Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia

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. Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia......Page 3 Table of Contents......Page 5 List of Illustrations......Page 7 Introduction......Page 9 SHARING ACROSS BOUNDARIES......Page 21 From Drill to Dance......Page 23 The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs......Page 43 Aboriginal Families, Knowledge, and the Archives: A Case Study......Page 57 Decolonizing Methodologyin an Arnhem Land Garden......Page 77 The ‘Cultural Design’ of Western Desert Art......Page 91 ETHICAL AND OTHER ENCOUNTERS......Page 107 Modernism, Antipòdernism, and Australian Aboriginality......Page 109 Material Resonance: Knowing Before Meaning......Page 127 Waiting at the Border: White Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty......Page 149 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......Page 169 Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance......Page 189 READING TRANSFORMATIONS......Page 203 The Geopolitical Underground: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Mining, and the Sacred......Page 205 Identity and the Re-Assertion of Aboriginal: Knowledge in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung......Page 227 Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in the Nyungar Writer Alf Taylor’s Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading......Page 253 “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......Page 275 Performative Lives – Transformative Practices: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving, and Richard Frankland, Conversations with the Dead......Page 295 Notes on Contributors......Page 313