Academic literature on the topic 'Aboriginal performers'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the lists of relevant articles, books, theses, conference reports, and other scholarly sources on the topic 'Aboriginal performers.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Journal articles on the topic "Aboriginal performers"
1
Broome, Richard. "Enduring Moments of Aboriginal Dominance: Aboriginal Performers, Boxers and Runners." Labour History, no. 69 (1995): 171. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/27516397.
Full text
2
Lavers, Katie, and Jon Burtt. "BLAKflip and Beyond: Aboriginal Performers and Contemporary Circus in Australia." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 4 (October 11, 2017): 307–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x17000458.
Full textAbstract:
In this article Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt investigate BLAKflip and Beyond, a programme of workshops set up by the Australian circus company Circus Oz to mentor and support young Aboriginal performers by providing training and pathways into professional circus. Their analysis is contextualized through an examination of the thirty-year history of Circus Oz, most significantly its roots in the progressive and radical politics of the 1970s. The history of notable and successful Aboriginal performers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Australian circus is also examined, questioning why, given the relative success of Aboriginal circus performers in the recent past, there are almost none working today. Whiteness as a pervasive characteristic of contemporary Australian performance is offered as a possible cause of this absence, while hopes for the future of Aboriginal circus are discussed with Davey Thompson, the new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Programme Manager at Circus Oz. Katie Lavers is an adjunct faculty member at Edith Cowan University, author of numerous journal articles, and co-editor (with Peta Tait) of The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016). Jon Burtt is a lecturer in Dance and Performance Studies at Macquarie University. He is the author of numerous articles on circus pedagogy, and is an advanced-level circus trainer. Lavers and Burtt are currently co-authoring (with Louis Patrick Leroux) a book on contemporary circus (forthcoming 2019).
3
HARRIS, AMANDA. "Representing Australia to the Commonwealth in 1965: Aborigiana and Indigenous Performance." Twentieth-Century Music 17, no. 1 (October 24, 2019): 3–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572219000331.
Full textAbstract:
AbstractIn 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.
4
Casey, Maryrose. "Aboriginal performance as war by other means in the nineteenth century." International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2015): 2–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/ijcis.v8i2.123.
Full textAbstract:
Commercial performances for entertainment are usually assumed to be lightweight, cultural activities that serve little or no serious purpose. Perhaps because of this typical perspective, prior to the mid-twentieth century, Indigenous Australian performances drawing on their cultural practices for entertainment are often styled as either the result of oppressive exploitation by colonisers or cultural tourism. However, an examination of Indigenous Australian initiated and controlled performances, for entertainment in the nineteenth century, reveals a more complicated picture. In Australia, across the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, Aboriginal people and the colonisers actively fought for physical, psychological and emotional sovereignty of the land through thousands of performances for entertainment purposes. This might be expected given that Australian Aboriginal cultures are probably the most performance-based in the world—in the sense that explicit, choreographed performances were used for a vast range of social and cultural purposes from education, through to spiritual practices, arranging marriage alliances, to judicial and diplomatic functions. What might be less expected, considering the dominant power position, are the multiple ways in which the white audiences attempted to intrude, interrupt and inhabit these performances. The Aboriginal performers displayed their strength, vitality, high status and continued survival literally in the face of the colonisers and charged them a fee to observe. In response, white audiences both desired these performances and acted in ways to prevent them, often taking over the performance space and bringing events to a quick finish, while complaining that the show did not go on. The battle continued in white performances of Aboriginal practices and the ways in which Aboriginal performance was documented. In the twenty-first century, Aboriginal sportsmen who display their pride in their Aboriginality and opposition to racism continue to negotiate the same fight for space.
5
Ahmad, Sulthan. "Totem, Ritual dan Kesadaran Kolektif: Kajian Teoritik Terhadap Pemikiran Keagamaan Emile Durkheim." Al-Adyan: Journal of Religious Studies 2, no. 2 (December 31, 2021): 153–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.15548/al-adyan.v2i2.3384.
Full textAbstract:
As a sociologist, Emile Durkheim has a different perspective in understanding religious behavior, including in interpreting totem rituals for Aboriginal tribes in Australia. According to Durkheim, the ritual does not only have a religious meaning, but also a social meaning—having certain social functions for the performers. Through a collective consciousness framed by a belief system and the same normative patterns, individual and social differences possessed by clan members can be relativized so as to create social unity. In Aboriginal people, the totem is a symbol of the unification of clan societies. Therefore, in such a ritual, the clan members feel united by an impersonal power that has full power over the clan. By doing the ritual, clan members feel a strong bond with one another and a binding loyalty. In the communal ceremony, the worshipers affirm their commitment to the clan as a form of clan solidarity.Sebagai seorang sosiologi, Emile Durkheim memiliki perspektif yang berbeda dalam memahami perilaku keagamaan, termasuk dalam memaknai ritual totem pada suku Aborigin di Australia. Bagi Durkheim ritual totem tidak hanya memiliki makna keagamaan, tetapi juga makna sosial—ritual memiliki fungsi-fungsi sosial tertentu bagi pelakunya. Melalui kesadaran kolektif yang dibingkai oleh sistem keyakinan dan pola-pola normatif yang sama, perbedaan individu dan sosial yang dimiliki oleh anggota klan bisa direlatifkan sehingga tercipta kesatuan sosial. Pada suku Aborigin, totem merupakan simpol persautan masyarakat klan. Karenanya dalam ritual totem dimaksud, anggota klan merasa disatukan oleh sebuah kekuatan impersonal yang berkuasa penuh terhadap klan. Melalui ritual totem yang dilakukan, anggota klan merasakan ikatan yang kuat satu sama lain dan kesetiaan yang mengikat. Dalam upacara yang berlangsung secara komunal tersebut, para pemuja menegaskan komitmen mereka pada klan sebagai bentuk solidaritas klan.
6
RYAN, ROBIN. "UKULELES, GUITARS OR GUMLEAVES? Hula Dancing and Southeastern Australian Aboriginal Performers in the 1920s and 1930s." Perfect Beat 3, no. 2 (October 6, 2015): 106–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/prbt.v3i2.28763.
Full text
7
Hunter, William Cannon. "Performing Culture at the Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village in Taiwan: Exploring Performers' Subjectivities Using Q Method." International Journal of Tourism Research 15, no. 4 (May 21, 2012): 403–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jtr.1887.
Full text
8
Tait, Peta. "Danger Delights: Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 45 (February 1996): 43–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00009611.
Full textAbstract:
Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).
9
Vanni, Ilaria. "The archive and the contact zones: The story of Stan Loycurrie and Jack Noorywauka, performers at the 1929Australian Aboriginal Artexhibition, Melbourne." Journal of Australian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 314–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2014.921231.
Full text
10
Lin, Wei-Ya. ""Raus aus dem Elfenbeinturm!"." Die Musikforschung 72, no. 4 (September 22, 2021): 333–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.52412/mf.2019.h4.39.
Full textAbstract:
The Tao are one of sixteen recognized indigenous groups in Taiwan who live on Ponso no Tao, which literally means "the island of human-beings". Since the 1950s, many policies by the Taiwanese government have aimed to support "development" and "modernization" of ethnic minorities. As a consequence the Tao veered away from their traditional religion and cultural practices, for example by using the economic and monetary system imposed by Taiwan since 1967, and in 1971 the island was opened for tourism. These lifestyle changes resulted in a loss of traditional vocal music as well as the knowledge of history, views of life and taboos which had traditionally been transmitted through song. In 1980, an "intermediate deposit" for weak radioactive waste was established on the island through close cooperation and fraudulent practices between the Taiwan Power Company and the government. In 2009, radioactive substances were found outside of the dumpsite on Orchid Island. This article evaluates the social and political implications of two applied ethnomusicological projects developed together with the indigenous group of the Tao. These are the concert project "SoundScape - Island of Human Beings" (2014), which brought together Austrian, Taiwanese and Tao performers and composers, and the dance theatre production Maataw - The Floating lsland (2016) developed in collaboration with the Formosan Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe (FASDT). Both projects are based on the author's dissertation "Music in the Life ofthe Tao: Tradition and innovation" (2015). These projects posed questions such as: how can anthropological and ethnomusicological approaches and methods be applied during the creative processes of composition and choreography in order to interpret the Taos ecological and political issues on the stage? What insights can be gained from the practice-based collaboration and discussions, during and after the performances? And how do these artistic projects reflect back on and potentially change current political and social situations?
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Aboriginal performers"
1
Sampson, David. "Strangers in a strange land the 1868 Aborigines and other indigenous performers in mid-Victorian Britain /." Click here for electronic access to document: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/314, 2000. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/handle/2100/314.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Technology, Sydney, 2000.Sportsmen: Tarpot, Tom Wills, Mullagh, King Cole, Jellico, Peter, Red Cap, Harry Rose, Bullocky, Johnny Cuzens, Dick-a-Dick, Charley Dumas, Jim Crow, Sundown, Mosquito, Tiger and Twopenny. Bibliography: p. 431-485.
2
Marshall, Anne, University of Western Sydney, of Arts Education and Social Sciences College, and School of Social Ecology and Lifelong Learning. "Ngapartji-ngapartji : ecologies of performance in Central Australia : comparative studies in the ecologies of Aboriginal-Australian and European-Australian performances with specific focus on the relationship of context, place, physical environment, and personal experience." THESIS_CAESS_SELL_Marshall_A.xml, 2001. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/556.
Full textAbstract:
All forms of cultural interaction are expressive and creative. In particular, what the performing arts express is not always the conscious, the ideal and the rational, but more often the preconscious, pre-verbal, asocial and irrational, touching on darker undercurrents of human and extra-human interrelations, experiences, beliefs, fears, desires and values. So what is performance and how does it differ in cultures? A performance is a translation of an idea into a synaesthetic experience. In the context of this thesis, however, translation does not imply reductive literal translation as can be attempted by analogy in spoken or written descriptions and notation systems. The translation is one through which participating groups and individuals seek to understand the being in the world of the Other by means of mutual, embodied negotiation of meaning - sensually, experientially, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally - that is, by means of performance. As a contribution towards a social theory of human performance, the author offers reflections on an exchange between two performance ecologies - those of a group of Aboriginal Australian performers from Mimili, Central Australia and a mixed ethnic group of Australian performers from Penrith, NSW, Australia.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
3
Ryan, Trevor J. "Keniny Kaadadijiny: Restoring and developing dance for Noongar Boodjar." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2022. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2602.
Full textAbstract:
As Noongar people, we have a strong spiritual connection to boodjar, or Country, which relates to everything within landscapes that give us meaning and purpose. It is our law and culture to care for the natural environment and places of significance. Performing on-Country is a key part of maintaining it. Country is everything—weather, land, sea, sky, flora, fauna, groundwater—and song, dance, and Country are fundamentally connected; expressing Country through performance is part of Country as a living thing. In a Noongar context, it is not just “performance” in the sense of a fiction or purely symbolic act; Noongar performance makes manifest and maintains ever-present relationships that sustain Country, humans, and biota. However, along with other factors, the increasing irregularity and restriction of longstanding Noongar performance practices directly coincides with increased environmental degradation. In response, Aboriginal people signal the pressing need to restore languages and performance traditions decimated by the settler colonial project. Therefore, there is a need to better understand and appreciate how Aboriginal performance cultures contribute to humanity’s ability to coexist with nature.
This thesis explores the development of a series of novel Noongar dances which represent spiritual, cultural, and hence environmental affective values associated with Country, with a view to re-invigorating both cultural practice and links to Country itself, for Noongar and non-Noongar. My experience as a Noongar dancer, actor, drama teacher and cultural tour guide has led me to ask the following questions that I personally feel need to be answered. How can we as Noongar performers express our understandings of Country within movement? What kind of dances can we create for species and landscapes that are endangered on-Country and within performance traditions? And how can we share this, so to pass on and sustain across generations and communities for a deeper connection to Country?
The development of these dances was supported by a steering committee of Noongar elders who came from Noongar boodjar and hence were able to give cultural advice, guidance, authority; and further supplemented and supported by experts in the humanities and in environmental science and ethics from the local region. With the importance of recreating these Noongar dances within Country we reached out to the community to be involved and to participate in this amazing journey of development and discovery towards forming an ensemble to perform these new dances within Noongar country, which came to be known as the Mayakeniny “sound dancing” Dancer Group.
Our knowledge has been passed down from generation to generation through stories, song, language, dance, and art. Although settler-colonial practices have adversely impacted maintenance of this knowledge, as Noongar people we still have a responsibility to look after Country. In the past, Noongar performance repertoire helped us fulfill this responsibility. Given the considerable changes to Country and developments in technology from the early colonial period onwards, it is important to consider how we can create on-Country performances today that reach contemporary Noongar and non-Noongar audiences in meaningful and lasting ways.
4
"Strangers in a Strange Land: The 1868 Aborigines and other Indigenous Performers in Mid-Victorian Britain." University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2100/314.
Full textAbstract:
Enshrined by cricket history, the 1868 Aboriginal cricket tour of England has become popularly established as a uniquely benign public transaction in the history of contact between Aborigines, pastoralist settlers and British colonialism. Embraced by two Australian Prime Ministers and celebrated by a commemorative Aboriginal tour, film documentaries, museum displays, poetry, creative fiction, sporting histories, special edition prints and a national advertising campaign for the centenary of Australian federation, the zeal for commemoration has overwhelmed critical enquiry. Incorporating some critical interpretations of the tour which are current in Aboriginal discourse, this re-examination subjects the tour to approaches commonly applied to other aspects of Aboriginal history and relations between colonialism and indigenous peoples. Although it is misleadingly understood simply as a cricket tour, the primitivist displays of Aboriginal weaponry during the 1868 Aboriginal tour of Britain were more appealing to spectators than their cricketing displays. Viewed solely within the prism of sport or against policies leading to extermination, dispersal and segregation of Aborigines, there is little basis for comparative analysis of the tour. But when it is considered in the context of displays of race and commodified exhibitions of primitive peoples and cultures, particularly those taken from peripheries to the centre of empire, it is no longer unique or inexplicable either as a form of cultural display, a set of inter-racial relations, or a complex of indigenous problems and opportunities. This study re-examines the tour as a part of European racial ideology and established practices of bringing exotic races to Britain for sporting, scientific and popular forms of display. It considers the options and actions of the Aboriginal performers in the light of power relations between colonial settlers and dispossessed indigenous peoples. Their lives are examined as a specific form of indentured labour subjected to time discipline, racial expectations of white audiences and managerial control by enterpreneuurs seeking to profit from the novelty of Aborigines in Britain. Comparative studies of Maori and Native American performers taken to Britain in the mid¬Victorian era flesh out sparse documentation of the Aboriginal experience in an alien environment. Elements of James Scott's methodology of hidden and public transcripts are utilised to identify the sources of concealed tensions and discontents. A detailed study of the two best known 1868 tourists, Dick-a-Dick and Johnny Mullagh, considers two strategies by which Aborigines confronted by a situation of acute disadvantage used their developed performance skills and knowledge of European racial preconceptions in partially successful attempts to satisfy their emotional and material needs and further Aboriginal goals. Finally, the disjunctions between commemoration and critical history are resolved by suggesting that the 1868 tour and its performers deserve to be commemorated as pioneers in the practice of recontextualisng and popularising Aboriginal culture in the western metropolis.
5
Marshall, Anne. "Ngapartji-ngapartji : ecologies of performance in Central Australia : comparative studies in the ecologies of Aboriginal-Australian and European-Australian performances with specific focus on the relationship of context, place, physical environment, and personal experience." Thesis, 2001. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/556.
Full textAbstract:
All forms of cultural interaction are expressive and creative. In particular, what the performing arts express is not always the conscious, the ideal and the rational, but more often the preconscious, pre-verbal, asocial and irrational, touching on darker undercurrents of human and extra-human interrelations, experiences, beliefs, fears, desires and values. So what is performance and how does it differ in cultures? A performance is a translation of an idea into a synaesthetic experience. In the context of this thesis, however, translation does not imply reductive literal translation as can be attempted by analogy in spoken or written descriptions and notation systems. The translation is one through which participating groups and individuals seek to understand the being in the world of the Other by means of mutual, embodied negotiation of meaning - sensually, experientially, perceptually, cognitively and emotionally - that is, by means of performance. As a contribution towards a social theory of human performance, the author offers reflections on an exchange between two performance ecologies - those of a group of Aboriginal Australian performers from Mimili, Central Australia and a mixed ethnic group of Australian performers from Penrith, NSW, Australia.
Books on the topic "Aboriginal performers"
1
Leon, Mark St. The wizard of the wire: The story of Con Colleano. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993.
Find full text
2
1963-, Thompson Liz, ed. Aboriginal voices: Contemporary aboriginal artists, writers, and performers. Brookvale, NSW: Simon & Schuster Australia, 1990.
Find full text
3
Aboriginal Voices: Contemporary Aboriginal Artists, Writers and Performers. North Atlantic Books, 1992.
Find full text
4
Leon, Mark St. The Wizard of the Wire: The Story of Con Colleano. Aboriginal Studies Pr, 2000.
Find full text
5
Russell, Lynette. Procuring Passage. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037153.003.0004.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter discusses the assumption that resource maritime labor was exclusively performed by men. It argues that in southeastern Australia the success and wealth produced by the sealing industry up to 1815 and the subsequent economic stability of European men was wholly dependent on Tasmanian pallawah or indigenous women's skills and expertise. Although there are estimates that there were as many as 200 Newcomer men involved in the industry, each man often had between three and five Aboriginal women working with him. In some years the islands yielded between ten and twenty thousand sealskins. Each hunting episode required the women to club the seal and drag it to the beach, where they would begin the butchering process. The women also developed useful skills in boat handling and other associated aspects of the industry.
Book chapters on the topic "Aboriginal performers"
1
Thrush, Coll. "Civilization Itself Consents." In Indigenous London. Yale University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300206302.003.0011.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter considers two moments—an ethnographic display of military regimentation from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and an anti-modern jeremiad from the first years of the twentieth. Both involved North American Indigenous people and were deeply shaped by narratives of civilization and progress. But perhaps more importantly, both happened in a specific place and time: the late Victorian and Edwardian city, where particular kinds of urban development created new anxieties about London and its empire. These strands came together at a series of large-scale Indigenous spectacles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Seneca runner, a group of Aboriginal Australian cricketers, a Maori rugby side, and Lakota Wild West Show performers all riveted London, and their presence there speaks much not just about Indigenous visitors but about Victorian and Edwardian—and imperial—culture.
2
Treloyn, Sally, and Rona Goonginda Charles. "Music Endangerment, Repatriation, and Intercultural Collaboration in an Australian Discomfort Zone." In Transforming Ethnomusicology Volume II, 133–47. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197517550.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
To the extent that intercultural ethnomusicology in the Australian settler state operates on a colonialist stage, research that perpetuates a procedure of discovery, recording, and offsite archiving, analysis, and interpretation risks repeating a form of musical colonialism with which ethnomusicology worldwide is inextricably tied. While these research methods continue to play an important role in contemporary intercultural ethnomusicological research, ethnomusicologists in Australia in recent years have become increasingly concerned to make their research available to cultural heritage communities. Cultural heritage communities are also leading discovery, identification, recording, and dissemination to support, revive, reinvent, and sustain their practices and knowledges. Repatriation is now almost ubiquitous in ethnomusicological approaches to Aboriginal music in Australia as researchers and collaborating communities seek to harness research to respond to the impact that colonialism has had on social and emotional well-being, education, the environment, and the health of performance traditions. However, the hand-to-hand transaction of research products and represented knowledge from performers to researcher and archive back to performers opens a new field of complexities and ambiguities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants: just like earlier forms of ethnomusicology, the introduction, return, and repatriation of research materials operate in “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 2007 [1992]). In this chapter, we recount the processes and outcomes of “The Junba Project” located in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia. Framed by a participatory action research model, the project has emphasized responsiveness, iteration, and collaborative reflection, with an aim to identify strategies to sustain endangered Junba dance-song practices through recording, repatriation, and dissemination. We draw on Pratt’s notion of the “contact zone” as a “discomfort zone” (Somerville & Perkins 2003) and look upon an applied/advocacy ethnomusicological project as an opportunity for difference and dialogue in the repatriation process to support heterogeneous research agendas.
3
Valverde, Mariana, and Adriel Weaver. "‘The Crown Wears Many Hats’: Canadian Aboriginal Law and the Black-boxing of Empire." In Latour and the Passage of Law. Edinburgh University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9780748697908.003.0005.
Full textAbstract:
In this ambitious but earthbound critique of the ‘black-boxing of empire’, Mariana Valverde and Adriel Weaver adroitly trace the construction and deconstruction of the spectral corpus mysticum in Canadian legal discourse. The authors interrogate the weird legal agency of the Crown in aboriginal rights cases, disclosing the relentless production of novelty concealed beneath the conservative image of a continuous, eternal office and recalling the Latourian lesson about law’s soi disant homeostatic character: ‘even in this case [in which legal principles are modified], it will only be a matter of making the body of legal doctrine still more coherent, so that, in the last analysis, nothing will really have budged.’ These cases, Valverde and Weaver show, contract into themselves Canada’s colonial/postcolonial histories and the full weight of its legal tradition’s contradictory commitments. The sovereign gesture of recognition, offered by way of the ‘honour of the Crown’, paradoxically deprives the aboriginal nations so recognised of their very claim to existence, their nationhood: ‘the Canadian state now has obligations of sovereign/royal honour toward all aboriginal peoples … but the naming of those obligations simultaneously performs a kind of re-coronation of the very colonial sovereign whose servants caused so much harm to aboriginal peoples over the centuries’. Valverde and Weaver allow us to linger on this troubling sense of the uncanny, of the historical deja vu or phantasm of repetition that takes on materiality in the bilateral movement of the Crown through the networks of public law. It is a phantasm that reappears in the discursive techniques of judges that are, in fact, elaborating and reinventing precisely the discretionary doctrinal construct (‘honour of the Crown’) that they claim, instead, to merely appeal to, hearkening to an eternal spring of sovereign virtue through the mists of antiquity.