Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race

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by Gillian Cowlishaw

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published February 2004, 272 pages, cloth

ISBN 1405114037

In December 1997, a riot broke out among Indigenous people in a small town in rural Australia. Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race uses this vivid incident as a means of launching a larger discussion about race, identity, and racialized violence. This lively, highly readable ethnography brings Indigenous people into the contemporary global race discourse--a discourse dominated to date by discussions of African Americans and American Indians in the US. The first half of Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race uses the "talk of the town" to uncover the complicated story of that hot summer night. Local and national meanings of the riot are exposed, and the entrenched racial binary evident in everyday relationships is explored. The second half of the book takes up questions of history/memory, citizenship/respect, and interpellation/abjection so as to explore the politics, social science, and psychology of these conditions. Written both for beginners and those well-versed in contemporary debates, Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race introduces new readers to key theories of race relations and offers more seasoned readers a fresh perspective on racial and aboriginal politics.