Download Spaces of Indigenous cultural performance as spaces of

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Spaces of Indigenous cultural performance as spaces of
resistance
Dr Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney
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Spaces of Indigenous cultural performance as spaces of
resistance
Abstract
Indigenous cultural performance and cultural activities in mainstream social spaces have
been given limited consideration by sociologists as acts of resistance. The paper adopts a
sociological approach to consider social spaces in which Indigenous cultural performance
and cultural activities take place as ‘heterotopic spaces’ (Foucault 1986; Hetherington
1997). The paper considers these ‘heterotopic spaces’ as sites of broader political projects
of decolonisation, expressions of Indigenous sovereignty, and resistance to the
dominance of whiteness. In doing so, the paper attempts to develop ideas around
Indigenous resistance in the context of expressions of Indigenous cultural performance and
cultural activities.
Key words: Indigeneity, culture, identity, subjectivity, resistance and whiteness
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Spaces of Indigenous cultural performance as spaces of
resistance
Introduction
In Newcastle, representations of Indigenous culture and Indigenous cultural performances
in social spaces provide local Kooris and Gooris a space to represent and share
Indigenous culture, protocols and genealogy with one another and non-Indigenous
peoples. Indigenous culture is reflected through ceremonies, contemporary and traditional
performance, such as the smoking ceremony performed by local Elders or traditional
dance performed by young Awabakal dancers annually at Newcastle’s Cultural Stomp
festival. It can involve showcasing, talking about, and sharing Indigenous experiences,
such as the Reconciliation tent at Cultural Stomp. It can involve the incorporation of
Indigenous cultural protocols into an event, such as Surfest opening with a ‘Welcome to
Country’ in which Indigenous Elder Bill Smith welcome surfers and spectators to the
land and then Awabakal dancers such as the Ginjada Dancers perform a traditional
Aboriginal dance. Representations of Indigenous culture and cultural performance can
take place as separate Indigenous cultural festivals or events such as the Birabahn
Cultural Festival or theatre performances such as Kin Tucka Tiddas. What each has in
common is that each space operates as a heterotopic space.
This paper considers how heterotopic social spaces, in which Indigenous culture and
cultural representations are performed in Newcastle, operate as a space in which
subjectivity, freedom, power relations and resistance are expressed (Foucault 1986).i
Hence, it explores how the ‘heterotopic space’ operates as a space that re-orders the
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dominant social order. It demonstrates how, in this very re-ordering, the heterotopic space
can operate as a site of resistance to colonising practices and the dominance of whiteness
and its dominant social and cultural representations, politics and practices.
Spaces of Indigenous cultural performance as heterotopic spaces
The consideration of social spaces in which Indigenous culture is performed as
heterotopic spaces emerges from Foucault’s original ideas about heterotopias – ‘places of
otherness’ – in Of Other Spaces (Foucault 1986) and The Order of Things (Foucault
1989). Heterotopias as spaces exist in relation to other spaces (Foucault 1989 xvii;
Hetherington 1997: 43). In considering Foucault’s ideas about heterotopias, Hetherington
(1997: 46) notes that, the heterotopic space ‘ruptures the order of things through their
different mode of ordering to that which surrounds them’. Heterotopic spaces can
‘…facilitate acts of resistance and transgression (Hetherington 1997: 46). Furthermore, as
Hetherington (1997: 46) points out, for Foucault, they act ‘as spaces for the means of
alternative ordering through their difference and Otherness’. It is ‘through their
juxtaposition with the spaces that surround them they come to be seen as heterotopias’
(Hetherington 1997: 46).
In this context, the heterotopic space is a social and political space for alternative
forms of social production, which reflects an Indigenous culture and genealogy
comprised of identity, politics, community and culture. The heterotopic space can
represent a site of freedom and resistance. Heterotopic spaces can operate as spaces in
which Indigenous peoples either indirectly or directly engage in interrupting the
production and reproduction of the dominance and normativity of the social and cultural
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practices of whiteness. They can also operate as spaces that disrupt past and ongoing
practices of colonisation and dispossession. For example, in 2008 Bangarra –Australia’s
national premier Indigenous performing arts company – performed its dance production
Mathinna at Newcastle’s Civic Theatre. Mathinna is performed as a sequence of
powerful representations about Australian colonisation and Indigenous child removal.
The various dance sequences represent, for example, Mathinna’s experience of removal
from her Indigenous family and community; her adoption and later abandonment by the
Governor and Lady Franklin of Tasmania; her experience of the paternalism and the
violence toward her; and, her struggle with alcoholism and self-loathing. The audience is
confronted with the complexities of colonisation and Indigenous child removal,
demonstrating the interconnections between this individual Indigenous woman’s
experience and her alcoholism and self-loathing. Her life comes to a depressing end
shortly after she returns to her people who live on an Aboriginal settlement.
Having defined the meaning of the heterotopic space in the context of the present
paper, I now wish to explore the meaning of resistance as it is used here.
Resistance as an everyday act
In part, I am interested in resistance in the context of social action, social practice and
subject-formation. Thus, in this context, I wish to consider resistance as an everyday act
and in the context of power relations. This differs from considering resistance as
extraordinary or momentous as it is traditionally considered in the social movement
literature (Guidry, Kennedy & Zald 2000: 18).
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In developing their typology of resistance in the context of social movements,
Hollander and Einwohmer (2004: 536-538) argue that the core features of resistance are
the ‘act’, the ‘intent’ and ‘opposition’. Nonetheless, they point out that there is a
distinction between resistance as an act of collective mobilisation and resistance as an
everyday act (Hollander and Einwohmer 2004: 540). Unfortunately, for the purpose of
this paper, Hollander and Einwohmer’s (2004) sociological analysis of types of resistance
provides only a cursory and rudimentary consideration of power and subjectivity in the
context of conceptualisations of resistance.
Alternatively, in considering the work of Manuel Castells around resistance identities,
Paul Havemann (1998: 14) points to the primacy of Indigeneity to resistance. That is,
Indigeneity as a subject position rests with primary identity that sits with Indigenous
peoples’ ‘right to define and perpetuate their traditions, culture and languages,
hierarchies, customs, modes of governance and mode of land use’ (Havemann 1998: 14).
Practices of resistance involve expressions of Indigeneity as primary identity, and this
resistance identity is ‘constructed by reinforcing the connectedness of kin with places,
languages and traditions over time’ (Havemann 1998: 14).
Similarly, Deirdre Howard-Wagner (2009) demonstrates how Indigeneity as a subject
position is deployed to resist the practice and terms of citizenship, challenge historical
norms, and resist the dominance of social and cultural practices of whiteness. I shall
develop this idea shortly, but first I wish to consider how power is conceptualised here.
Arguably, a contemporary sociological analysis of resistance in the context of social
spaces that features an analysis of subjectivity and agency, should also feature an analysis
of power relations. Yet, I believe there are limitations with adopting a hegemonic
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conceptualisation of power in this context. Magowan (2000: 310), for example, points to
the limitations of such an approach in explaining Indigenous cultural performance in the
context of Bourdieu’s (1991: 2) notion of ‘recognition’ (reconnaissance) and
‘misrecognition’ (meconnaissance) of symbolic power that reduces performative
dialogue to symbolic power or symbolic violence of ‘active complicity in relation to the
state’ (Magowan 2000: 310). The examples explored here of Indigenous cultural
performance as act of resistance go beyond relationships with the state to everyday acts
of Indigenous resistance to broader processes of colonisation, dispossession, whiteness
and power relations.
Alternatively then, Michel Foucault’s thoughts on resistance in the context of power
relations may be a more useful way of framing resistance in the context of Indigenous
cultural performance. For example, a closer reading of the Methods section of
Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume One (1976) and The Subject and Power (1994)
demonstrates that Foucault offered an analysis of power relations in the context of
resistance, subjectivity and identity.ii
Moreton-Robinson (2000 & 2004) and Howard-Wagner (2009) have already applied
Foucault’s ideas about power relations and resistance to explain Indigenous resistance
to the social and cultural practices of whiteness. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000), for
example, explains how power and resistance work through Indigenous subjectivities via
the articulation of alternative representations of Indigenous culture and Indigenous
subjectivities. Indigenous subjectivities operate as a form of resistance and allow for a
different positioning of Indigeneity than that represented in dominant practices and
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discourses (Moreton-Robinson 2000: 30). This approach allows for a consideration of
resistance as positive and as empowerment and freedom (Foucault 1994).
I, for example, explain how Indigenous discourses and practices as a form of
resistance ‘expose and disrupt whiteness, as relations of power, in negotiations for the
recognition of Awabakal sites and acknowledgement of local Awabakal history’
(Howard-Wagner 2009: 40). My work demonstrates how resistance contains a certain
political value, which is accorded to the self as an Indigenous subject and that Indigenous
subjectivity as an ethical subjectivity is constructed in relation to a long history of power
relations (Howard-Wagner 2009). That is, ‘faced with a relationship of power, a whole
field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions open up’ (Foucault 1994:
340). Subjectivities work through resistance, but, as a form of resistance, that are not
fixed or static (Howard-Wagner 2009: 49). In this context, practices of resistance emerge
out of resistance to the performativity of whiteness as an expression of power relations
and as a mode of action upon actions (Howard-Wagner 2009: 49).
Representations of Indigenous culture and performance can also contain an overt
political value, such as a reference to the struggle for Indigenous right. That is, resistance
contains a certain political value, which is accorded to the self as an Indigenous subject.
That is, ‘faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results,
and possible inventions open up’ (Foucault, 1994: 340). Practices of resistance emerge
out of a resistance to the dominant cultural and social arrangements and practices and
institutional operations of whiteness, but are also shaped by these arrangements, practices
and operations of whiteness. Resistance is thus also a process of desubjectification.
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Let me now apply this consideration of resistance to a consideration of social spaces as
heterotopic spaces of resistance by drawing on examples of Indigenous cultural
representations and performance in Newcastle.
Indigenous cultural performance as ‘resistance’ in Newcastle
Mainstream festival in Newcastle, such as Surfest and Cultural Stomp, often
incorporate Indigenous cultural protocols, such as a performance by the Awabakal
Traditional Dancers, a smoking ceremony by local Elders. The often also include an
Indigenous event, such as the Indigenous surf classic that forms part of Surfest or a talk
on the Stolen Generation in the Think Tent at Cultural Stomp. These events can form
heterotopic spaces within the festival space itself. For example, a panel discussion on the
Stolen Generation, comprised of Indigenous people who were removed from their
families and communities and non-Indigenous people involved in current restorative
projects addressing the effects of the Stolen Generation, discussing the effects of
colonisation and Aboriginal child removal.
Such representations of traditional and contemporary Indigenous culture in Newcastle
can be explained as a form of what postcolonial and whiteness theorist Homi Bhabha
(1994) defines as hybridity in the context of how it effects a transformation (Young 2004:
189). That is, Indigenous cultural performance can be interpreted as operating as a
‘strategic reversal of domination’ (Bhabha 1994) and reflecting a resilience of resistance
to colonisation (Jefferess 2008: 29). For example, the very act of incorporation of
Indigenous cultural protocols provides a space within dominant spaces for providing an
alternative to the dominant social and cultural practices of whiteness. This practice is thus
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a form of resistance. Yet, here resistance is not an overt political act or an organised form,
but operates through what Foucault (2009) refers to as the ‘practice of freedom’ as a
‘counter-conduct’ to dominant mainstream social and cultural practices. The very act of
incorporation of Indigenous cultural protocols is thus transformative in nature.
Yet, the program remains emblematic of the dominance of the social and cultural
practices of whiteness. As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, the incorporation of
Indigenous cultural protocols in the form of a ‘welcome to country’, dance performance
or smoking ceremony into mainstream cultural festivals can operate to ‘reproduce
asymmetrical relations of power’ in which non-Indigenous organisers determine how
Indigenous community will be incorporated into a festival program (Howard-Wagner
2006: 6). As I observed while conducting ethnographic research in Newcastle, rather
than consulting the Indigenous community or local Kooris and Gooris in the design and
development of a program, festival organising committees often decide what it wants to
incorporate and approach an Indigenous person or group to invite that person or group to
perform at the festival (Howard-Wagner 2006).
Alternatively, events such Coming Together Day in 1993, the opening of the Mixed
Mob exhibition in 2001, the Birabahn Cultural Festival in 2002 and the annual NAIDOC
week activities, operate as heterotopic spaces in which Indigenous people have selfdetermination over the program and the core program is limited to traditional and
contemporary Indigenous performance and representations of Indigenous culture, as well
as showcasing, talking about and sharing Indigenous experiences.
For example, the Birabahn Cultural Festival was held to mark the opening of the
Birabahn Building (named in honour of both the Eagle-hawk totem of the Awabakal
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peoples and Governor Macquaries’ dedicated Chief of the Awabakal tribes (Schaefer
2009: 321)), which houses both the Wollotuka Institute and Umulliko Indigenous Higher
Education Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. It was organised by staff and
students from the Wollotuka Institute, as well as local Kooris and Goori. This cultural
festival operated as a ‘heterotopic space’ that ‘ruptures the order of things through their
different mode of ordering to that which surrounds them’ and ‘…facilitate acts of
resistance and transgression (Hetherington 1997: 46). It is a social space that differs from
the social space of mainstream cultural festivals – it is an alternative ordering
(Hetherington 1997).
The Birabahn Cultural Festival, for example, included a ‘welcome to country’,
traditional dance performance, a corroboree, talking circles, a contemporary Indigenous
play, Indigenous films, an Indigenous art exhibition, an Indigenous music festival
featuring national and local Indigenous artists and story telling. Various festival events
such as the screening of the film Stranger in My Skin and performance of the play Get Up
and Dance, for example, operate as a space for the expression of the effects of
colonisation, dispossession and child removal and Indigenous journeys to understand and
reconnect with identity. ‘Get up and Dance’ is a contemporary play about the experiences
of a young Goori boy who grew up in an Aboriginal community near Armidale as he
searches for an understanding of his Aboriginal identity. Local Indigenous playwright
Ray Kelly wrote it.
Similarly, Kin Tucka Tiddas is a contemporary performance choreographed and
produced by Ngoroe-kah, a local Koori performance group in Newcastle. Ngoroe-kah
describe the performance as:
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Six women serv[ing] up a selection of tasty tales, missing
moments and passion pudding … which describes what being
an Indigenous woman means – the pressures, expectations,
sisterhood, herstory, laughter, music, triumph and the
sustenance women provide for their culture.
The performance involves the articulation of stories collected from Indigenous women
and their own experience, which transpires from a long history of power relations and
whiteness, a history that has shaped and created contemporary Indigenous subjectivities.
At stages in the performance, a contemporary corroboree is performed around a large
Indigenous artwork/sculpture that forms part of the set on the floor of the stage. Here
resistance is productive and constitutive via body, personhood and space.
This theatre performance is a representation of what Bhabha refers to as ‘hybridisation’
involving representations of both traditional and contemporary Indigenous culture – it is
‘a third space’ that disrupts, transgresses and displaces (Bhabha 1994). The
hybridisation of Indigenous culture operates as a ritual protest and an example of
performative politics, engendering new possibilities (Bhabha 1994). Through this
performance, cultural display becomes a medium for establishing intercultural relations
of power and politics via a performative dialogue between the performers and their
audience. The audience too is brought into this third space. The third space that also
operates as a heterotopic space in that it is a site of empowerment, resistance,
transgression and a re-ordering of social order (Hetherington 1997). Kin Tucka Tiddas
evidences how Indigenous cultural performances and cultural displays can both
showcase and share experiences and articulate representations of Indigenous culture, as
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well as operate as a political strategy and a form of everyday Indigenous resistance.
Here Indigenous cultural performance and cultural displays operate as forms of
Indigenous resistance to whiteness through which freedom is expressed as an ethical
behaviour related to the constitution of the Indigenous political subject. These ethical
subjectivities shape Indigenous cultural practices as forms of resistance. (Foucault 2003:
30-33).
Conclusion
The above examples, and other representations of Indigenous culture that I observed,
evidence how cultural performances and activities that operate in ‘heterotopic’ spaces of
subjectivity, freedom, power relations and resistance (Foucault 1986) in which local
Kooris and Gooris either indirectly or directly engage in interrupting the production and
reproduction of the dominance, normativity and privilege of whiteness.
The significance of the heterotopic space is that it is a social space in which the
performance of Aboriginal culture operates to challenge, contest, invert and reverse
conventional and received understandings of social spaces (Danaher, Moriarty and
Danaher 2006: 48) of whiteness and social relations between Indigenous and white
Australians traditionally constituted within those spaces. It is a re-imagining of the social
space.
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i
The author of this paper is white female academic and Indigenous rights activist. The empirical reflections
presented in this paper are based on three years engagement in fieldwork in Newcastle that consisted of an
six months of establishing relationships in the field followed by eighteen months of intensive sociological
ethnographic research and a further twelve months of ongoing engagement with the research setting.
During this time, the researcher also wore the hat of activist, giving something back to the Indigenous
community as determined by local Kooris and Gooris.
ii
For Foucault (1976: 95): ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this
resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’. So, rather than simply being
oppressive, power is positive in that it produces realities, it produces domains of objects and rituals of
truth (Foucault 1977: 194). Therefore, while power is omnipresent, it is fluid relational and productive.
This is what Foucault refers to as power relations.
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