ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the eye and the I in Australian scenes of race. It is about the possibilities of seeing, imagining and knowing another across the cultural divides between settlers and Indigenous peoples but just as importantly it is also about the radical limits to vision and knowledge. The Postcolonial Eye also aims to put under pressure what is meant by post colonialism, especially those notions of post colonialism in which colonising and settling impulses are figured as if belonging only to the past. The book is very much concerned with these places of illegibility for a settler-reader faced with an Indigenous-signed text. The work of writing the book has brought into proximity images and ideas that have generally kept apart and this new proximity has affected a shift in author's perception it is an anamorphotic shift.
