An Art/Ethnography binary informs a range of discursive engagements with Australian Aboriginal art. Ethnography is usually associated with colonialism, primitivism and regarded as circumscribing the art, while Art is posited as unequivocally progressive and good. This article will discuss the activities of various Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors in the Aboriginal art world, and explore the way the Art/Ethnography binary's reiteration by these actors instantiates the way this field is shaped by the tensions that arise from Australia's condition as a settler state with a marginalized Indigenous population. It will show that the trope of Art versus Ethnography has a multifaceted operative power that reflects remote and urban Aboriginal artists' differential participation within the field, and the complex relationship between two objectives that politicize it: the desire for recognition on the part of Indigenous actors, and the desire for post-colonial redemption on the part of non-Indigenous actors. KeywordsAboriginal/Indigenous art, art discourse, ethnography, Indigenous activism, post-colonialism, sociology of art, post-colonial, Australian . . . our exhibitions convey a progressive attitude towards current contemporary art practices striving for dynamic combinations often involving both black and white perspectives. With respect to Aboriginal culture, Fire-Works places a strong emphasis on the contemporary rather than the ethnographic. (Fireworks Gallery, 2007)

In recent decades, Indigenous artists have been strongly represented in exhibitions of Australian art offshore. This article explores two such exhibitions: fluent, staged at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and Culture Warriors, shown at the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC, in 2009. These exhibitions took place during an era in which issues around Indigenous rights and recognition were frequently the subject of domestic public debate and policy turmoil. They have also been significant staging posts on Indigenous Australian art’s trajectory towards contemporary fine art status – something that, while no longer questioned in Australia, continues to be precarious overseas. By considering how both political and aesthetic concerns were addressed by Indigenous curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft, this discussion sheds light on the ways in which emergent political meanings associated with Indigeneity have driven new kinds of institutional practice and international cultural brokerage.

In the early twentieth century, the widespread belief that young white women were at risk of being captured and forced into sex work led to significant legislative victories, and this crisis also shaped US literature in surprising ways. When writing about so-called white slavery crossed over from the spheres of journalism, social reform, and the law into fiction, authors devised a suite of quasi-empirical literary techniques that turned the dubious facts of white slavery into the stuff of popular art. Novelists drew heavily on juridical and social scientific evidence to lend authority and specificity to stories that they insisted (counterfactually) were gravely true. White slavery fiction marries empiricism with sensationalism, data with melodrama, cold statistics with exaggeration and falsehood. This essay examines the literary empiricism of Reginald Wright Kauffman’s 1910 novel The House of Bondage and the amateur literary criticism of progressive anti-vice reformers to examine a tradition of mutual borrowing between nonfictional genres such as the report, tract, and newsletter and modern US fiction. An analogy between slavery and forced sex work was pivotal to the social critique that white slavery novels existed to forward. Yet the genre’s catalyzing metaphor circulated a radically dehistoricized, racist conception of enslavement for a twentieth-century white readership, drawing its figurative vocabulary and sense of political urgency from chattel slavery while eliminating any concern with Black men, women, or children.

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