AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Western Australia has continued to be seen from without as both necessary and as supplemental: its distinctive place within the national economy, history and psyche has continued to drive a specific and contested set of relations with the state that provides a useful lens upon “Australia” and Australian studies in its larger sense. The status of Australian studies has fluctuated over the last decade but continues to thrive, especially internationally. This special issue explores the potential for a Western Australian perspective to engage with a multifaceted Australian studies. Contributors seek to re-evaluate the analytical framework of Australian studies, interrogating influential assumptions about history and culture. Through narratives of deep time, Asian exchange and cosmopolitanism, truth-telling and extra-colonialism, for example, such research reorients our ideas of “Australia” by rupturing the seemingly inevitable contours of the nation and offering means to re-imagine a future shared civic space. A western orientation offers possibilities for spatially and temporally disrupting the Western linearity that has grounded the modern nation-state. Key principles of this approach must include critical interrogation—rather than celebration—of the entity called Australia, the centrality of Aboriginal perspectives and voices, and the opportunities for creativity and innovation offered by interdisciplinarity.' (Jane Lydon, Reorienting Australian Studies? Remaking Australia from the West : Introduction)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Kim Scott’s Taboo and the Extimacy of Massacre,
single work
criticism
(p. 165-180)
'Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.' (Publication abstract)
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Appropriation And/or Collaboration? Australian Literary Publishing and the Case of Daniel Evans and Randolph Stow,
single work
criticism
(p. 181-196)
'Collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous practitioners in Australian writing has a long and fraught history, and appropriation remains a serious issue in the Australian publishing industry today. At the same time, however, positive instances of collaboration, particularly in contemporary writing, have shown its capacity to produce rich and nuanced cultural outcomes. This article is part of a developing project aiming to investigate collaborations like these and their related industry outcomes. It looks to feel out some of the complexities around Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration, considering as a starting point Randolph Stow’s work with Daniel Evans, which led to the publication of “The Umbali Massacre […] As told to him by Daniel Evans” in the Bulletin in 1961. As a case study, it has several interesting features: the context of Stow’s work with Indigenous peoples and his friendship with Evans; Evans’s direct contribution to Stow’s Miles Franklin Award–winning To the Islands (1958); Stow’s failure to properly acknowledge Evans in the novel’s frontmatter; and his subsequent appropriation of Evans’s voice in the Bulletin piece, even while advocating for Indigenous sovereignty. As such, it illustrates both the dangers and the potential of Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration as a dual inheritance in the industry today.' (Publication abstract)
