Critical
Responses | Informative
Summaries | Works Cited
"Working the Web in Postcolonial Australia"
by Cathryn McConaghy and Ilana Snyder
Like many of the chapters, McConaghy and Snyder state their topic and purpose directly:
In this chapter, we consider a new media form of cultural production, the Web, as a site for renegotiation of identities, and for social reposition and transformation. Our focus is on the Web-based literacy practices which are used by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to construct “Aboriginality.” We are interested in examining the Web as a site for the production of rhetorical narratives that isolate Aborigines and constitute them as exotic rather than contemporary peoples, or otherwise depict them in ways Aborigines themselves judge to be negative. (74)Because McConaghy and Snyder see “the Web as constituted by both neocolonial and anticolonial forces” (74), they recognize that their “analysis of Web-based literacies is located within a broader theoretical discussion of the relationship between literacy practices and the production of colonial texts” (76). Given their interest in colonialism and literacy, McConaghy and Snyder's chapter explores Web sites both by and about Indigenous Australians. McConaghy and Snyder find that “what these sites have in common is an attempt to use new textual representations to counter existing colonial ones – to construct new legitimating conditions for the production of power and knowledge in postcolonial Australia” (82). They observe with
optimism [. . .] the ways in which the Web provides opportunities for social, cultural, and political acts of resistance. [Yet they] argue that [the Web] also plays an important part in the reproduction of social difference [through the] lies and distortions of racists as well as [. . .] the material and structural consequences of a national history which has continued to cast Indigenous Australians as Other. (89)So McConaghy and Snyder's assessment of the Web is "qualified" (86). In particular, they recognize that the Web and its technologies have the “homogenizing effects of globalization” which are “so prevalent that any oppositional work is severely restricted” (85). One such homogenizing effect is "ways in which hypertext, intrinsic to the Web’s landscape, reconfigures our notions of textual authority” (82).
Nevertheless, McConaghy and Snyder’s study emphasizes the “anticolonial projects” (85) and “counter-hegemonic possibilities” (86) of the Web. They recognize that
the struggles of the local are also the struggles of the global. It is something of a paradox that the hegemonic powers of the new globalized media that may serve to thwart local struggles may, when local contests move to the global theatre, actually enhance opportunities for engaging in counter-hegemonic work. [. . .] Perhaps, in the final analysis, the possibilities for engaging the local in the global through the Web represent the new medium’s greatest potential. (89)For the Indigenous Australians, the Web becomes a space where literacy practices meet and clash as part of the process of constructing online identities. Yet the Web’s globalization of local oppressions also engenders a potential community and support system for counter-hegemonic work.