Representing Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970: Assimilation, Resistance, Collaboration

by Amanda Harris (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2020

  $160.84

  In Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-70, Amanda Harris centralizes auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence of staged Aboriginal music and dance in the assimilation era. Harris seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of these histories to make sense of what adaptive performances reveal about the continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices under assimilation policies. Harris also intervenes in Australian musicological methods, historicizing the practices of art music composers and institutions to show how the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility had a direct relationship to non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book draws on oral histories and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, postcolonizing efforts and political change, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures.