Review of The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race, by Alison Ravenscroft

Abstract

Alison Ravenscroft's The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race raises important questions about the limits of 'white' vision, understanding and knowledge in relation to an Indigenous Australian culture and perspective that, in Ravenscroft's words, is 'profoundly, even bewilderingly strange and unknowable within the terms of settlers' epistemologies' (1). In its readings of a selection of Indigenous-authored texts and its analysis of photographs of Indigenous subjects, The Postcolonial Eye productively draws on psychoanalytic and other critical frameworks.