Digital Commons Network^™

Who Is John Citizen?, Ian A. Mclean

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Like the Jewish-American author Philip Roth, Gordon Bennett’s art is at once intensely autobiographical and self-effacing. Each plays with the rhetoric of identity precisely to deny the identity game any oxygen or legitimacy as if nothing is more boring (or dangerous) than its heavy-handed politics. Roth denies he is a Jewish writer: Bennett denies he is an Aboriginal artist: for both their art is a means to escape the reductive logic of identity politics by showing its essentialisms to be discursive fictions or, as Bennett once said, a 'hall of mirrors'.