Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters

by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Editor)

Indigenous rights in Australia are at a crossroads. Over the past decade, neo-liberal governments have reasserted their claim to land in Australia, and refuse to either negotiate with the Indigenous owners or to make amends for the damage done by dispossession. Many Indigenous communities are in a parlous state, under threat both physically and culturally.

In Sovereign Subjects some of Indigenous Australia's emerging and well-known critical thinkers examine the implications for Indigenous people of continuing to live in a state founded on invasion. They show how for Indigenous people, self-determination, welfare dependency, representation, cultural maintenance, history writing, reconciliation, land ownership and justice are all inextricably linked to the original act of dispossession by white settlers and the ongoing loss of sovereignty.

At a time when the old left political agenda has run its course, and the new right is looking increasingly morally bankrupt, Sovereign Subjects sets a new rights agenda for Indigenous politics and Indigenous studies.

Genres: Nonfiction, Indigenous, Australia, Essays, Philosophy, Theory, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Aileen Moreton-Robinson is professor of Indigenous studies at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and is director of the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network. She is author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism and editor of several books, including Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters.

Reviews

[Deb Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant collection of writing that articulates the concept of Indigenous sovereignty in Australia in the contexts of history, writing, law, and policy. These conversations have been mostly excluded from mainstream discourse in Australia in order to legitimise the assumed sovereignty of the Crown and Australian government, but these are important truths that all Australians should read and know. Each author presents their thesis with intellegence and wit. I learnt so much from this book, and will definitely read it again to pick up on more nuanced arguments that i will have missed. Highly recommend.

[John Gentry · Rating 3 out of 5]

It should be known this book was assigned for a class.....

That being said it took me quite a while to get through it. A collection of essays on Australian indigenous rights; it's truly hit or miss. A great deal are dense, and not the good cuddly dense. It's the quicksand dense. I had trouble wading through it and I set it aside to pick up other things quite often.

Here's a summary of what you'll learn: the indigenous Australians struggle for rights is still going on and things don't look good. With all the bashing on various "academics" I just wish the various authors could have written in a style that would be easier to grasp for the general public. In the end it seems hypocritical to talk about the failures of a system while perpetuating one of the main failures of the academic system.... the failure to create product even remotely accessible to the common man (indigenous or not).

I give three stars. This is because I learned a great deal from it, regardless of my experience while learning. It doesn't receive any higher of a review because of the reasons mentioned above.