Abstract

The British settlers and past Australian governments tried to eliminate Aboriginal peoples to obtain and maintain territory: many indigenous Australians were shot by the Native Police Forces and white vigilante groups, while later on the assimilation program was implemented to breed out Aboriginality. This Fellows' Seminar deals with the question of how contemporary literary and cultural representations of Aboriginality negotiate these attempts to eliminate indigenous Australians. More specifically, it will compare self-representations by Aboriginal peoples to representations of indigenous Australians by the white community. Narrative representations are important in this context because they allow us access to contemporary identity constructions and the creation of national identity.

Short CV

Jan Alber is Associate Professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He wrote his PhD thesis on the representation of prisons, and his Habilitation (for which he received a prize from the German Association of University Teachers of English) on "unnatural narratives" that represent physical, logical, or human impossibilities. Alber was awarded research fellowships from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, and he is President Elect of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

What is a Fellows' Seminar?

The AIAS Fellows' Seminar is a session of seminars held by the AIAS fellows or by other speakers proposed by the fellows. In each seminar, one fellow will present and discuss his/her current research and research project, closing off with a question and discussion session.

All seminars are held in English and open to the public. Registration to the seminar is not necessary. Read more about the AIAS Fellows' Seminar here.