"See you on the road"...:Postcolonial Pedagogies in the age of

Howard and Hanson.

Paper presented at the Australian Association for Research in

Education conference,

Brisbane, Australia,

November 30-December 4, 1997

Lorraine Johnson-Riordan,

University of Western Sydney, Macarthur

DEDICATION

This paper has several dedications. First, to Pat Dodson, for the title of the paper; second to Paulo Freire who died in May of this year and whose work has greatly influenced my teaching. I had the pleasure of being present at a number of seminars and other events in New York City at which he was guest in the '80's and early '90's. I also want to dedicate this paper to all the Indigenous students who I have had the privilege of teaching over the past 3 years. Their presence inside the University, an historically white colonial/ colonizing institution has brought me, a white Anglo-Celtic educator face to face with the practical, political, moral and epistemological dilemmas that were central to Freire's own life work and which were epitomized in his classic text Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I fear this paper won't do justice to his memory, written as it has been in some haste, but it is impassioned by my intellectual engagement with his work, one of this century's preeminent educators.

In this paper, I want to achieve several things. First, I want to speak to the theme of this conference and talk about the times we live in now in Australia, the era of Howard and Hanson and the resurgence of the Right, and pose the question "what does this mean for us as educators? as cultural workers?" I'll argue for the usefulness of "postcolonial" as one way of naming the times and as position for cultural critique. I will argue for the notion of Cultural Studies as feminist postcolonial pedagogical practice and as a 'pedagogy of the body'. And I will talk about doing Indigenous Cultural Studies (ICS) in indigenous tertiary classrooms. I'll point to the possibilities a politics of de/colonization opened up by

bringing to centre stage the blak body (Destiny Deacon) and, especially the deployment of autobiography and memory work as de/colonizing pedagogical practice for these times. Finally, I will argue for a repositioning of white teaching bodies in postcolonial teaching space.

THE TIMES

The resurgence of the Right

What we see is a resurgence of the Right and its attempt to rupture the movement towards post-coloniality - the Republic, Mabo, Wik, immigration, Asian relations. A struggle around bodies, borders and boundaries dominates the contemporary scene. Indigenous land rights are at centre stage in the national debate, unsettling (but hardly turning upside down!) what was thought to be settled and certain and triggering deep fears in the Australian psyche. On the ABC's 7.30 Report on September 4 Howard produced a map of Australia, colored in brown and white, a map representing the "browning" of Australia the fear of a take over from within by Indigenous people. No wonder Howard has remained silent in the face of Pauline Hanson! (handout from Weekend Australian, nov.23-24, 1997, p.24).

In the name of democracy - Howard's rhetoric "for all of us", Hanson's "One Nation" and "equality for all" - we've got an aggessive resistance to difference, an assault on multiculturalism (Howard proposed to do away with the term [The Advertiser, Adelaide 26/12/96] and a full frontal attack on Indigenous people and their rights. Howard has refused to apologize for the stolen children or to properly address the Inquiry's report, he has refused to negotiate on WIK, his call for "free speech" and an end to "political correctness" (a la Reagan/Bush), and his refusal to challenge Hanson has created a space for racism to flourish in private/public spaces - from the "mongrel" talk of the Mayor of Pt. Lincoln, S.A., to Hanson on Aborigines and cannibalism, to her perverse notion that Aborigines are advantaged over and above "ordinary white Australians", to Fischer's "bucketloads of extinguishment" and more. Sadly, this is a late 20th century return to 18/19 century colonial mind, the desire for white cultural, political and economic hegemony and with it a renewed determination to wipe Indigenous people off the Australian landscape.

This has been accompanied by an assault on the Humanities - the bastion in colonial times of English language, literature and history, the supporting pillars of national identity and national culture. The Right demands historical amnesia. Yes, bad things were done to Aborigines in the past, admits Howard, but that doesn't mean anyone living now is guilty or responsible for those wrongs. He rejects "blackarmband history" of course because it provides counterhegemonic narratives of the past and contests the narratives of the heroic deeds of our white male explorers, the grand narratives of white masculine history that have dominated our teaching in schools. And superficial stories about complex social and economic problems abound, conveniently scapegoating Others

for all the woes. The Right accuses the "bleeding heart liberals" of supporting the "barbarians" who cross national and other borders. All of this is made worse by the shallowness of media reporting and, of course, right wing radio talkback hosts who collude in reproducing colonial racism. The ideas are repeated over and over, and become fused into "mainstream" values, a taken for granted "commonsense."

What particularly interests me for the purpose of this paper is the disembodied nature of this discourse - the free floating, suspended, ahistorical space of speech and thought. A space of forgetting and dis-membering, of splitting off the head from the body. See nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing as Leunig's cartoon (SMH, 14/11/97) suggests. And it heralds a re-turn, a turning back to a different time and space, the borders and spaces of racialized/racist colonialism. (It's interesting that Howard has attempted a re-turn into his body recently in talking with Geraldine Doogue on Life Matters about loneliness and men's feelings).

Black renaissance in cultural production

For at least the past decade in Australia, there has been an immense outpouring of Black cultural expression, with the proliferation and increased visibility and recognition of Indigenous writing, and Indigenous art and performance. Significantly, much of this work is autobiographical, the texts are performed from the speaking position of "I" the body of the blak woman. This was the case at Sydney's recent Festival of the Dreaming. In art, Rea's Eye/I'mmablakpiece celebrates the life of her grandmother and explores the non-linear movement between the lives of traditional women, mission life and blak urban women's lives, the multiple times and places of blak wimmin's postcolonial subjectivities.

The Wimmin's business series at The Playhouse included an international lineup of indigenous wimmin's performances, Margo Kane, Deborah Cheetham's "White Baptist Abba Fan", Ningali Lawford's story of herself and Deborah Mailman's Seven Stages of Grieving, each staged around the lives, loves and pain of the blak woman's body.

The proliferation of Indigenous work has emerged as much from urban/cosmopolitan sites (Mundine's "urban Ab") as from the "traditional" artists of the North. But it is also emerging from less known sites in-between (the south-east) and from points of enunciation that are neither "Trad Ab" nor "urban Ab" but from the speaking positions of "new Aboriginalities" to use Hetti Perkins term.

It's not surprising that given the pressures of the inter/national art market and in the context of the colonial/postcolonial racialized struggles over space and place, that these times have produced a series of mis/appropriations and mis/representations in the world of art and writing. Elizabeth Durack has assumed the right to take on the persona of Eddie Burrup, Leon Carmen wrote an apparently autobiographical story of a blak woman Wanda Koolmatrie and most recently Ray Beamish, a white man, former husband of Kathleen Pettyarre, claims authorship and ownership of her/his artworks. "Revealed: Black art scandal - white man claims credit for prize-winning Aboriginal painting' was the headline in the Weekend Australian, Nov.15-16, 1997,p.1))

Human Rights issues

Meanwhile Human Rights violations persist unaddressed. To cite Justice Marcus Einfeld's speech to the 6th National Guardianship and Administration Conference in Canberra, September 16, 1997: "I am for one nation too...I agree that all Australians should be treated equally. I just wish that Aborigines and Islanders could be treated equally with the rest of us. I know many indigenous people, who, like their critics, would also like an end to "special treatment". They would have liked such special treatment to have ended decades ago, as they watched their children being forcibly taken away, as they were mercilessly bashed for speaking their own languages, as they were told that their lands were owned by someone else, as they were chased and shot dead for having black skins. They would like to see the end of "special treatment" of having grossly disproportionate imprisonment of their people in Australian prisons, as high as 25 times the rate of white inmates in Western Australian prisons...They would also be glad to forgo the "special treatment" of seeing more than a hundred aboriginal men and women dying in the lonely desolation of official custody in the last few years - more in the ten years following the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Deaths in Custody than in the 10 years before. They would be pleased to give back to the rest of society the "special treatment" of high infant, maternal and adult mortality rates, unequal access to education and health care, and an unemployment situation for Aboriginal youths 18 times worse than their white counterparts."(p.6)

Political movements, black and white

Most recently, and with added impetus since the Convention in Melbourne in May, and Howard's 10 point plan to amend WIK, there has been a groundswell in grassroots anti-Howard anti-Hanson anti-racist movements along with the Reconciliation movement bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous "middle" Australia, middle class and middle aged together.

The question then is what implications does all this have for us as educators? as cultural workers? as critical political intellectuals? What strategies can we deploy to actively intervene and make a difference in these times?

At this point, I want to suggest three broad strategies for intervention into the contemporary scene (1) a de/colonizing political practice for postcoloniality and (2) teaching/ Cultural Studies, that is teaching understood as 'doing Cultural Studies' and (3) a feminist pedagogy of the body

ON POSTCOLONIAL

The term "postcolonial" has been used to both name the times and to position critique. When it comes to naming the times we run into difficulties immediately. Hall's (1990) "new times" has generated controversy1. And, while some theorists continue to refer to "the" postmodern or "the postmodern condition", others question or refuse the term altogether2.

"Postcolonial", too, is problematic and either rejected or critically appropriated (Williams and Chrisman 1993). As Spivak has pointed out, the postcolonial doesn't have an adequate referent. You can't point to what it "is". The writer Ama Ata Aidoo, for one, has warned that to use this term (and others like "Third World") is to engage in a "strategy of misnaming", a "pernicious fiction" which further perpetuates colonialism. McClintock (1993) has argued that the term 'postcolonial', underpinned by the modernist figure of linear development, can easily be misconstrued as a new historical stage, apparently superceding the one before (a problem which also relates to the other categories). Ruth Frankenburg and Lata Mani (1993) make the argument that it is more useful to work with a notion of "postcolonial" as a system of domination (rather than as an historical stage). They focus on the axes of colonial/ colonizing and de-colonizing (or "de/colonizing" as Watson and Smith [1992: xiii-xxxi] suggest) as ongoing processes which are themselves co-constructed with multiple other axes of subject formation, including 'race', gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

It is in this sense of engaging in de/colonizing practices in relation to continuing material and symbolic forms of colonization that I argue for the strategic use of 'postcolonial' as both a name for the times and as a position of critique. The Howard/Hanson era is a specific articulation of postcoloniality. The question is what makes these times different in the ongoing history of colonialism/ postcolonialism and how do we as educators address that difference?

CULTURAL STUDIES AS PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE

The second strategy for intervention in the current times is the notion of Cultural Studies as pedagogical practice.

First I want to say something about how I got into Cultural Studies. I was in the Phd program in Sociology at the City University of New York when "it" started to happen in 1988. Stanley Aronowitz and an interdisciplinary group of Phd students who were discontented with old disciplinary boundaries and categories were the key movers and shakers. Although there was, as part of the movement, an attempt to establish Cultural Studies as a discipline in its own right, what actually evolved was a Cultural Studies Centre within the Sociology program, a Cultural Studies working within and without that discipline. This turned out to be a pretty potent position. (see Aronowitz Rollover Beethoven).

What I took away from the CUNY experience, and what is central to my work now, is the understanding that the project of CS is centrally bound up in the cultural politics of knowledge production, that is, it is a political, epistemological and pedagogical project, although I don't agree with Aronowitz that it is "revolutionary". But, in hindsight, I came to this position more through my teaching in CUNY colleges than through my PHd studies. My Cultural Studies teaching/activism was very much shaped by the culture wars that raged through the US academy in the Reagan/Bush era of the '80's and the face to face classroom experience I had with "new" students in CUNY (working class minority students who had not previously entered the University). The feminist, poststructuralist and postmodern critiques of science and sociology legitimated my actions and gave me language in which to theorize what I was doing.

If you connect teaching and Cultural Studies you don't tend to make it into the Cultural Studies hall of fame (bell hooks and Carolyn Steedman) and you also get a pretty disinterested if not hostile reaction from within education circles. But I'm going to insist that it is, however, the main road we as educators and cultural workers need to take in these troubled times and beyond. Raymond Williams' articulation of the relation between Cultural Studies and teaching is worth recounting. In his lecture "The Future of Cultural Studies" given to the Association for Cultural Studies at Northeast Polytechnic in March 1986, Williams argued that "the heart" of Cultural Studies was its engagement with the relation between an intellectual project (such as Cultural Studies) and its social formation, or I would add the historical conditions. "We have to look", he said, "at what kind of formation it was from which the project of Cultural Studies developed, and then at the changes of formation that produced different definitions of that project" (ibid: 152). Tracing the trajectory of Cultural Studies in his own and others' work back to the '30's, Williams cited his teaching in adult education ("that notably unprivileged sector" [ibid: 154]), and later in the new Universities and Polytechnics, rather than any texts as the site from which his Cultural Studies practice emerged. And it was the presence of "new" students, women and working class adults who had not previously had access to tertiary education, and with whom Williams identified as working class "world"-travellers, that provided the occasion for its emergence as a challenge both to existing bodies of disciplinary knowledge and traditional pedagogical practices.

Williams identified those times as a "new educational conjuncture" brought about by changing historical, social and cultural conditions. Central to the problematic of his Cultural Studies project was a crisis in the production and dissemination of knowledge which he saw as being constrained by a certain organization of disciplines, the push to vocational training (with its anti-intellectual overtones), and the technologization of tertiary/adult education through Open Learning and other initiatives. All of these privileged the "transmission" of information over more complex social and cultural processes of knowledge production involved in teaching and learning. Williams' response to this was to generate a teaching practice committed to a "democratic culture" in adult classrooms. Significantly, this was to be achieved through a "process of constant interchange between the discipline and the students" (ibid: 157; my italics). He argued not only for the necessity of working between the disciplines, but also for an understanding of Cultural Studies as a project which opposed both the reduction of education to "vocation" (supporting instead what Stuart Hall has since called a "worldly vocation") and the displacement of knowledge by information.

I want to argue for the importance of taking up Williams' notion of Cultural Studies as radical teaching practice and argue that a new education conjuncture has emerged in the Howard/Hanson era which demands that Faculties of Education take on board what Cultural Studies has to offer.

FEMINIST POSTCOLONIAL CULTURAL STUDIES AS PEDAGOGY OF THE BODY

In this specific articulation of postcoloniality in Australia, the crisis, as I have suggested in my very brief analysis, is a crisis of knowledge. More specifically, it's a crisis about knowledge, power and culture, about cultural values, about morality, ethics and 'truth'. It is also a crisis of borders and bodies, space and place. As an intervention into this crisis, I'm arguing that feminist postcolonial Cultural Studies is a strategy we can deploy.

TEACHING POSITIONS

But first I want to talk about teaching positions, specifically colonial teaching positions.

White teacher/Indigenous students

I want to suggest 5 positions of colonial/colonizing teaching.

Whatever the underlying politics, disembodiment, expressed in declared or undeclared notions of essentialism constitute forms of colonial/colonizing teaching. "We are all the same" - To adopt this position is to engage, consciously or unconsciously, in the denial of ethnic and cultural differences and a conscious refusal to explore differences that make a difference in what and how one knows. Usually underpinned by a liberal politics (teacher values equality and treats everyone the same) or a conservative politics (teacher identifies with students who are the same as herself and marginalizes others in the name of treating everyone the same). Both teaching strategies are disembodied.

A third version of this involves the radical teacher who displaces herself/her body and identifies with the minority students ("I/I'm like you, I'm not one of them") in order to be accepted, bridge the gap (or, as students have said to me in New York "white people just wanna be loved"). Disclaiming her differences and disavowing her cultural/economic belongingness to the hegemonic group, she seeks to position herself on the side of/inside with her marginalized students. Through her strategy of identification - "We are all the same in here...I am not them, the white racist others" - enables her to disembody herself, deny her ethnic body, her "whiteness" and her insider implication in colonial racism.

This attempt to deflect hostility from the white body of the teacher and her complicity (albeit indirect) in historical genocide serves to stabilize her teacher authority base.

A fourth position, entangled in the others, is "you tell me yours but I won't tell you mine - because I'm the teacher." This position is detectable in the discourse of some Reconciliation Circles and WIK-ED meetings I've attended. (i.e. in adult learning circles in the contemporary scene). Middle aged/class whites are keen to know about the other. They (consciously or unconsciously) want to place the burden of representation on the other. All whites have to do is listen, and apparently, through listening learn. Again, in this scenario, the white body is "outside" and whilst moved by the trauma of the story being told by the blak woman about past injustices done to her, the white woman doesn't see the implication of her own white body in the present. She remains doubly displaced, on the one hand from the story telling and on the other from the action of oppression.

Face-to-face with difference, culture shocked by the unfamiliar "other", the teacher saves face, veils her fears and hides behind professionalism, objectivity and disciplinarity. She turns to the safety of the (Eurocentric) textbook, the body of knowledge of her discipline and standard methods of University teaching. In the Indigenous tertiary classroom, these tactics further alienate students already in an alien world (historically outsiders now inside), separating the body of knowledge from their bodies as source of knowledge and dismissing selves/ bodies/subjectivities - the lifelines of culture and knowledge.

Indigenous teacher/indigenous students

I want to give one scenario here. "We are all the same". The indigenous teacher who assumes sameness of herself and her students and teachers from the point of view of 'we', adopts an essentialist position in relation to Aboriginality and risks denying Aboriginalities ("new Aboriginalities" [Hetti Perkins]). A teaching from the point of view of "we". This position sometimes underpins the teaching of Aboriginal Studies.

This is a limited political strategy in these times for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people struggling towards Reconciliation. For one thing it assumes an easy taken-for-granted reading off the body ("As you can see I'm aboriginal"). For another it covers over differences and discontinuities between Indigenous people. And, thirdly, powerful critiques of essentialism by black intellectuals in the U.S. and England have pointed to the impossibility of knowledge predicated solely on identity. (e.g. Gilroy's "It's not where you're from it's where you're at") Yes, Indigenous people should be teaching in Universities but that's a different issue. Finally, the political necessity for this position may be passing. It is contested by metropolitan Indigenous artists and performers and by the recent grassroots coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous people around the WIK/race debate.

However, whether the teacher is white or black may not be the central issue.

READ BELLEAR

POSTCOLONIAL TEACHING POSITIONS

Hall (1996,p.465) tells us that what is similar to other times and what makes this specific historical moment different - that combination - is what gives us "the specificity of the question" and "the strategies of cultural politics" with which we as intellectuals and cultural workers can attempt to intervene. I take it that there's no one strategy, no single question and the strategy of intervention you adopt depends on the particularities of your situation.

As a broad strategy, feminist postcolonial Cultural Studies offers me a way to work through the complexity of identity politics, issues of representation, and the cultural politics of knowledge, a way to work in and against a particular historical conjuncture, time and place. A framework to engage with a multiplicity of tyrannies that have dominated modernist and colonial/colonizing teaching - the tyranny of disciplinary knowledge, the tyrannies of positivist thinking in education, of teaching as a disembodied cognitive activity which takes place in the head, the tyranny of the objective professional teacher-in-authority, the tyranny of essentialism, the tyranny of oppositional black/white politics.

If I re-position myself as white feminist postcolonial teacher, as Spivak (1993) has suggested, both inside and outside colonialism and inside/outside its articulation with gender and 'race'/ ethnic power relations and admit to benefitting from my multiple positions of privilege,

the question is what tools from feminism, what Cultural Studies tools can I deploy with Indigenous students/ black women students?

This brings me to a pedagogy of the body. Since the Right wing discourse is disembodied discourse characterized by historical amnesia and a suspension of bodies (i.e. the body of the racist speaker), cultural workers need to reclaim bodies, histories, memories, experiences and story telling.

Reclaiming story telling, in the broadest sense, is central to a pedagogy of 'the' body. Story telling, writes Trinh Minh-ha (1989;1991) is the oldest form of building critical consciousness in community. Story telling and 'reading' become "braided narrative" in that the telling is also a 'reading' of the story. It is a way of talking back and writing back (hooks 1989).

AUTOBIOGRAPHY and MEMORY WORK as a pedagogy for the body and as strategy for post-coloniality

Not surprisingly, there has been a proliferation of autobiographical works, a "subjective explosion", in a range of forms by Indigenous people, especially blak women in this country. I've already mentioned the Festival of the Dreaming Wimmin's business series at the Opera House in September where blak women performance artists presented some of the most powerful pieces of the Festival. Deborah Mailman, Margo Kane, Ningali Lawford, Leah Purcell and Deborah Cheetham each presented works from the speaking position of "I" a blak woman. In art as well as in writing the genre of autobiography dominates (Rea's Eye/I'mmablakpiece). It's also become a powerful strategy at the huge public meetings around Sydney recently, where Indigenous guest speakers have been talking in detail about what has happened to them as stolen children. (Lois O'Donahue at North Sydney Leagues Club, , Woolhara).

Why, at this specific historical conjuncture, do Indigenous women use autobiography as a genre within which to work? It is a site, in multiple forms, that black wimmin can use to break through the silence and speak their bodies, their experiences, their memories. Their works are pedagogies of the blak body.

As a teaching strategy, autobiography opens up the possibility of a pedagogy of the body, in which both my students' Indigenous identities and subjectivities and my non-Indigenous "whiteness" and Anglo-Celtic ethnicity can be examined. Writing/reading autobiographically undermines essentialist positions around their "blackness"( "as you can see I'm Aboriginal" and, later, "well, I have been taken for Greek at the supermarket checkout") and my "whiteness" (the taken-for-granted invisible ethnicity of Anglo-Saxon/Celtic bodies) by situating my/their gendered bodies ethnically, sexually and in other ways.

I use autobiography (in oral, written and art forms) as a creative critical/political intervention into body matters.

It is a means of textualizing our worlds, of bringing our realities into the classroom for re-reading and critique. Autobiography as life/text deconstructs the false separation between text and world. To appropriate autobiography as strategy for postcoloniality is not to enter what Hall has called the "moment of profound danger" when power and politics get constituted exclusively as matters of language and textuality, a strategy that has somewhat overcome Cultural Studies work through the deluge of North American literary formalism. It is, however, to acknowledge that "questions of power and the political have to be and are always lodged within representations of textuality." (Morley & Chen, p.15??)

Autobiography places the bodies of blak women at centre stage in the context of the current moment of postcoloniality - her /their voices, stories, experiences, history, body politics -thereby displacing discrete categories of 'race' or gender or a seemingly innocent Indigeneity. It also disrupts the authority of authenticity - while retaining the politics of the collective tragedy of Indigenous peoples as colonized first peoples in this country, it opens up differences within that collective experience. And by opening up spaces for subjectivities and identities, the stories themselves create the possibility of healing rifts brought about by colonial racism absorbed by Indigenous communities from the dominant culture. Racism that's evident in lines like "you're not a real Aborigine". There's a lot of ignorance and naievete and competitiveness and downright hostility that gets manifested in classroom student relations. A student who thinks she is real and deserves government money because she has been raised on a mission with "traditional" ways (Mundine's "trad Ab") dismisses other students who are blonde and blue-eyed ("why don't ya just be a white girl?") or were raised in the city (Mundine's "urban Ab"). Then there's the antagonism towards "the come latelies", misunderstood as claiming Aboriginality in order to pick up the benefits. An examination of the stolen generation reveals how an Aboriginal person can so easily become a "come lately" through no fault of their own.

It opens up the possibility, too, of working through the denials, refusals and secrets around Indigenous bodies, the the deep levels of shame and pain constituted in colonial institutions, schools, churches, workplaces (always wearing T-shirts and never showering with the white boys after sport,

the feverish search for identity, traces of the past, putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their Aboriginality.

BEYOND STORY TELLING

But, story telling isn't enough. A story is also a 'reading' and re-writing of the blak and white body, a way of bringing to consciousness the differential workings of power in/over blak and white bodies.

Stories are told and read simultaneously, and in the dialogues and the re-readings, connections and disconnections are made. Autobiography, then, is my way of setting up the dialogue, to pick up from Sandra Harding's closing argument in her talk yesterday. And this is the moment of 'truth' making, of morality, ethics, politics and epistemology.

What I want to do now is share with you some of the work.

Remembering schooldays is a potent task, pleasurable and painful. My story of a '50's colonial classroom in a small town in the Adelaide Hills gets read with and against Kris Johnson's story of primary school days in Western Sydney in the same era. Kris is a few years younger than me. The class is already aware that generational differences make a difference when it comes to schooling practices. I'm Anglo-Celtic, Kris is a fair skinned Aborigine, each of us went to all white schools. Or did we? Amongst other things, we both got taught about "the Aborigines". I learned my whiteness in part from what I learned about black others. Those who hadn't yet died out and were "out there", far away living traditional stone-age, nomadic lifestyles. Kris also learned to be white. She'd done an archaeological dig in her garage and discovered some of her primary schoolbooks which she shared with the class. She described herself as failing academically. Her education was at a distance to her lifestyle. Social studies caused her great stress and confusion. She writes: "I thought I was Aboriginal until we studied the evolution of Man.

She also learns about far away black others.

Kris is doubly displaced. First she denies her Aboriginality to her schoolfriends because she knows it wouldn't be believed. And second she learns only about the "trad Ab", an Aboriginality to which she cannot relate. Her Aboriginality remains a secret until much later.

CONCLUSION

I'm arguing that we can and do make a difference and that the classroom and our pedagogical strategies are sites of significant Cultural Studies work. What we're doing is shifting the balance of power in the relations of culture or as Hall has put it "changing the dispositions and configurations of cultural power" (Hall, 1996,p.468).

EPISTEMOLOGY

Working on a new epistemology means working on the limits of deconstruction. We've shifted from an epistemology of identity, to an epistemology of difference and from there, through Gayatri Spivak's work, to an epistemology of identity-in-difference. In this working out of a new epistemology my hope would be that the theorizing gets done through the political-practical work of postcolonial classrooms rather than the armchairs of French (or North American) philosophers. To do this, the teacher/researcher will have to be a participant inside the frame - the white body of the teacher, her ethnicity/'race'- has to be inside the process of the construction of knowledge. It must involve the process of re-membering, it must take into account knowledge produced through the sifting and sorting through the multiple times and places which any one body inhabits. And that might come about through narrativizing those complex moments of de/colonizing, the face to face confrontations with the colonial mind (and that colonial mind can dwell in any colored body), the moments of connection and disconnection, of cultural translation.

I am questioning here the usefulness, now, of poststructuralism and postmodernism. ("another version of historical amnesia" {Morley & Chen, 1996, p.14]) as well as the "overwhelming textualization of Cultural Studies" (Morley & Chen, 1996, p.15).

However an epistemology for postcoloniality in this country gets articulated, a new Indigenous (blak) politics of knowledge has emerged bringing with it an immense challenge to what has been taken for granted not only in the discipline bases from which most academics teach but also to the "whiteness" of our teaching practices. It offers a means not only of reconceiving and rewriting our "white" and "black" identities, but also of engaging in the challenging project of rewriting traditional white Western curricula in tertiary institutions together with the immense pleasure of working together in coalition with the first peoples of this country.

These are projects of serious immediate national concern, which must not merely be reflected in, but led by University academics and especially by those of us working in education.

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1. Hall acknowledges the word "new" is problematic first because it suggests a complete break from the past and, second, because "newness" is not a universal experience. Contemporary changes are unevenly apparent around the globe (Hall 1990: 116-134).

2. Judith Butler, for instance, writes: "The question of postmodernism is surely a question, for is there, after all, something called postmodernism? Is it an historical characterization, a certain kind of theoretical position, and what does it mean for a term that has described a certain aesthetic practice now to apply to social theory and to feminist social and political theory in particular?" (Butler 1992: 3-21).