Representing aboriginality

If films are political artefacts that both reflect and reconstruct a society´s discourses, then analysis of the cinematic representation of aboriginality is vital to the post-colonial agenda.

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.

Three films are analysed in the discussion of dominant trends: The Great Dance - a hunter´s story (Directed by Craig and Damon Foster, 2000), The Last Wave (Directed by Peter Weir, 1977) and Once Were Warriors (Directed by Lee Tamahori, 1994)