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Translations is a personal history written at the intersection of colonial anthropology, creative practice and migrant ethnography. Renowned postcolonial scholar, public artist and radio maker, UK-born Paul Carter documents and discusses a prodigiously varied and original trajectory of writing, sound installation and public space dramaturgy produced in Australia to present the phenomenon of contemporary migration in an entirely new light. Rejecting linear conceptualisations of migrant space–time, Carter describes a distinctively migrant psychic topology, turbulent, vortical and opportunistic. He shows that the experience of self-becoming at that place mediated through a creative practice that places the enigma of communication at the heart of its praxis produces a coherent critique of colonial regimes still dominant in discourses of belonging. One expression of this is a radical reappraisal of the ‘mirror state’ relationship between England and Australia, whose structurally symmetrical histories of land theft and internal colonisation repress the appearance of new subjects and subject relations. Another is to embrace the precarity of the stranger–host relationship shaping migrant destiny, to break down art’s aesthetic conventions and elide creative practice with the poetics (and politics) of social production – what Carter calls ‘dirty art’. Carter tackles the argument that immigrants to Australia recapitulate the original invasion. Reflecting on collaborations with Aboriginal artists, he frames an argument for navigating incommensurable realities that profoundly reframes the discourse on sovereignty. Translations is a passionately eloquent argument for reframing borders as crossing-places: framing less murderous exchange rates, symbolic literacy, creative courage and, above all, the emergence of a resilient migrant poetics will be essential.
Bull, Snake of the Hundred Heads, / Lion of Burning Flame, / O God, Beast, Mystery, come!’ As Harrison comments, such shape-shifting is ‘not a power of transformation due to the mature omnipotence of the god; it is with the Dithyrambos from his birth; it is part of his essence as the Twice-Born’. 73 Similar translations were at work in the Tjunta transformations. The acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty, reflected in the white recognition of the spiritual landscape inhabited
sovereign/Australian being on an epistemological formulation of the terms of access to whiteness’. 16 As typical expressions of colonial state bad faith, the further intricacies of this mirror-state psychology need not be pursued here. The less travelled path concerns the way in which advocates of Aboriginal sovereignty recognition deploy the same racist tactics, with the result that within their own narratives of dispossession and repossession an entire class of ancestors fails to