Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive Hypothesis

Rozmowy o Komunikacji 3. Problemy komunikacji społecznej. Ed. G. Habrajska. Oficyna Wydawnicza Leksem, Łask, pp.171-184.

Aiming to provide a critical insight into the Indigenous Literature and its position within the Australian Literature, History of Literature and its Australian contemporary trends and deliberations, the article embarks upon prospects for Indigenous Literature within contexts of World Literature in times of globalization. Recognising goals and functions for Indigenous Literature described by Indigenous authors, the article comments on the mainstream literary critique and observes that Indigenous Literature has an unsteady position within Literary History and Institutions; thus, it is not fully represented up to its multifarious potencies. Assuming exclusiveness, inclusiveness and matchlessness of Indigenous Literature, the article promotes a debate on possible pragmatic and theoretical approaches to the growing body of Indigenous texts. Furthermore, taking the challenge of the Indigenous Literature becoming autonomous, not situated within Australian National Literature and not within the institution of Australian Literary Studies but constituting its own faculty, the article underlines various aspects of such a shift, exploring Indigenous Literature’s characteristics that attract non-English speaking audiences in Australia and afar. Additionally, the article looks for reconfigurations of the 'Aboriginal' discourse and directs academics and authors’ attention to the issue of distance and time reductions in the era of globalization. In today’s trans-national politics of globalisation, the Indigenous Literature of Australia is challenging international readerships through literocultural and foreign language translations. In conclusion, the article underlines its overall intention of initiating a forward-thinking discussion not only within the literary and academic fields, but in the circles of educational institutions. While opening the question of Indigenous Literature within fields of trans-national, International translation and institutionalisation, the article also embarks on theoretical, interpretational and litero-historical issues. Keywords: Indigenous Literature, Critique & Translation, Globalisation, Literary Classification, Australian Literary History

Linguaculture

One of the most subtle and complex oral literatures, Australian Aboriginal literature, still keeps meaning covert to Western readers, despite its ever-growing popularity and prolificity. As an introduction to an ongoing research into orality in Australian Aboriginal Literature, this paper aims to focus on a number of reasons which, while make Aboriginal stories more palatable for Western culture, distil original meaning of concepts, beliefs and traditions. In other words, what are some of the elements which hinder source – reader communication when it comes to Australian Aboriginal literature? The focus of this paper is meaning transformation through layers of interpretation, starting from an original performance of a story, with its syncretism of art forms. It is well worth it to explore such development of meaning, from performance to oral translation into English, with its later written form, to ultimately broken-down fragments covert within poems or novels. It is of no wonder We...

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2007

2005

Queensland Review, 2005

This article provides a brief literary history of Indigenous writing in Queensland. The literature covered here is informed by the experiences of the personal, the familial and the communal, and enlarges the meanings of both the literary and the political because Indigenous writing is part of, not separate from, the daily lives and struggles of its authors. Related to this is the question of the sacred, and Indigenous relationships to the land are an abiding preoccupation of the writing explored here. Literature, as well as the way it is read, is intimately related to Indigenous efforts to achieve cultural autonomy and calls for recognition of difference and shared humanity and agency. It thereby becomes a tool of recognition, acknowledgment and transformation, producing new kinds of knowledges and new kinds of readers.

2011

Kim Scott suggests in his text I Come from Here by means of yarning that the authority of Indigenous people and language is primary to an authentic sense of place. Scott uses an accumulative, episodic, and personal narrative style to argue that the return to, and consolidation of cultural material in, a community of descendants of the informants must be founded upon principles of community development. Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by sharing of ancestral material with ever widening, concentric circles is how this process results in respect and partnership that empowers community life. Eden Robinson explores in her text 99.99% True & Authentic Tales with humor how the past and present coexist in contemporary Haisla life. In the process, Robinson also depicts some of the challenges faced by Canada\u27s First Nations writers, whose readers can become so determined to experience the culture represented to them that they wish to live not only in an author\u2...

Journal of Australian Studies, 1992

The politics of representing Aboriginality often focuses on questions of authorship and appropriation. Much of this criticism rests on the simplistic assumption that texts created by collaboration and even uneven collaboration are not in some respects voiced by their subject or subjects. This paper discusses two popular texts about Aboriginal ceremonial songs or ‘songlines’ in order to challenge this assumption, reading Bill Harney with A. P. Elkin’s Songs of the Songmen: Aboriginal Myths Retold (1949), and John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families’ Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (2010) as Aboriginal texts. These texts are particularly interesting insofar as they focus attention on the relationship between voice and text, as well as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, being the products of collaboration by the anthropologists Elkin and Bradley with, on the one hand, a non-Aboriginal ‘Protector’ and popular writer (Harney), and, on the other, the subjects of the ethnography themselves (that is Yanyuwa Families). As I argue, the shifting ways in which the songlines of northern Australia are voiced in Songs of the Songmen and Singing Saltwater Country provides insights into the politics of representing Aboriginality in Australia, and the forces that have historically affected it. The close analysis of these texts focuses attention on the role of ethnographic fetishism for the exotic and authentic within the changing context of cultural production in Australia.

Cultural Studies, 1997

This is an electronic version of an article published in [Cultural Studies, 11(2),. [Cultural Studies] is available online at informaworld.