Murdoch University
The Krishna Somers Foundation presents its second lecture of the year. The lecture will be given by
Dr Suvendrini Perera.
Please come to the lecture, enjoy debating with Suvendi and drink some excellent wine
(or orange juice).
The Australian Solution? Mapping a New Politics of Space in the War on Terror
Abstract
Leading up to the centenary of Federation in 2001 the major national question engaging Australia was that of Indigenous sovereignty. The possibility of a treaty was at the centre of public debate. Four years later, discussions of a treaty have all but disappeared from the scene. Although in this period sovereignty has been in the spotlight as never before, the question of sovereignty now engages a very different set of preoccupations: border protection, regional hegemony and interventionism abroad.
This paper explores the new grounds on which national sovereignty claims are acted out and the spatial imaginaries that authorise these claims. How do these rework understandings of the national geo-body as they also reposition Australia in what David Goldberg characterises as ‘the order of racial globalities’?
Suggested prior reading: Suvendrini Perera, “’What is a camp’…?” in Suvendrini Perera and Anthony Bourke ed. Borderphobias: Borderphobias: The Politics of Insecurity post 9/11, Borderlands Vol 1 No 1 (August 2002) http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html
Suvendrini Perera, currently a research fellow at Curtin University of Technology, completed her BA at the University of Sri Lanka and her PhD at Columbia University, New York. She has published widely on questions of race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and diaspora and is a contributor to a number of major anthologies of cultural studies. She is the author of Reaches of Empire (Columbia UP) and editor of Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/ Ethnicities/ Nationalities (Meridian). She is currently working on an ARC funded project on borders and junctions in the Asia-Pacific region.
