The Bubble: Metaphors We Survive By

Metaphors are indispensable tools for making sense of reality, including the ongoing reality of systemic colonial relations—or to obfuscate it (to deflect the need to enact substantive decolonisation agendas, for example). In times of crisis they perform a crucial role in translating and interpreting a rapidly changing world.

Viral phenomena have multiplied recently, literally and metaphorically. But all crises generate metaphorical languages. Terrorism was not a virus, it was a bacterial formation; the GFC was a fierce and incontrollable storm… The ‘Canberra bubble’ – a bad thing – has become the ‘family bubble’ – a good thing. To understand what is at stake in the metaphors we use and the ways they are deployed, we need a critical engagement with their underlying assumptions, their rhetorical operation, their ideological effects, and their real-world implications.

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Session 2

COLONIAL HISTORIES AND METAPHOR
FRIDAY 11 SEPTEMBER

But is colonialism a metaphor?

Lorenzo Veracini (Swinburne University of Technology, Social Sciences), ‘Colonialist and Decolonial Metaphors’.

Christine Winter (Flinders, Anthropology), ‘Seedtime and Harvest: Metaphors of Christian Colonial Missionizing’

Shane Chalmers (Melbourne Law School), ‘Metaphoric Sovereignty: Colonial Victoria and the Independent Order of Black Fellows’.

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