the legislation required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; Eric Shouse, ‘Feeling, Emotion and Affect’, M/C: Journal of Media and Culture 8(6), 2005.

3. Kenneth Olwig, cited in Lisa Palmer, ‘“Nature’, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities”, Australian Geographer 37(1), 2006, pp 33–43, p 33.

4. As modelled in Judy Atkinson and Glenn Wood, ‘Turning Dreams into Nightmares and Nightmares into Dreams’, Borderlands 7(2), 2008.

5. Allen Jones, personal communication with Dianne Jones, 15 October 2011.

6. Stephanie Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45(3), 2009, pp 243–250, p 243, drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952), London: Pluto, 2008, p 112.

7. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p 112.

8. Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility’, p 243.

9. Mark Leopold, cited in Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility, p 244.

10. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992.

11. Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970, North Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Press, 2008, p 105.

12. Louis Nowra, Bad Dreaming, Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2007, p 92.

13. Atkinson and Wood, ‘Turning Dreams into Nightmares and Nightmares into Dreams’, p 3.

14. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 99.

15. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 106.

16. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 106.

17. John Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City: Urban Aboriginality, Ambivalence and Modernity’, boundary 2 21(1), 1994, pp 65–83, p 71.

18. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, pp 344–345.

19. Leopold, cited in Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility’, p 244.

20. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, pp xv–xvi.

21. Odette Kelada, ‘White Nation Fantasy and the Northern Territory Intervention’, ACRAWSA Journal 4(1), 2008, drawing on Ghassan Hage's White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Annandale, NSW: Pluto Press, 1998.

22. The National Indigenous Times, June 2007, www.nit.com.au.

23. More information about Kojunup is available on the Shire website: www.kojonup.wa.gov.au/about/history.html; and on the Kojunup visitor centre website: www.kojonupvisitors.com/en/History+and+Heritage/default.htm.

24. Fielder, ‘Sacred Sites and the City’, p 79.

25. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 224.

26. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 227.

27. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, pp 225–226.

28. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 228.

29. Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p 229.

30. See Donald S Garden's Northam: An Avon Valley History, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979; and the West Australian Vista website: www.westaustralianvista.com/history-of-northam.html.

31. Peter Jones, personal communication with Dianne Jones, 15 October 2011.

32. Marianne Riphagen, Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Up-and-Coming Artists and the Photomedia Works in Australian and International Visual Arts Worlds, Doctoral Dissertation, Oisterwijk, Netherlands: Uitgeverij BOXPress, 2011, p 238.

33. Riphagen, Indigenous Cosmopolitans, p 238.

34. Deaths in Custody Watch Committee WA website: http://deathsincustody.org.au.

35. Gerry Georgatos, ‘$1 Million More a Week in WA Cost for Prisons’, The National Indigenous Times, 7 December 2011, p 16.

36. Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility’, p 243.

37. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man's Burden’, McClure's Magazine 12, February 1899, http://faculty.txwes.edu/csmeller/Human-Prospect/ProData09/01ModCulMatrix/ModWRTs/Kipling1865/Kip1899Burden.htm.

38. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The White Man's Burden: Patriarchal White Epistemic Violence and Aboriginal Women's Knowledges within the Academy’, Australian Feminist Studies 26(70), 2011, pp 413–431, p 413.

39. Newell, ‘Postcolonial Masculinity and the Politics of Visibility’, p 243.