Aileen Moreton-Robinson

Works

• 2000Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism

  Analyses how Australian feminism, in its theory and its practice, took the experience of white middle-class women as the norm, and “talks up” to it from the standpoint of Indigenous women, using their life histories.

• 2015The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

  Essays arguing that settler nations such as Australia and the United States are built on a “possessive logic” in which land, the nation and whiteness itself are treated as white property – a logic that denies Indigenous sovereignty.

Position

Moreton-Robinson is on the map as a founding figure of Critical Indigenous Studies in Australia, a field that studies settler societies from Indigenous standpoints instead of treating Indigenous peoples as objects of research. “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman” (2000) asks why Australian feminism, while claiming to speak for all women, took the experience of white middle-class women as the norm; read through the life writings of Indigenous women, whiteness appears as an invisible position of privilege and power. “The White Possessive” (2015) generalises the analysis: settler nations such as Australia and the United States rest on a “possessive logic” in which land, the nation and even the authority to define race are treated as white property, so that Indigenous sovereignty is not merely ignored but actively denied. From this standpoint Moreton-Robinson criticises critical race and whiteness studies in the United States for centring slavery and immigration and leaving Indigenous dispossession aside; how Black and Indigenous experiences of slavery and dispossession relate to each other is itself debated in Black and settler-colonial studies (e.g. T. L. King, The Black Shoals, 2019). The work is a common reference in Indigenous and settler-colonial studies and is often taught alongside Glen Coulthard’s “Red Skin, White Masks”; no documented links yet connect it with others on the map.

Life & context

Aileen Moreton-Robinson was born in 1956 on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) in Queensland and describes herself as a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people. Moreton-Robinson took a first-class honours degree in sociology at the Australian National University and in 1998 a doctorate at Griffith University with a thesis on Indigenous women and feminism in Australia, published in 2000 as “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman”. After teaching Indigenous studies at Griffith University and women’s studies at Flinders University, Moreton-Robinson worked from 2006 to 2019 at the Queensland University of Technology, as professor of Indigenous studies and dean of Indigenous research and engagement, and in 2016 became its first Aboriginal distinguished professor. Moreton-Robinson directed the National Indigenous Research and Knowledges Network, edited the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies and edited volumes on whiteness and on Indigenous sovereignty. Honours include a book prize of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (2016), election as an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020), as the first Indigenous scholar from outside the United States.

Further main works

• Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (ed., 2004)
• Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (ed., 2007)
• Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations (ed., 2016)