ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an evidence of Kim Scott's choice of language and examines a fragment of his text that, for readers as yet unfamiliar with Benang, will show something of the images with which it works more generally: In the darkness, among the stuff thrown from the wagon, something struggled and made noises. It begins with three associated fragments. This is not an economic move; it is suggested by the text itself which composes itself in fragments ethically. The chapter examines a blackface minstrel show, performed before a camera, where the desired proximity between whiteness and blackness is specularised. The show recalls the nineteenth-century theatrical practices of the American urban North, with its naturalisations of slavery, although some of its sartorial references are to more recent reinvigorations. The symbolic practices that produce post colonialism's objects are not sufficiently sustained and the objects totter and threaten to fall.
