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  • Colonial Encounters, Body Politics, and Flows of Desire
  • Frances Gouda (bio)
Inga Clendinnen. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 324 pp.; ill.;
Anna ColeVictoria HaskinsFiona Paisley, eds. Uncommon Ground: White Women and Aboriginal History. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005. 279 pp.; ill. ISBN 0–85575–485–0 (pb).
Karen Vieira Powers. Women in the Crucible of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 240 pp.; ill.; map. ISBN 0–8263–3519–5 (pb).
Tony BallantyneAntoinette Burton, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 445 pp. ISBN 0–8223–3455–0 (cl).

In recent years, a range of review essays has summarized and interpreted the results of more than two decades of the so–called new colonial history. 1 This innovative scholarship has been inspired by a critical postcolonial stance—a perspective that often incorporates an emphasis on the historical evolution of racial hierarchies and gendered identities. Since the 1980s, analyses of first contacts between European colonizers and indigenous peoples in Asia, Australia, Latin America, and Africa—and the long–term consequences these initial encounters produced—have yielded a rich harvest of new historical insights. The field has become an intellectual arena in which differences in sociopolitical and cultural power grounded in color–coded and gendered bodies have acquired a major role in defining the relationships white Europeans established with the inhabitants of the territories they colonized in the course of almost four centuries. These recurrent topoi are frequently intertwined with assessments of the presumed disparities in human intelligence and sensibilities that infused the contacts between Europeans and native subjects, prompting white–skinned colonizers to act out their innate sense of superior civilization in myriad ways.

David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon (1993) provides a useful starting point for thinking about these issues.2 The setting of Malouf’s historical novel is a makeshift community of European farmers in Australia’s Queensland during the 1840s. He begins his compelling story with a description [End Page 166] of the surrounding landscape. In the eyes of three white children, the Aborigine world of the bush encircling the ramshackle houses where their pioneering families tried to eke out a living was “the abode of everything savage and fearsome, and since it lay so far beyond experience, not just their own but their parents’ too, of nightmares, rumours, superstitions and all that belonged to the Absolute Dark” (3). This shadowy, menacing world was suddenly brought home to the white settlers through the figure of an in–between “black-white feller” named Gemmy Fairley (35). Having survived a shipwreck off the Australian coast as a thirteen–year–old boy, he was rescued by Aborigines and lived among them for the next sixteen years. When the children encountered Gemmy, they heard him stammer his very first words: “Don’t shoot. I am a B–b–british object,” after which he continued to speak in “some whining blackfeller’s lingo” (3). With his sun–baked black skin and sun–bleached white hair, Gemmy resembled a “straw–topped half–naked savage.” His “monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness” prompted the Scottish farmers to wonder: “Could you lose it? Not just language but it. It” (6, 39, 36; emphasis in the original).

The fear of losing It is at the core of Remembering Babylon. In the novel, It refers not only to anxieties about a loss of the common, civilized language British men and women brought with them to Australia; It also buttressed a white–skinned self that provided a moral anchor as well as an implicit consensus concerning Europeans’ rights to stake out ownership of land whenever and wherever it suited them. It sustained their sense of impunity toward the Queensland Aborigines, making Gemmy a creature who may have started life as an ordinary English boy but who had lost his Englishness —not only language but also his whiteness—due to the Aboriginal residue clinging to him after having crossed into black territory at the age of thirteen.

All four books under review address various aspects of Remembering Babylon’s central question: what...

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