Book
(Re)Writing Histories: The Emergence and Development of Indigenous Australian Life-Writing
| Τίτλος: | (Re)Writing Histories: The Emergence and Development of Indigenous Australian Life-Writing |
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| Συγγραφείς: | Michèle Grossman |
| Πηγή: | Entangled Subjects ISBN: 9789401209137 |
| Στοιχεία εκδότη: | Brill, 2013. |
| Έτος έκδοσης: | 2013 |
| Θεματικοί όροι: | 5. Gender equality, 10. No inequality |
| Περιγραφή: | Framing the genre: mainstreaming Indigenous Australian life-writingIn an essay that has generated considerable literary-critical debate in the field of Aboriginal writing and representation since its publication more than twenty years ago in 1988,1 Stephen Muecke mounts a critique of the 'repressive/expressive' matrix that he argues governed early analyses of Indigenous Australian life-writing. Muecke's main focus is on the theorization of the emergence of Aboriginal literature according to what he terms a 'crude' version of Foucault's 'repressive hypothesis' and Primo Levi's 'nexus [of] oppression-rebellion': that "out of silence or absence comes the reconstruction of selfhood," a formulation that, he argues, is produced by the 'liberationist accounts' of both feminist critiques and those aligned with the 'Marxian romance' of Enlightenment-based analyses of struggle.Muecke's analysis is based on his reading of two highly influential Indigenous Australian women's life-writing texts published in 1987, Glenyse Ward's Wandering Girl2 and Sally Morgan's My Place? His discussion of these texts seeks to dislodge a series of foundational myths that have attended the framing of Indigenous autobiographical writing, such as the story of "per1 secution and struggle" that marks the account of "Aboriginal relations to the publishing industry" generated by the "repressive hypothesis."4 It also seeks to distinguish between autobiographical writing that aspires to the status of "a universal literary condition" and autobiographical writing that is literally 'occasional', both in its narration of specific events in one life and/or a set of lives, and in its desire to make a series of 'political moves', such as the 'recuperation of untold stories', that intervene as 'documentary history' in the specific contexts of Aboriginal lives.5 And it attempts to offer an alternative account of inscriptive practices of self-representation that rely on cross-cultural frameworks of reading Aboriginal 'traditions' of enunciation, authorship, and narrative production.Muecke rejects the 'repressive hypothesis' of Aboriginal literature on the grounds that it is "burdened by a Romantic legacy of the expressive self." In this regard, his analysis runs counter, as I indicated above, to that of critics like Tim Rowse, who subscribe to the classical conventions of Western autobiography and see the 'expressive self as a precondition of autobiographical discourse. However, Muecke is careful to point out that the 'expressive self is a category that has at times been mobilized by Indigenous writers and critics themselves - in line, perhaps, with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of strategic essentialism6 - as a legitimate (and legitimating) product of the intersubjective realm of discourses generated by dialogue between European settler and precolonial Indigenous Australian concepts of identity and consciousness.The Romantic tradition of 'self-expression' sits in contrast with what Muecke sees as the rules of engagement governing the production of 'traditional' Aboriginal narratives, which involve a "situation [...] where "custodianship" tends to displace "authorship," where individual subjects are socially positioned as the repeaters of traditions rather than as the sources of original or creative material."7 But Muecke does not perpetuate simplistic distinctions between a 'pure' pre-contact Aboriginal narrative tradition and a consequent diagnosis of post-contact Indigenous narratives as 'inauthentic' because of their imbrication with dominant cultural discourses. Rather, he seeks to delineate the ways in which Wandering Girl and My Place lay claim to a complex heritage of textual 'filiation' with both Aboriginal and European modes of inscriptive practice, combining and deploying aspects of 'battler' autobiography, confession, documentary history, strategies of non-disclosure and 'judicious silence,' 'shame' stories and, in the case of My Place, an emphasis on the 'deferment of (narrative) authority', a feature, Muecke has argued, which conforms to traditional Aboriginal custom, in that "Morgan resists the impulse to enclose the other's narratives within her own" by way of acknowledging that Indigenous "narrators are only ever the partial holders of traditions and are required to defer to the others who hold the rest of the sequence if they are available. … |
| Τύπος εγγράφου: | Part of book or chapter of book Other literature type |
| DOI: | 10.1163/9789401209137_003 |
| Σύνδεσμος πρόσβασης: | https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3113895131/2-re-writing-histories-the-emergence-and-development https://brill.com/view/book/9789401209137/B9789401209137-s003.xml |
| Αριθμός Καταχώρησης: | edsair.doi.dedup.....28e8e46ab4f4e7926c7565442eefa54b |
| Βάση Δεδομένων: | OpenAIRE |
| DOI: | 10.1163/9789401209137_003 |
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