From: "Soren Pedersen" <speder-AT-post2.tele.dk>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 17:47:08 +0000
Subject: Realized simulacra


> Soren,
> 
> > The "real" 
> >aboriginal is a myth, he says. Imagine if this myth suddenly 
> >materialized in reality, meticulously constructed, digitally 
> >programmed, from antecendent historical bits and bytes.
> 

Dale,

> That's exactly my point, it already has. To such a point where people who 
> identify as Aboriginal are placed under scrutiny because they don't 
> confer with the notion of "the Aboriginal". It's these debates about the 
> real that strike me as interesting; in purely political terms 
> authenticity has to be based upon the identification of the individual, 
> as the history of Australia is one of covert and overt genocide in which 
> aboriginal people were massacred, had their children taken from them  and 
> were systematically removed from their homelands all in the casue of 
> cleansing the race....!!! Therefore to be subject to such things as such 
> things as genetic tests or even identifying "how much of you is 
> Aboriginal" (there used to be a system of halfcaste/quartercaste/quadroon 
> and octoroon) is anathema to most aboriginal people - and yet in the 
> media and popular parlance terms like these are still being used. 
> Whenever an article about aboriginal health appears on the news they 
> always use the same stock footage of aboriginal people sitting in dusty 
> outback environs

To what extent have Aboriginals already internalized (surrendered 
to) the simulated identity of the "real" Aboriginal?

I suppose the same question could be raised with regard to 
Afro-Americans. To what extent have they already internalized the 
simulated identity of the "real" Afro-American that Oprah Winfrey and 
Spielberg (Amistad) have struggled so hard to construct.

- Soren