The Fantasy of Whiteness: Blackness and Aboriginality in American and Australian Culture

Abstract

This dissertation argues that a fantasy of white authority was articulated and disseminated through the representations of blackness and Aboriginality in nineteenth-century American and Australian theatre, and that this fantasy influenced the representation of Aboriginality in twentieth-century Australian culture. The fantasy of whiteness refers to the habitually enacted and environmentally entrenched assumption that white people can and should superintend the cultural representation of Otherness. This argument is presented in three parts. Part One examines the complex ways in which white anxieties and concerns were expressed through discourses of blackness in nineteenth-century American blackface entertainment. Part Two examines the various transnational discursive connections enabled by American and Australian blackface entertainments in Australia during the nineteenth century. Part Three examines the legacy of nineteenth-century blackface entertainment in twentieth-century Australian culture. Overall, this dissertation investigates some of the fragmentary histories and stories about Otherness that coalesce within Australian culture. This examination suggests that representations of Aboriginality in Australian culture are influenced and manipulated by whiteness in ways that seek to entrench and protect white cultural authority. Even today, a phantasmal whiteness is often present within cultural representations of Aboriginality.