Decolonizing the landscape : : Indigenous cultures in Australia / / edited by Beate Neumaier and Kay Schaffer ; contributors Katrin Althans [and fifteen others].

• TeilnehmendeR: Neumaier, Beate.; Kay Schaffer, Kay.; Althans, Katrin.
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam, Netherlands : : Rodopi,, 2014.; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Cross/cultures ; 173; Cross/Cultures 173.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (304 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- From Drill to Dance / Kim Scott -- The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs / Stephen Muecke -- Aboriginal Families, Knowledge, and the Archives: A Case Study / Anna Haebich -- Decolonizing Methodology in an Arnhem Land Garden / Michael Christie -- The ‘Cultural Design’ of Western Desert Art / Eleonore Wildburger -- Modernism, Antipòdernism, and Australian Aboriginality / Ian Henderson -- Material Resonance: Knowing Before Meaning / Bill Ashcroft -- Waiting at the Border: White Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty / Lisa Slater -- 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 / Kay Schaffer -- Recovering the Past: Entangled Histories in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance / Sue Kossew -- The Geopolitical Underground: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Mining, and the Sacred / Philip Mead -- Identity and the Re-Assertion of Aboriginal Knowledge in Sam Watson’s The Kadaitcha Sung / Heinz Antor -- Gallows Humour and Stereotyping in the Nyungar Writer Alf Taylor’s Short Fiction: A White Cross-Racial Reading / Anne Brewster -- “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 / Katrin Althans -- Performative Lives – Transformative Practices: Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, The 7 Stages of Grieving, and Richard Frankland, Conversations with the Dead / Beate Neumeier -- Notes on Contributors.