Full Description
Winner of the 2015 ASAL Walter McCrae Russell Award
Indigenous Australian cultures were long known to the world mainly from the writing of anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, missionaries, and others. Indigenous Australians themselves have worked across a range of genres to challenge and reconfigure this textual legacy, so that they are now strongly represented through their own life-narratives of identity, history, politics, and culture. Even as Indigenous-authored texts have opened up new horizons of engagement with Aboriginal knowledge and representation, however, the textual politics of some of these narratives - particularly when cross-culturally produced or edited - can remain haunted by colonially grounded assumptions about orality and literacy.
Through an examination of key moments in the theorizing of orality and literacy and key texts in cross-culturally produced Indigenous life-writing, Entangled Subjects explores how some of these works can sustain, rather than trouble, the frontier zone established by modernity in relation to 'talk' and 'text'. Yet contemporary Indigenous vernaculars offer radical new approaches to how we might move beyond the orality-literacy 'frontier', and how modernity and the a-modern are productively entangled in the process.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: When They Write What We Read
Unsettling Subjects: Critical Perspectives on Selves in Writing and Writing Selves
(Re)Writing Histories: The Emergence and Development of Indigenous Australian Life-Writing
'The Pencil and the Mouth': Anthropology, Orality, Literacy, and Modernity
'A Tape-Recorder and an Editor': The Politics and Practices of Cross-Cultural Collaborative Text-Making
Crowded House: Gularabulu: Stories of the West Kimberley
Troubling Relations: Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs, and The Sun Dancin'
Fighting With Our Tongues, Fighting For Our Tongues: Warlpiri karnta karnta-kurlangu yimi/Warlpiri Women's Voices: Our Lives, Our History and Auntie Rita
Conclusion: Reading the Word, Reading the World: Re-Reading Orality, Literacy, and Modernity
Works Cited
Index
