This essay examines how and why two works of postcolonial literature (Master of the Ghost Dreaming by the Aboriginal Australian writer Narogin Mudrooroo and Indigo: Mapping the Waters by the British writer Marina Warner) and two films (Werner Herzog's 1973 German classic Aguirre: The Wrath of God and the 1986 Australian Broadcasting Corporation film Babakiueria) invite readers to re-imagine colonial contact from the perspective of indigenous Australian and Caribbean people. The essay juxtaposes these particular texts in order to analyze different narrative techniques—cinematic and literary, fictional and somewhat documentary, serious and humorous—and different colonial textual targets—letters, reports, diaries, and ethnographies. Looking at this range of techniques and topics allows us to speculate on the intent and efficacy of these revisionary texts and to explore how they use the narrative point of view to metaphorically shift political perspective. This potentially greater understanding of imperial history and historicity can be an important catalyst of movements toward social progress in postcolonial and neocolonial states. But, as the essay shows, Babakiueria warns that reader/viewers must also be wary of this desire to know the Other, which can, if focused in the wrong direction, reinforce "orientalism" and enable a culturally paralyzing complacency.

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This essay examines two monuments: the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa and the American This is the Place Monument in Utah. Similar in terms of construction and historical purpose, both employ gender as an important tool to legitimize the settler society each commemorates. Each was part of a similar project of cultural recuperation in the 1930s−1940s that chose as their object of commemoration the overland migration in covered wagons of a group of white settlers that felt oppressed by other white settlers, and therefore sought a new homeland. In a precarious cultural moment, descendants of these two white settler societies—the Dutch Voortrekkers of South Africa and Euro-American Mormons (Latter-day Saints or LDS) of Utah—undertook massive commemoration projects to memorialize their ancestors’ 1830s−1840s migrations into the interior, holding Afrikaners and Mormons up as the most worthy settler groups among each nation’s white population. This essay will argue that a close reading of these monuments reveals how each white settler group employed gendered depictions that were inflected by class and race in their claims to be the true heart of their respective settler societies, despite perceiving themselves as oppressed minorities

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