Lisa Slater – Body/Landscape – Seminar 15 June

Desiring Belonging: White anxiety, anti-colonial spatiality and Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals

Presented by Lisa Slater (Wollongong), with responses from Lyn McCredden and Emily Potter

In this paper, Lisa revisits Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals (1999), which is an exploration and working through of Somerville’s desire to write an embodied sense of belonging in Australia and to practice anti-colonialism. During the process, she becomes very sick. Lisa argues that BLJ is Somerville’s response to a particular conflict in the progressive settler colonial imaginary, which compels and immobilizes “good white Australians”. Following John Law, she asserts that Somerville’s sickness materialises “some very precise realities that are not enacted in other non-embodied ways”. Lisa names this “sickness” of the body “anxiety”. She seeks to trace what is being held in place – colonial order – but more importantly, what new alliances, experiences and subjectivities are being created?

Lisa Slater is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She works in the disciplines of critical Indigenous, cultural and settler colonial studies. Her work is committed to challenging key concepts that inform policies and cultural politics. Her projects have a strong focus on remote and rural Australia. Lisa is completing a monograph, Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism (forthcoming, Routledge).

Friday 15 June, 3–4.30pm, Deakin Downtown, Melbourne. All welcome, but please RSVP to Sue Chen: [email protected]