AustLit

'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.' (Publication summary)

'In the following, I would like to focus on Wesley Enoch's and Deborah Mailman's The 7 Stages of Grieving (1995) and Richard Frankland's Conversations with the Dead (2002), plays which address and simultaneously perform a transformative process involving actors and spectators, with specific ethical and political implications. While both plays engage in this transformative endeavour, The 7 Stages of Grieving explores the possibilities of connecting across boundaries towards the horizon, while Conversations with the Dead centres on its boundaries, foregrounding questions of difference.'

Source: p.280

'One of the central concerns recurring throughout this collection is the question of how to probe the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems so as to lay the groundwork for entering into a true dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics. The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to acknowledge the impact of Australia's colonial past as a violent history of oppression, to engage with alternative ways of knowing, and to adapt counter-strategies of resistance which do not cultivate the comforting position of redemptive empathy and identification, but which, rather, enforce a process of self-questioning and un-settlement, calling for a renewed ethical response. This process has its pitfalls and works differently for different readers, viewers, and critics, given their own different embeddedness in histories of cultural and national trauma and the complex processes of healing.'

Source: From paragraph two (p.ix).