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IRSCL Award Winner 2003
Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature
by Clare BradfordCarlton: Melbourne University Press, 2001
Reading Race demonstrates how Australian children's texts of all genres (fiction, non-fiction, picture books, school texts, films) represent Aborigines and Aboriginality to Australian children. It examines the ideologies of race which inform Australian children's texts, the cultural shifts that are visible in their representations of Aboriginality, and the tensions and uncertainties which they disclose. In its deployment of postcolonial theory and its attention to Aboriginal textuality, Reading Race affords models of theorized analysis of texts. It deals with questions of gender, colonialism and the sacred; issues of cultural appropriation, hybridity and reconciliation as they manifest in Australian texts.