Seminar focuses on Performing Aboriginality in an Age of Globalisation

Sep 16, 2005

The Centre for Canadian-Australian Studies in collaboration with the Identities and Cultural Transformation Research Group hosted an honours and postgraduate seminar on Friday 16 September.

The seminar, Performing Aboriginality in an Age of Globalisation was part of the centre’s “Performing the Nation” series and featured a Keynote Address by Professor Sam Carter from the Emily Carr Institute, University of British Columbia. The topic of Professor Carter’s address was Canadian Applied Arts and their Global Impact.

The presentation focused on the qualities that distinguish the look of Canada and how the Canadian applied arts reflect the spirit and image of Canada at home and abroad.

It included a diverse glimpse of Canadian applied arts from handmade to mass produced works including architecture, gardens, celebrations, furniture, textile-clothing, ceramics and electronic communication.

Professor Carter’s talk examined the impact of Indigenous arts on the idea of nation as communicated through the applied arts.

Students speakers at the seminar were Ernie Blackmore (“When Cultures Collide”), Kimberley McMahon-Coleman (“Portraying a Nation Within a Nation: Murri Sensibilities in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung”), Rebecca Smith (“The Subversive Cartography of Canadian First Nations Writer Eden Robinson”), Roslyn Weaver (“Indigenous Literature and Australian Apocalypse”) and Colin Salter (“Different Times, Different Packaging? White Ways of Knowing and Seeing its Impacts on Contemporary Performances of Aboriginality”).