Martina Horakova (Masaryk University, Czech Republic):  The Tracker Strikes B(l)ack: The Uses of ‘Black Tracker’ in Australian Film

Invitation

Time: 5 May, 2021 12.00 am

Venue: online

Join Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/98879496194?pwd=Y3JYMjQvb2tWbUlqVVo1ajdDUjh3QT09

Meeting ID: 988 7949 6194
Passcode: 766016

Presenter: Martina Horakova (PhD) assistant professor (Department of English and American Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Topic: The Tracker Strikes B(l)ack: The Uses of ‘Black Tracker’ in Australian Film

Abstract: The talk will introduce one of the most iconic figures of recent Australian film, the Black Tracker, whose shadowy presence looms large in Australian imagination as a recurrent symbol of colonial history. While the earlier representations depicted these trackers as guides to white explorers and later as sinister members of Native Police, at the turn of the 21^st century the trope of Black Tracker has been appropriated to signify more ambivalent meanings, intervening into larger debates about national identity, racial politics, and settler-Indigenous Reconciliation. I will discuss two well-known and critically acclaimed films, The Tracker (2002, dir. Rolf de Heer) and One Night the Moon (2001, dir. Rachel Perkins), to demonstrate how the figure of the Black Tracker is employed to comment on national spatial anxieties and to challenge settler belonging.

Bio: Martina Horakova is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. In her teaching and research, she focuses on contemporary Australian and Canadian literatures, particularly on Indigenous cultural production and theories of settler colonialism. She authored Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and Canada (MUNI Press, 2017) and co-authored Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (MUNI Press, 2011). Among others, she published book chapters in Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (De Gruyter, 2019), A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (Camden House, 2013), Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (Cambria Press, 2010), as well as journal articles in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Life Writing, Antipodes, JEASA or Zeitschrift für Australienstudien/Australian Studies Journal. She is currently working on a project related to memoirs of postcolonial settler belonging in Australia. From 2016 she is the general editor of JEASA, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia.