I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a White Postcolonizing Society

Abstract

Migrancy and dispossession indelibly mark configurations of belonging, home and place in the postcolonizing nation-state. The focus on white British migrancy is because of its role in colonization and the dominant and privileged location of white people and institutions, which remain at the centre of Australian society. In this chapter, the author argues that Indigenous belonging challenges the assumption that Australia is postcolonial because our relation to land, what she call an ontological belonging, is omnipresent, and continues to unsettle non-Indigenous belonging based on illegal dispossession. Through her use of the term ‘postcolonizing’ she seek to distinguish between the specificities of Indigenous/white settler societies such as Australia and those countries such as India and Algeria where the different specificities of historical experience are theorized within postcolonial studies. The author suggests an ontological relationship to describe Indigenous belonging is essentialist or is a form of strategic essentialism because she imputing an essence to belonging.

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