Ned Kelly as Memory Dispositif

Basu (Walden U., Minnesota) shows how the cultural memory of 19th-century Australian outlaw Kelly has always functioned in both radical and highly conservative ways, sometimes both at once. He has come to stand for an anti-imperialist, working-class subaltern Irish-inflected national identity, she says, but at the same time has come to represent and enforce the whiteness, hyper-heterosexual masculinity and violence of ＂Australianess.＂ She has coined the term memory dispositif for such a cluster of often conflicting ideas and values, and traces Kelly’s from his execution in 1880 to the present. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)