SYMPOSIUM - The History Wars Revisited (Preliminary Anouncement) Free University of Berlin, Tuesday 6 October 2009 [16.04.2009]
The History Wars Revisited (Preliminary Anouncement): A Retrospective Symposium at the Free University of Berlin, Tuesday 6 October 2009
Venue: Harnack-Haus, Ihnestr. 16-20, 14195 Berlin (Dahlem), Germany
Guest speakers:
• Bain Attwood, Professor of History at Monash University, author of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (re. ed. 2007), Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005), Rights for Aborigines (2003).
• James Boyce, freelance historian from Hobart, author of Van Diemen’s Land (2008), winner of Tasmania Book Prize 2009.
• Stephen Muecke, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, author (with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe) of Reading the Country (1984), No Road (bitumen all the way, (1997), Ancient & Modern: time, culture and indigenous philosophy ( 2004), and and Joe in the Andamans and other fictocritical stories (2008).
• Kim Scott, Western Australian author of True Country (1993), Benang - From the Heart (1999), The Dredgersaurus (2001), and with Hazel Brown, Kayang & Me (2005).
The History Wars of the 1990s in Australia have been variously interpreted in the broader social context as a symptom of a return to conservative values and as part of a complex of other issues in the area of policing, immigration and asylum politics. At the more immediate level of intellectual debate, they have been seen as a trench war between rigidly polarized positions and as a rehashing of debates that had already been resolved within the discipline of historiography. Did the History Wars have longer-term repercussions upon debates in the public sphere, decision-making at the level of policy, the ways in which academic disciplines or the creative arts interact with the public sphere? What directions have the historical and interpretative humanities disciplines taken as a result of or despite the History wars? Do specific disciplinary positioning inflect the ways in which the History Wars are assessed now, or the effects they have had upon public discourse? How do the various standpoints of indigenous, Anglo-Australian, immigrant or overseas commentators contrast with one another in the wake of the History Wars? Has the recent change of government evinced a turn from or a continuity in the conservative discourses which underpinned much of the rhetoric of the History Wars? How did the Rudd Apology deal with moot questions of genocide, dispossession or sovereignty? And finally have the History Wars had a long-term positive or deleterious effect upon the process of reconciliation between indigenous and immigrant Australians, and upon the nation’s confrontation with its own genocidal past?
Contact: Russell West-Pavlov | Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, FU Berlin | westpav@zedat.fu-berlin.de