Representing Aboriginality

Book excerpt: Representing Aboriginality takes a close look at the dominant trends in the representation of aboriginal people in Australian, South African and Aotearoa/ New Zealand film. Jan Mohamed's thesis of The Economy of the Manichean Allegory is employed to interrogate these trends in terms of Other/Self binaries, where representations of the Other are understood to be sensitive to tensions within the individual psyches of the media-makers as well as to social tensions and stresses within the "political unconscious" of the society in which they appear. Thee films are analyzed in the discussion of the dominant trends: The Great Dance- a hunter's story, The Last Wave, and Once Were Warriors. Clelland-Stokes' forceful analysis of visual representations pf aboriginality will be of interest to scholars and students on the fields of visual anthropology, cultural anthropology, culture and media studies, film studies, and anyone interested in the visual culture of aboriginal and indigenous communities.