Rethinking the Racial Moment

Essays on the Colonial Encounter

Edited By: Barbara Brookes, Alison Holland

£39.99

This collection of essays re-energises the debate on race by focusing on its intersections with colonialism. It shifts our historical understanding, offering invigorating new approaches to cultural encounters via the interpretive frame of ‘the moment.’

In recent years ‘race’ has fallen out of historiographical fashion, being eclipsed by seemingly more benign terms such as ‘culture,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘difference.’ This timely…

In recent years ‘race’ has fallen out of historiographical fashion, being eclipsed by seemingly more benign terms such as ‘culture,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘difference.’ This timely and highly readable collection of essays re-energises the debate by carefully focusing our attention on local articulations of race and their intersections with colonialism and its aftermath. In Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter Alison Holland and Barbara Brookes have produced a collection of studies that shift our historical understanding of colonialism in significant new directions. Their generous and exciting brief will ensure that the book has immediate appeal for multiple readers engaged in critical theory, as well as those more specifically involved in Australian and New Zealand history. Collectively, they offer new and invigorating approaches to understanding colonialism and cultural encounters in history via the interpretive (not merely temporal) frame of ‘the moment.’

Alison Holland is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. She teaches Aboriginal History as well as Australian environmental history. She has written extensively on aspects of Aboriginal and women’s history with a particular focus on themes of gender, race and citizenship in colonial contexts.

Barbara Brookes is Professor of History at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. She is the author of Abortion in England, 1900–1967 (Croom Helm, 1988) and co-editor of five collections of essays encompassing aspects of New Zealand’s social, medical and cultural history.