Re-presenting the Australian aborigine: Challenging colonialist discourse through Autoethnography (original) (raw)

Australian Aboriginal Autobiographies: Reading Identity, Aboriginality and Belongingness

This is a short book which tries to accomplish two things at once: on the one hand it is intended as an overview of the principle predominant concerns and ideas about the relationship between the white/black relations and constitutive prevalent structures of symbolic universe of Aboriginal Literature; and, on the other , it is an attempt to develop a critical stance towards these ideas, with the hope of providing a new and more satisfactory account of this relationship in the form of creating a new critical discursive space within the dominant discursive space. These two aims are not unrelated to one another. As will become apparent in the text, one of the major themes that emerges from the description I give of the main positions which have been taken on this matter is the intimate connection that exists between the ideas that we have and the sort of life that Aborigines were forced to live. This book examines the issues of identity, aboriginality and a sense of belongingness from the viewpoints of three autobiographies, proposing a new model of creating a new discursive space within the dominant discursive space. It critically discusses the Australian Aboriginal model―a new epistemological terrain―which would become an emancipatory dialogue of discourse, having potentiality to bring transformation in Australian Aboriginal Community. It will be of interest to students and researchers of the post-colonial studies, to those engaged in ‗Australian Aboriginal Studies‘, and indeed to all those who are concerned to know what are some of the major concerns of Aboriginal Writings.

Australian Autobiography: the Politics of Making Postcolonial Space

Journal of the Association For the Study of Australian Literature, 2013

In this paper, I want to argue that postcolonial settler-invader autobiography is a textual negotiation of-and-on an ambivalent site of utterance. That ambivalent space is a physical and discursive space between indigeneity and empire. In order to make this argument. I need to mobilise a number of different theoretical arguments, so I am going to do this in an abbreviated fonn, trying briefly to mark out the positions through which I need to move. The main argument of this paper is that postcolonial space is both a physical and discursive space; and that it enables the production of a particular type of subject. or rather it provokes the articulation of a seemingly different subject position. Autobiography, I will argue, is a genre in which postcolonial strategies of representation are particularly evident, and those strategies of representation are invoked not only through the subject of autobiography, but also in and through the fonns of its coming into textualisation. This paper will

Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves, Poor Remnants of a Dying Race: Aborigines in Colonial Women's Writing

Aboriginal Culture Today: Kunapipi, 1988

The bicentenary of invasion and settlement, 1988, challenges nonAboriginal Australians as never before to confront and analyse the racism that pervades hegemonic cultural discourses and practices. Looking back to the noisy decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the crucial formative period of modern Australian cultural nationalism, one is struck by the silence of and about Aboriginal people. White Australians' exclusion of Aboriginals has been, I would argue, crucial to our self-constitution as 'Australian'-an identity, a unity, whose meaning derives from its discursive displacement of the 'other' race, just as its power as a nation state derives from the appropriation of Aboriginal land.1 In that respect, Australian culture is still colonial.

Indigenous Australian autobiography and the question of genre: an analysis of scholarly discourse

Acta Neophilologica, 2011

This article is concerned with the different genre applications to Indigenous Australian autobiographies. Scholarship has not employed a consistent genre designation for this literature. This article identifies the reasons for a particular genre choice in scholarship and draws on interviews with scholars and authors to test their motivation for either adopting or rejecting the term 'autobiography' for Indigenous life narratives.

A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Belinda Wheeler

2015

Part of the Australian Studies Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Other English Language and Literature Commons, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, and the Place and Environment Commons Follow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose