Harms of the Stolen Generations Claimed Under the Flag: Contesting National World-Making Through Literature
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Flags, Color, and the Legal Narrative Public Memory, Identity, and Critique, 2021, 1, pp. 593-603
- Issue Date:
- 2021-05-25
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| Filename | Description | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19195831_8170834830005671.pdf | Published version | 1.17 MB |
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The focus of this chapter is on how the state has mediated and adjudicated the harms of the Stolen Generations, and the ways these harms have been framed—and claimed—under the national state imaginary of Australia. In 2019, these harms have still not been resolved, even under the compromised terms of the state, as no federal reparations scheme is in place. Although the Aboriginal flag is often displayed by the government in ‘Sorry Day’ events as a sign of solidarity with Indigenous people, and during events that marked the National Apology to the Stolen Generations (Parliamentary Debates, 2008) (‘The Apology’), and its recent ten-year anniversary, this chapter argues that state adjudication and marking of past harms are moments in which the state asserts its authority against Indigenous people. I am then interested in the unique potential of the engagement of representation to address an urgent area of postcolonial law and politics—taking the significance and role of Aboriginal authority in the context of Australian state law that refuses encounters with Indigenous sovereignties and laws as the central case study. In this context, how do we undertake the important ethical and political work of properly marking the absences and elisions of state law? How do we create spaces beyond ‘the national’ in which to undertake the important work of encounters that take place without state recognition? This chapter focuses on practices of representation as being central to responding to these questions—and on representation as being central to the interpretation of authority. It examines how, in the legal domain, the state reads the genres and narratives of Aboriginal law, and how literature provides a domain from which to analyse, critique and challenge these practices. Engaging exemplary counter-texts in this critical mode provides a way to challenge law’s forms and logics, creating spaces that are neither purely legal nor purely literary.
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