[csaa-forum] Event Reminder - Dr. Joanne Faulkner - USYD - Psychoanalysis at Sydney Seminar Series

[Jacqueline Dalziell]

Hi everyone,

Dr. Joanne Faulkner (MQ U) will be speaking on Feb.27th, 1-2:20 at the Norman Gregg Lecture Theatre on campus as part of the Psychoanalysis at Sydney seminar series (Home | PA Sydney<https://www.psychoanalysisatsydney.com.au/>). Lunch will be provided.

I thought her talk may be of interest to some on this list.

Please find Jo’s abstract and bio, with further details below:


Title: Coding the Indigenous child for adoption: the colonial Imaginarium of “ragged” and “rescued” children

Abstract

The removal of First Nations children from their families and culture has historically been, and continues to be, an apparatus of settler colonial governance that dispossesses generations of children of the relationships and knowledges in which their connection to country is grounded. Nonetheless, settler culture often represents Aboriginal children as attractive, if degraded, objects of desire: from the sensuous "piccaninny" images by Brownie Downing, to Baz Luhrman's depiction of Nullah, the "creamy"-skinned, magical Aboriginal boy, who metonymically stood for the history of the Stolen Generations in Australia (2008). This paper examines recent efforts to reframe state removal of Aboriginal children in terms of ‘adoption’ and the resurgence of an old discourse of white rescue to naturalise it by linking this discourse to the piccaninny trope. The paper develops scholarship on ‘the piccaninny’ representation by reading it alongside the ‘ragged’ child targeted by the child rescue movement in England. Both figures serve to demean the children they represent and separate them from their sources of identity and belonging by depicting them as orphaned and cared for by no one. Tracing this figure’s journey of emigration from London to Australia, the paper focuses on the cultural work performed by two men – philanthropist and bureaucrat – whose innovations in representing these ‘types’ continue to define the field of child rescue: Thomas J. Barnardo and A. O. Neville. Each of these men were successful, I argue, because they were able to activate middle-class and settler-colonial circuits of identity formation and articulate (middle-class/ settler) subjects' relationships to others in terms of rescue.

Bio

Joanne is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Literature, and Language (MCCALL), and was an ARC Future Fellow from 2018 - 2022. Her research investigates the ways in which representations of childhood circulate in Australian culture to manage anxieties about national identity and history; and, particularly, the specific meanings attributed to Aboriginal children as sites of mediation, intervention, and impasse between settler-colonial and First Nations peoples. Her most recent book is Representing Aboriginal Childhood: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Australia<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/wsGjCXLW2mUMl2pLrs6fJTWvVW0?domain=routledge.com> (Routledge, 2023) and other books include Young and Free: [post]colonial ontologies of childhood, memory, and history in Australia<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/ywmGCYW8Noc6KMGyBUGhLTxL9da?domain=rowmaninternational.com> (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016) and The Importance of Being Innocent: why we worry about children<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/iZlFCZY1Nqio1lOWBIKi0TBV4P_?domain=cambridge.org> (Cambridge UP, 2011). She co-edited (with A/Prof Magdalena Zolkos) Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity Disciplining the Child<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/K0YRC1WLPxcEr3vQWIXsyTV8U_X?domain=amazon.com> (Lexington Books, 2015). Joanne is a settler coloniser living on lands to which Gadigal and Wangal peoples belong, and working on Dharug country. These peoples' cultures and knowledges have nurtured country since the beginning of time and sovereignty was never ceded.

RSVPs appreciated but not obligatory:

https://www.psychoanalysisatsydney.com.au/event-details/dr-joanne-faulkner<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/pkmWC2xMQziEL1nDyI9tNT5vM33?domain=psychoanalysisatsydney.com.au>

Thanks so much everyone – hope to see those of you who can make it!

Jac

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