Decolonizing the Landscape
Indigenous Cultures in Australia
Published on 1. January 2014
Book
Hardback
316 pages
978-90-420-3794-6 (ISBN)
Description
How does one read across cultural boundaries? The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists in contemporary Australia calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to respond to this critical question.
Contributors address a plethora of creative works by Indigenous writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and painters, including Richard Frankland, Lionel Fogarty, Lin Onus, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright, as well as Durrudiya song cycles and works by Western Desert artists. The complexity of these creative works transcends categorical boundaries of Western art, aesthetics, and literature, demanding new processes of reading and response. Other contributors address works by non-Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke, Margaret Somerville, and Jeni Thornley, all of whom actively engage in questioning their complicity with the past in order to challenge Western modes of knowledge and understanding and to enter into a more self-critical and authentically ethical dialogue with the Other.
In probing the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems, essays in this volume lay the groundwork for entering into a more authentic dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics.
Contributors address a plethora of creative works by Indigenous writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and painters, including Richard Frankland, Lionel Fogarty, Lin Onus, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright, as well as Durrudiya song cycles and works by Western Desert artists. The complexity of these creative works transcends categorical boundaries of Western art, aesthetics, and literature, demanding new processes of reading and response. Other contributors address works by non-Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke, Margaret Somerville, and Jeni Thornley, all of whom actively engage in questioning their complicity with the past in order to challenge Western modes of knowledge and understanding and to enter into a more self-critical and authentically ethical dialogue with the Other.
In probing the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems, essays in this volume lay the groundwork for entering into a more authentic dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Leiden
Netherlands
Publishing group
Brill
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
617 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-420-3794-6 (9789042037946)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Beate Neumeier is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Cologne. Her research is in gender, performance, and postcolonial studies. Editor of the e-journal Gender Forum and the database GenderInn, she has published books on English Renaissance and contemporary anglophone drama, contemporary American and British-Jewish literature, and women's writing. Kay Schaffer, an Adjunct Professor in Gender Studies and Social Analysis at the University of Adelaide, is the author of ten books and numerous articles at the intersections of gender, culture, and literary studies. Her recent publications address the Stolen Generations in Australia, life narratives in human rights campaigns, and readings of contemporary Chinese women writers.
Content
List of Illustrations
Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer: Introduction
Sharing Across Boundaries
Kim Scott: From Drill to Dance
Stephen Muecke: The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya's Songs
Anna Haebich: Aboriginal Families, Knowledge, and the Archives: A Case Study
Michael Christie: Decolonizing Methodology in an Arnhem Land Garden
Eleonore Wildburger: The 'Cultural Design' of Western Desert Art
Ethical and Other Encounters
Ian Henderson: Modernism, Antipodernism, and Australian Aboriginality
Bill Ashcroft: Material Resonance: Knowing Before Meaning
Lisa Slater: Waiting at the Border: White Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty
Kay Schaffer: Wounded Spaces/Geographies of Connectivity: Stephen Muecke's No Road (bitumen all the way), Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals, and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre
Sue Kossew: Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance
Reading Transformations
Philip Mead: The Geopolitical Underground: Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Mining, and the Sacred
Heinz Antor: Identity and the Re-Assertion of Aboriginal Knowledge in Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung
Anne Brewster: Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in the Nyungar Writer. Alf Taylor's Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading
Katrin Althans: "And in my dreaming I can let go of the spirits of the past": Gothicizing the Common Law in Richard Frankland's No Way to Forget
Beate Neumeier: Performative Lives - Transformative Practices: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving, and Richard Frankland, Conversations with the Dead
Notes on Contributors
Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer: Introduction
Sharing Across Boundaries
Kim Scott: From Drill to Dance
Stephen Muecke: The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya's Songs
Anna Haebich: Aboriginal Families, Knowledge, and the Archives: A Case Study
Michael Christie: Decolonizing Methodology in an Arnhem Land Garden
Eleonore Wildburger: The 'Cultural Design' of Western Desert Art
Ethical and Other Encounters
Ian Henderson: Modernism, Antipodernism, and Australian Aboriginality
Bill Ashcroft: Material Resonance: Knowing Before Meaning
Lisa Slater: Waiting at the Border: White Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty
Kay Schaffer: Wounded Spaces/Geographies of Connectivity: Stephen Muecke's No Road (bitumen all the way), Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals, and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre
Sue Kossew: Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance
Reading Transformations
Philip Mead: The Geopolitical Underground: Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Mining, and the Sacred
Heinz Antor: Identity and the Re-Assertion of Aboriginal Knowledge in Sam Watson's The Kadaitcha Sung
Anne Brewster: Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in the Nyungar Writer. Alf Taylor's Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading
Katrin Althans: "And in my dreaming I can let go of the spirits of the past": Gothicizing the Common Law in Richard Frankland's No Way to Forget
Beate Neumeier: Performative Lives - Transformative Practices: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving, and Richard Frankland, Conversations with the Dead
Notes on Contributors