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On
"Dancing with Strangers": Rechoreographing Indigenous and British Sovereignty
in the Colonial Encounter
On January 29, 1778, three days after the First Fleet carrying British sailors
and convicts landed in Port Jackson, Sydney Cove, to a place that became
the first white settlement in Australia, the sailors met indigenous
inhabitants of this country on the beach. In the words of one Lieutenant
Bradley, this first-contact event began auspiciously when "all hands
danced together." It is the embodied conditions of this event and their
rewriting as history that concerns me in this paper. I
will first consider the publication of Inge Clendinnen's book that takes this
event as the title for an award-winning popular history of the colonial
encounter. Dancing with Strangers (2003) appeared in the context of
debates about the telling of national history in Australia. I will criticize
her reading of first settlement by considering this event as a performance in
which the choreography of corporeal histories might speak about the physical
and mental dispositions, the gender relations, or the legal and political
positions of the British and Australians. I
will argue that Clendinnen's misreading of the dancing, in spite of its
progressive intentions and her imaginative writing, plays into a 'white
fantasy' of indigenous peoples as lacking in law, history, and linguistics.
1
It does so because it relies, as its key
metaphor suggests, on the concept of the 'stranger,' a figure that, according to
Sara Ahmed (2000), continues to be fetishized in postcolonial studies and that
raises complex issues about how dancing bodies negotiate and transmit
cross-cultural knowledge. Dancing
with Strangers has been preeminently successful among
recent Australian historical narratives. It was nominated for, and won, several
literary awards as the best nonfiction book of the year, and the publisher has
praised Dancing with Strangers as a "model of what history can do, how
it can make sense of silences, discontinuities and contradictions."
2
This book appeared, however, in the context
of the vigorous public debate taking place in Australia over competing views of
the historical treatment of indigenous peoples of Australia, a debate that has
become known as the 'History Wars.' In the United States in the 1990s, a
similar debate, also called the History Wars, arose from exhibitions at the
Smithsonian Institution in which its representations of the Pacific War became
rhetorically identified with denigrating the public view of the nation's past
(Macintyre and Clark 2003: 9). In
Australia, the History Wars raged on the front pages of the national press due
to a group of powerful right-wing commentators and a conservative government
generally intent on suppressing divergent views of nation, nationality, and
national belonging. The History Wars have included discrediting Aboriginal
testimony in relation to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge; refusing to apologize for
the "Stolen Generations" report; and attacking the 'political correctness' of
the National Museum's exhibition program. Recently, a National History Summit
was convened to prepare a statement on what histories should be taught in
secondary schools around the nation. On
the one hand, we find the 'black-armband' view of history that attempts to
reconcile a bloody and destructive history of white territorial expansion in
Australia with indigenous accounts of resistance and survival. On the other
hand, there is a view of that same history as relatively benign and generous toward
its indigenous inhabitants, migrants, and Australia's global political
aspirations (McIntyre and Clark 2003: 35). This stance was exemplified by
Education Minister Julie Bishop's comment, echoing Prime Minister John Howard's
own view, that "the Australian story is overwhelmingly a positive one."
3
The political imperatives of this
perspective have among other objectives the reconciliation of indigenous
history to "unifying historical narratives," which have the effect of
preventing legitimate indigenous claims to local or national sovereignty. At
the time, Clendinnen did not enter this debate, although she was identified by
commentators such as Keith Windschuttle as one of the historical protagonists
for the black-armband view (Macintyre and Clark 2003: 162). What is evident,
however, is that the central metaphor of her book proposes a sympathetic
account of first contact--a 'togetherness' that might have held some promise
for negotiating relations between white and indigenous peoples in Australia. As
a dance-studies scholar, I naturally seized the book with enthusiasm when it
first appeared. Clendinnen's opening claim that "we don't readily think of
dancing as a phase of the imperial process, but a surprising amount of
interracial dancing went on" (2003: 8) led me to hope that her study of the
colonial encounter, following Captain Arthur Phillip's landing in Botany Bay in
1788, might consider the ways in which nation formation begins as a complex
embodied project. As
a project in ethnographic history, her book provides a thick description of the
material conditions and social decisions of the early colonial community
comprised of convicts, sailors, and a governing elite, as well as medical,
legal, and other senior officers. Clendinnen makes clear that the sources for
reconstruction of this emerging world of the settlement during these first days
in Australia are the diaries and journals of the First Fleet lieutenants that
record their observations of the daily routines, minor incidents, environment,
and what she calls the "Australians' secular life." The smartest rhetorical
move that she makes is to call the indigenous people "Australians" with all the
rest labeled "British." Still, the Australians are Aboriginal people as
observed by the British (Clendinnen 2003: 5). With her astute eye on the
ethnography of social practices, Clendinnen raises the hope that this would be
an Australian publication that conceived of dancing as performance laden with
critical and semiotic possibilities for cultural and historical analysis, even
though only fragments of these colonial texts include any consideration of
dancing. One
of Clendinnen's key interlocutors is Lieutenant Bradley, whose beautifully
written, illustrated journal was published, like most First Fleet accounts,
shortly after his return to England in 1793. In the entry of January 29, 1788,
the ship's company was welcomed ashore by unarmed men, "in the most cheerful
manner, shouting and dancing"; then after an exchange of goods, "these people
mixed with ours and all hands danced together" (Bradley 1969: 67). On
the next day with a bigger party of British, the locals left their spears in
their canoes, and all proceeded to more "dancing and otherwise amusing
themselves" (Bradley 1969: 68). When Clendinnen cites these quotations from
Bradley, she explains first that dancing could mean "caperings," in the sense
of physical expression of excitement, and then wonders what this dancing
together might have looked like (Clendinnen 2003: 8). She speculates on
"rollicking British hornpipes followed by elegant Australian knee-lifts. Wild
hoppings and leapings from some cultural no-man's land?" (Clendinnen 2003: 9).
But what about the details embedded in that opposing of steps? Why are the
British likely to be dancing the hornpipe? Is it rollicking? And what would be
the "elegant Australian knee-lifts?" How are these "wild," and why do these
"hoppings and leapings" come from a "cultural no-man's land"? These
annotations, unfortunately, reiterate stereotypes of dancing as inarticulate
posturing and confirm the 'strangeness' of the "elegant" but "wild" indigenous
body. Even more unsettling is the notion of a "cultural no-man's land," surely
used ironically by the word-sensitive Clendinnen, that would restate the legal
doctrine of terra nullius that prevented indigenous claims for land
ownership in Australia until the Mabo judgment in 1992.
4
Whatever the function of poetic license in
relation to the source reference, these ideas do not make it possible to
conceive that dance practices might also legibly bind bodies to specific
histories and localized places. Since
the pioneering work of dance scholars during the last twenty years, the
contribution of embodied knowledges and performance practices to understanding
culture has radically transformed ideas about dancing. Any act of dancing,
according to Susan Foster, is a collection of tactically deployed disciplinary
techniques that produce distinctive corporealities (Foster 1997: 239) or,
according to Jane Desmond, represents a complex set of material practices that
are both "symptomatic and constitutive of social relations" (Desmond 1997: 33).
Performing bodies are increasingly recognized in social and cultural research
as subjects with agency and distinctive histories. For
example, Jacqueline Shea-Murphy's The People Have Never Stopped Dancing
(2007) identifies the complex political and rhetorical negotiation of American
Indian dancers with various phases of colonial and modern histories of
performance. For Native Americans, the significance of dancing extended beyond
performative or entertainment accomplishment, since it provided a communicative
structure for them to advance land claims as well to affirm spiritual and
secular indigenous identities in the face of dominant policies of erasure and
containment. In Australia, the role of indigenous corroborees and ceremonies to
articulate political claims or to reconstitute community solidarity has become
part of the "currency of knowledge" produced in indigenous events (Dussart
2000: 21819). Dancing, therefore, takes place neither casually nor
ahistorically, whether at the level of the individual body or in the social and
affective community for which it has most meaning. So
what about this dancing on the beach mentioned earlier? By the eighteenth
century, dancing was a regular part of British naval training, and the ship's
fiddler was a full-time crewman. Greg Dening records that Captain Bligh,
sailing to Australia in the same years as the First Fleet, required his sailors
to do the hornpipe for two hours a day as part of a regime of healthy exercise
or enforced "cheerfulness" (Dening 1992: 66).
5
When two aberrant crewmen refused to dance, they were given no more drink and
threatened with further punishment (ibid.: 71). It appears that dancing the
hornpipe was more a disciplinary regime, a learned component of naval
solidarity, than it was joyous expression, although Dening also contemplates
the power that might have been exercised by the sailors who "mocked their
captain in the ditties they sang and the steps they danced" (ibid.: 73). Does
the sailors' dancing, therefore, hyperbolize the role of social control over
physical exertion even in this first moment on the beach? Or was it a cheeky
rendition of the sailors' independence? A digression on the hornpipe provides
some further insight into the disciplinary histories of the sailors' dancing
bodies, although for a dance with such an extended (and now popular) history,
very little detailed research has been produced on its genealogy and transformation
in different contexts over the last two hundred years.
6
The
hornpipe is one of several kinds of step dances, including the jig, that have a
Celtic history although different origins in Scotland and Ireland. To
understand the choreography of first settlement, this contradictory national
history is relevant since the hornpipe is not a "British dance" and does not,
therefore, neatly codify the corporealities of imperial power. In a performance
choreographed eighty years earlier for Queen Anne's birthday in 1707, as Linda
Tomko explains, the hornpipe in affective terms was associated with "Scotland,
and specifically with the quality of stubbornness" (1997: 114). She argues that
new forces of 'nation' were embodied in the dynamics of the hornpipe whose
"drive and energy" was identified with a powerful Scottish "work ethic"; thus,
the unification of Scotland with England would serve commercial and nationalist
imperatives (1997: 121). In
order to conscript Scottish bodies to the powerful mercantile interests of
British imperialism, English military structures needed to discipline the
idealized vigor that they admired in the Scottish labor force. In fact, the
codification of the hornpipe in the court dancing represented the extinguishing
of an independent political economy for the first of those British colonized
bodies closest to home. The disciplinary processes of hornpipe dancing on the
ship thus provided what would have been a mixture of English, Scottish, and
Irish sailors with a means of marking out difference in their footsteps under
the watchful gaze of English captains. Today,
the hornpipe in Irish dancing uses hard shoes that make a loud clapping sound
and is danced to either a 2/4 or 4/4 beat; but in movement terms, it has, as
Tomko notes, a "fleet, almost running quality" (1997: 115).
7
The figurative stance of the Irish dancer,
a motif commodified by the impresario Michael Flatley, involves an upright
upper body with arms held stiff and close to the body, almost inexpressive, and
a fast forward-and-backward flicking of feet. The leg positions, while open
insofar as they maintain balance and allow the dancer to turn, stay close
together, while below the knees there is a dynamic scissoring action. The leg
either extends directly forward or bends behind to touch the bottom or
diagonally across the other leg. The movement comes through the toes, springing
from the floor with maximum propulsion from the lower legs and tightly drawn
upper body. Popular
mythology has it that this constricted dance style emerged as the Irish were
oppressed by the British and forced to dance in their houses. Since the houses
had dirt floors, the performers would place a small square of timber on the
ground for the dancer to perform, while the fiddler provided musical accompaniment.
As a solo virtuoso dance, this confined corporeal expression could be easily
accommodated onto the tightly regulated upper decking of a ship, while its more
social aspects belonged to the competitive caelli, or occasions, when
individual dancers would show off one after another. Dancing, therefore, could
locate different classes of sailors in a competitive and social form of
activity as well as communicate repressed tensions between the ship's ethnic
groups, with different ancestries and national identifications. Bradley's
journal provides remarkable visual evidence of the dancing on the beach in a
delicate watercolor painting titled "Broken Bay, New South Wales, March 1788"
(see fig. 1). According to Clendinnen, it depicts "dancing in the British
style," with the British and Australians "dancing hand in hand like children at
a picnic. The pairs are scattered over the whole foreground, with none of the
local preference for formation dancing, which reinforces my suspicion that it
was the British who took the initiative" (2003: 8). This reading diminishes the
event's significance as if only children dance hand in hand, rather than the
possibility that dancing might also be a pastime performed by adult men. I will
return to the picture later, but I want to utilize further Tomko's analysis of
the formation of couple-dancing figures in the hornpipe.
Its floor pattern, Tomko writes, is characterized
by the "spatial use of numerous crossing patterns" and a common figure
that follows from an instruction to "take hands and circle" (1997: 115).
This crossing of paths, designed for matched couples of opposite genders,
"features an advance and retreat, a taking the measure of the Other,
and meditation on joining or merger" (1997: 121). This precise figuration
of a choreographed encounter between strangers, across male and female
genders and across English and Scottish nations in the court dance,
articulates a partnering that dismisses Clendinnen's assumption that
only untutored or naïve bodies hold hands while dancing across a space.
When the sailors stepped out at Port Jackson, it seems unlikely that
they performed a choreographed or theatrically staged hornpipe; however,
the cumulative effect of dance embodiment is that habits of physical
movement and spatial formation include the traces of constraining and
plotted, cultural sequences. In an improvised context, the familiar
bodies from the boat could use these corporeal dynamics to "take the
measure of the Other" as they took their partners in hand. Rather than
gleeful abandon, the codified gestures of "advance and retreat" across
the sand could have been used corporeally to negotiate what it would
be like to "join or merge" with the assembled strangers. As in any enforced
social-dancing situation (remember school dances), there was likely
to have been a combination of attraction and active distrust added to
the frisson of hand holding in this couple dancing. From
the evidence of Bradley's journal and other accounts of this day, it seems that
this first dancing was a relatively friendly occasion: "our people and these
mixed together and were quite sociable, dancing and otherwise amusing
themselves" (1969: 68). But Clendinnen again modifies the cultural agency of
the exchange when she adds her "suspicion" that it was "our people" who took
the initiative, even though Bradley himself makes no such claim (2003: 8).
Reading further back in his journal notes, we find that he actually describes
the Aboriginal men on shore dancing three times before he describes this
dancing together with "our people." First
of all, on the January 28, Bradley writes that when the sailors push back from
the beach in their small boats after a first day of extended exploration, "the
Men began dancing and laughing." As the boats pulled away but got closer to
where some Aboriginal women were hiding behind trees, the men "got on their
legs and danced till we were some distance, then followed us up on the rocks as
far as the Boats went along " (1969: 66). On the next day, when exploring
another tributary of the bay, another group of Australians put down their
lances, gesturing the sailors ashore, "shouting and dancing, [with] the women
kept a distance near the Man with the spears" (68). And only after this
willingness on the part of the Australians did it happen that the groups
"danced together." Syntactically,
the historical record suggests that the Australians were using their dancing to
express different ideas long before the British realized that an active physical
response might be needed to these different communicative gestures from the
shore. And their preliminaries extended beyond the more formal figurations of
exchange to long lines of men, up to seventy-two in number, that Bradley
describes in turn as dancing and laughing, dancing to protect their women by
chasing the sailors away, and dancing and shouting (1969: 71). Each of these
danced actions appears to have had a different social and political function:
the former perhaps in surprise and hilarity, the second in defense as the
predatory sexual intentions of the sailors became more apparent, and the last
in preparation for conflict as they lay claim to their own territories and
privileges. Another First Fleeter, Captain John Hunter, elaborates on this latter
attitude when he writes: "they appeared very hostile, a great many armed men
appeared on the shore wherever we approached it, and in a threatening manner,
seemed to insist upon our not presuming to land" (1968: 38). The shift from
threatening to dancing cannot be discounted in this narrative and makes more
sense if dancing is included in the repertoire of warrior behaviors and not
assumed to be benign. Let
us return to the three couples in Bradley's painting, each with an Aboriginal
man on the left and a uniformed soldier on the right. They are thinly placed
along the liminal border of the picture in which the vastness of Sydney Harbour
to the new colonists is represented by an expanse of open, bowl-like sky. All
the figures have bent legs and outstretched arms held just above waist height.
The taut slant of their bodies resembles a dance-workshop exercise that
requires a pair of dancers to hold hands, lean back, and find a point of weight
balance between them, so that neither body is stable without the other. It is
difficult to see any musical accompaniment, although both the British and the
Australians appear to have guards carrying weapons--on the one hand, guns and
on the other, a spear. The dancing takes place, then, not without some fear of
the 'other' or a sense of 'stranger-danger' since both groups have a watchful
audience in the boats. In the middle of the picture, however, another figure
shows an Aboriginal man standing midway between two clothed men with both arms
extended. His legs are stretched very wide, and no knees are lifted; and the
man on the right who is tipping backward appears to be trying to imitate this
pose. Hunter
gives this decisive indigenous movement vocabulary in 1791, its first written
description: "placing their feet very wide apart, and by an extraordinary
exertion of the muscles of the inner thighs and legs, moving the knees in a
trembling and very surprising manner, such as none of us could imitate" (in
Clendinnen 2003: 41).
8
This 'shaky-leg'
gesture, visible in the southeast of the country at settlement, has
subsequently been transmitted so widely that it serves as a quasi-universal
signifier of male Aboriginal dancing. The anthropologist John von Sturmer,
writing of dancers in Cape York, notes that the rhythmic dynamics of this dance
vary as "the knees are flexed and trembled smoothly or jerked in and out more
or less rapidly" (1998: 227). 'Shaky-leg' dance requires a high degree of
coordination and muscular elasticity, to work both the wide almost horizontal
balance and swift rotation of the hips, at the same time as the feet shuffle
close to the ground whether forward, backward, or sideways. Accompanied by an
emphatic but soft stamping rhythm, the lower body weight travels forward and is
underscored by the rhythm of clapsticks. The effect of this intensified
throbbing is to construct a vibrational animated space in front of the body as
the group moves forward, and it is from within
this chorus movement that individual variations are elaborated and presented. I
would argue that the evidence of the painting suggests that the dancing on the
beach includes this gestural vocabulary and that the Australians were holding
the power in this exchange as the "marines used to ship life" attempted to
adapt their bodily comportment to the expansive stance of the land's owners
(Tench 1961: 127). As a performed greeting to the white invaders, their dynamic
amplifying gestures would have registered in stark opposition to the more
constricted scissor-like forward and back movements of the British sailors. Having
elaborated on both the content of Bradley's text and his painting, I conclude
with three reflections on the postcolonial difficulty of reading cultural
encounters between strangers. The first is about the matter of imitation.
Hunter (according to Clendinnen) admits that the Australians' dancing that he
observes at the corroboree in 1791 is a movement that "none of us could
imitate" (2003: 41), which, for her, reinforces the willingness of the British
to try to meet these "strangers" through good humor and on open terms. Yet
according to Hunter's text of this first meeting in 1788, the Australians were
a "very active" people who "danced and sung with us, and imitated our words and
motions, as we did theirs" (1968: 37). Hunter's text places more emphasis on
the Australians' capacity to imitate and only later demonstrates an insecurity
about the British inability to acquire facility with the corporeal knowledges
of the indigenous other. This British weakness contrasts sharply with the much-noted
Australian capacity to imitate convincingly the colonizers' walk, gesture,
voice, and song in other accounts (Tench 1961: 97n13). As Homi Bhabha remarks,
"The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and
disturbing" (1994: 123). When the colonized prove to be superior at imitation
by appropriating a movement vocabulary and mocking compliance to a normalizing
attitude, then the colonizer begins to implement more ruthless forms of control
and regulation of behavior. In
the balletic tradition, mimesis has become associated with the acquisition of
dancing knowledge because of the presence of the mirror; in these accounts by
Hunter and Bradley, the effects of a scopic regime dependent on likeness appear
to be presented as the preferred model by which the Australians might learn how
to behave like the colonized.
9
However,
in indigenous and many other communities, dancing takes place in the absence of
a mirror as the primary mode of instruction, when dancers, often children, in
the company of many adults learn by focusing on the haptic, tactile, and
kinesthetic qualities of moving. The genuine difficulty of learning to dance
like any other in this situation is emphasized since it takes years of
adjusting the senses to accommodate processes of moving in one's own body in
order to incorporate a different complex of imperatives about balance,
spatiality, temporality, and inner imaginative work. Let us consider the
imbalance of those men whose feet are awkwardly splayed apart--they have no
sense of how to move from this position without falling over. The failure of
mimesis on the part of the colonizers in this first act of dancing demonstrates
that they are struggling to grasp an epistemological difference in bodies,
relationality, and ground before they can begin to dance together. In
this counterreading of colonization, I have relied almost solely on the written
and visual fragments from the colonial archive, and I am woefully aware of the
limitations this imposes on understanding. Given the few people who are
descendants of the once-populous tribes of Port Jackson and Botany Bay, there
are only scarce remains of traditional lore. I cannot, therefore, speak for or
about the experience that the Australians might have had in their dancing, nor
attempt to examine what this dancing looked like to them or through their eyes. Elsewhere
in Australia, the recent historical past has been constructed in relation to an
alternative white archive recorded in anthropological writings.
10
In that archive, there is a prolific (I
would say excessive) amount of commentary on indigenous dance. I remain
critical of anthropological discourse that focuses exclusively on categorizing,
recording, and documenting the 'other,' which, as Ian Anderson points out, has
sentenced today's Aboriginal people to a "colonial reality--an
authenticity--based on notions of Aboriginal life as primitive and uncivilised"
(2003: 45). More encouraging is that new and radical uses of anthropological
documents by indigenous communities allow them to recuperate dance styles and
traditions that once were prominent in social and ceremonial life.
Increasingly, anthropologists understand that control and administration of
indigenous knowledges must be owned by local Aboriginal communities or artists.
These political shifts in anthropology have led to an encouraging reevaluation
of dancing as a social and cultural practice that embodies and participates in
processes of cultural negotiation and (usefully for historical understanding)
always has. Specific indigenous dances "embody moral rights, responsibilities,
obligations and sentiments" on political occasions, according to Fiona Magowan
(2000: 310). In returning to this colonial encounter, I am, therefore,
interested not in the spiritual or ceremonial uses of dancing but in the
actively secular activities, such as warfare, political negotiation, sexual
contest, and competitive bartering, that are being played out on the beach. If
dancing is an embodied expertise that links subjectivity to political dynamics,
then it is conceivable that the Australian dancers were using their dancing to
explain who and what they were to the white strangers. "Totemic dances," as von
Sturmer explains, "are said to be transmitted from one's immediate ancestors, from
one's father and one's father's father. A performance can be validated simply
by claiming, 'I follow from my father,' one might also assert 'being Bonefish,
how can I dance other than Bonefish?'" (1998: 226). In these terms, a dancer's
being coexists with a sense of accountability to an ancestral dancing self who
articulates an individual's belonging to a distinctive corporeal disposition as
well as a complex choreographic tradition.
11
The narrative of Bonefish thus includes the reembodiment of an animated
landscape of collective identity. When
Australian men come down to the beach to dance with the sailors, they are,
therefore, asserting a particular kind of authority: "The superior dancers are
determiners as much as keepers of the tradition," writes von Sturmer (1998:
226). If, at first, the energetic activity of their dancing functions as a kind
of preliminary greeting to the British as it would to an opposing tribe, the
signs are that these different genres of dancing include a display of physical
prowess in preparation, like many other war dances, for prolonged contests of
authority. As the dancing names and marks territory, it also defines the
dancing maneuvers that should be followed by visitors who wish to travel in a
particular country. Bradley makes clear that the dancing shifts from one
location to another, and presumably also from one tempo to another, over the
course of those first few days. To modify the Bonefish text, it could be said
that the Eora peoples in Sydney Cove were saying, "I am dancing this sandy
shore, this land, and how can I dance other than this place? You, therefore,
must dance not with us but for us." From the Australian perspective, the
colonizers needed to be "superior dancers" if they were to be incorporated into
the "immaterial" knowledges of the local cultural economy. From the
Australians' perspective, they were communicating their power, identity, and
ownership when they invited the "white strangers" to contemplate the
difficulties of dancing together. The
final point I wish to make is about the figure of the stranger that Clendinnen
evokes in her title. The word strangers has a reluctant resonance with
Sara Ahmed's (2000) postcolonial critique of this concept. The problem of the
stranger, as she suggests, is that no sooner is it hailed or brought into being
by the power-knowledge of the colonizer than it becomes a fetishized category
of otherness because it assumes an ontology of difference from the self. In
this position of cultural antagonism, the otherness that constitutes the
stranger belongs to a social, cultural, and political reality that can be
neither known nor assimilable: "And yet we do not become them, and they do not
become us. The stranger is both familiar and strange, both within and without
our field of knowledge" (Ahmed 2000: 5). And strangers are particularly
excluded when forms of belonging and identity are used in discourses of
nationhood. The concept of strangers dancing together established by
Clendinnen's account, however, displaces the figure of the stranger from the
ships to those on shore, whose belonging in the dance cannot be understood. The
metaphor of dancing is proposed as if this encounter with others might
constitute yet another epistemological category that is ahistorical, that is
without precedent. As Ahmed writes, "The encounters we might have with others
hence surprise the subject, but they also reopen the prior histories of
encounter that violate and fix others in regimes of difference" (2000: 8). The
colonial gaze assumes that dancing can be reconstituted by white modes of
learning to dance through mimesis and forgets that the constrained bodies of
the sailor's hornpipe represents already those displaced conditions of
disciplinary power at work in their own bodies. As Bhabha asserts, colonialism
has always functioned as a discursive encounter that appropriates one condition
of embodied knowing into the other. In symbolic terms, the colonial
appropriation of Australian bodies robs them of the power they had in dancing,
a corporeal and affective situation that has been devastating for indigenous
communities. What is extremely problematic are descriptions where sympathetic
accounts of white history remain complicit with a 'stranger' fetishism, thus
perpetuating the loss of corporeal and kinesthetic histories that give cultural
authority to indigenous dancers as legitimate parts of their political
negotiation with 'strangers.' In
her sensitive reading of the colonial archive, Clendinnen rightly argues for
recognition that a condition of unfulfilled promise could emerge from the image
of black and white, Australian and British, "dancing together" and admits that
the problem was "real comprehension" (2003: 10). But she fails to develop the
"double consciousness" that Paul Gilroy (1993) asks of postcolonial
ethnohistoriography in relation to this example of cultural transmission
because she never seriously considers dancing as evidence of historical and
cultural knowledges written in and through the body. Her account discredits an
alternative political and symbolic narrative that might have been founded in
embodied sensuous and choreographic structures of dancing between and across
differences. Her notion that the dancing opened up a common ground of mutual
copresence appears, then, unduly nostalgic and dismissive of the complexity of
corporeal encounter. My
closer reading of this 'dancing' as a form of disciplinary practice by the
British and as collective authority by the Australians exemplifies an
'incomprehension' that exists even where dancing and playing replace spoken
language. Yet, the corporeality of this exchange is not without an important
affective and communicative content; these men were touched by one another. The
dancing provided a structure for the face-to-face encounter that, beyond a
simple coupling, was to mediate a close taking in of the skin, flesh, and
weight of the other's body. The 'dancing of strangers' is felt when neither
dancer can assimilate the movements or corporealities of the other into the
familiar, whether Scottish with English or Australian with British. A
postcolonial reading of dancing with strangers would not, therefore, assume any
easy 'union' of particular beings, states, or nations. And it would have to
admit two kinds of sovereignty evident in the complex structure, patterns, and
movement of dancing. My
aims in this paper were, thus, both specific and general: on the one hand, to
look at the particular evidence in the dancing on the shores of Port Jackson
and its possible contribution to thinking about political sovereignty in
Australia; on the other, to suggest that attention to embodiment in historical
narratives can challenge white historians in their accounts of nation
formation. As Aboriginal writer Steve Kinnane explains, "The redressing of
dominant non-Indigenous historical narratives of Indigenous collective and
individual lives is to experience the delicate space of negotiation,
collaboration and re-interpretation of our diverse identities" (2005). The
Australians' dancing at Port Jackson contests those knowledge categories
anxiously determined by the settler community as modes of social control and
respects the inassimilable difference carried in potentially hostile bodies.
Any misreading of this dancing by the scholars and public of a dominant white
nation only perpetuates the difficulty of dancing with strangers in
contemporary political discourse. Notes:
1 Ghassan Hage (2000) analyses
the "white fantasy" of Australia's national imaginary in relation to
multiculturalism, but the same ideological framework applies to indigenous
history.
2
Winner, 2004 Kiriyama Prize for nonfiction; Winner, 2004 NSW Premier's Literary
Award; Winner, 2004 QLD Premier's Literary Award; Short-listed, 2004 Age
Book of the Year Award; Short-listed, 2004 Courier Mail Book of the Year
Award; Short-listed, 2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards; Short-listed,
2004 Westfield/Waverley Library Awards. For publisher's comment, see Morag
Fraser (ed.), Inga Clendinnen: A Celebration (Canberra: Friends of the
National Library, 2005): 29.
3 An address by the Honourable Julie Bishop, minister for
Science and Training, to the Australian History Summit dinner, August
16, 2006. See http://www.mrcltd.org.au/research/education-reports/Address_by_the_Hon_Julie_Bishop_MP.pdf
(accessed May 14, 2009).
4
After several decades of land-rights claims and a decade of litigation, the
High Court of Australia ruled on June 3, 1992, that the land title of
indigenous peoples, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, would be
recognized as common law. This overthrew two centuries of legal denial of land
ownership, and therefore of Aboriginal sovereignty, by the doctrine of terra
nullius, a legal fiction built on the myth that Australia was an empty land
at the time of colonization.
5
I would like to dedicate this paper to the late ethnohistorian Greg Dening,
whose history student I was thirty years ago in a course titled "Culture
Contact in the Pacific"; the long shadows of that course are evident in this
paper. He has written of performance, and used its metaphors, with all the
abandon of scholars not versed in theater and dance, and at times, this
blurring of genres has been disconcerting. In other contexts, however, his
rigorous listening to the hidden voices, bodies, and ritual behaviors within
historical accounts has led to profound shifts in political and aesthetic
understanding of the past.
6
Dance historian Theresa Buckland, whose expertise includes
English folk dancing, confirmed this gap in the scholarly literature (verbal
communication, Society of Dance History Scholars conference, June 2006).
7With thanks to Travis Moran for giving me access to his lessons on Irish
dancing, September 2006.
8 This postural kinesthetic appears in most
representations of the corroboree, presented by Australians and depicted by
white artists during early settlement.
9
Looking glasses became common household items in the eighteenth century
that were available to officers on naval ships; therefore, the connections
between mimesis, colonialism, and subjectivity through the analogy of the
mirror, and thus likeness, become compounded. The use of mirrors to supplement
the mimesis of the ballet lesson has enhanced transmission of norms and codes
of corporeal instruction (Gardner 2004).
10
Alongside narratives of exploration, official reports, diaries, and
letters, the white archives in Australia contain the writings of celebrated
European anthropologists, as any search under the heading of "dance" or
"aboriginal" in the National Library or the Australian Institute for Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Studies will reveal.
11
Von Sturmer explains that "differences are jealously guarded, and there
are frequent accusations of stealing. Groups worried that their repertory is in
danger of being commandeered may threaten to 'kill' it" (1998: 226). References Cited: Ahmed, Sara 2000.
Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality. London:
Routledge. Anderson,
Ian 2003.
Black Bit, White Bit. In Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by
Indigenous Australians (ed. Michelle Grossman). Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press: 4351. Bhabha,
Homi 1994.
Of Mimicry and Man. In The Location of Culture. London and New York:
Routledge: 12131. Bradley,
William 1969.
A Voyage to New South Wales, the Journal of Lieutenant William Bradley RN of
HMS Sirius, 17861792. Sydney: Trustees of the Public Library of South
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Inge 2003.
Dancing with Strangers. Melbourne: Text Publishing. Dening,
Greg 1992.
Mr Bligh's Bad Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Desmond,
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Sally 2004.
Dancing Together: The Choreographer and the Dancer in Modern Dance. PhD diss.,
Monash University, Victoria, Australia. Gilroy,
Paul 1993.
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Ghassan 2000.
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Annandale, Sydney: Pluto Press. Hunter,
Captain John 1968.
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Steve 2005.
Shadow Lines: Prohibited Areas, Cheeky Spirits and Dangerous Love. Abstract for
Writing Indigenous Historical Narratives. Australian Institute of
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Stuart and Anna Clark 2003.
The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Magowan,
Fiona 2000. Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal
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Journal of Anthropology 11(3): 308–21. Shea-Murphy,
Jacqueline 2007.
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Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tench,
(Captain) Watkin 1961.
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Linda J. 1997.
Issues of Nation in Isaac's The Union. Dance Research 15(2):
99125. Von
Sturmer, John 1998.
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