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AustLit

Transnational Indigenous Literatures (3062HUM)
Semester 1 / 2016

Texts

y separately published work icon Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature Anita Heiss (editor), Peter Minter (editor), Nicholas Jose (editor), Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2008 Z1483175 2008 anthology poetry drama prose correspondence criticism extract (taught in 19 units)

'An authoritative survey of Australian Aboriginal writing over two centuries, across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. Including some of the most distinctive writing produced in Australia, it offers rich insights into Aboriginal culture and experience...

'The anthology includes journalism, petitions and political letters from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as major works that reflect the blossoming of Aboriginal poetry, prose and drama from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Literature has been used as a powerful political tool by Aboriginal people in a political system which renders them largely voiceless. These works chronicle the ongoing suffering of dispossession, but also the resilience of Aboriginal people across the country, and the hope and joy in their lives.' (Publisher's blurb)

Bob Blaisdell (Ed.),Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers (Dover, 2014)

Albert Wendt, The Adventures of Vela (U. Hawaii Press, 2009)

Jaime Luis Huenún Villa (Ed.), Poetry of the Earth: trilingual Mapuche anthology (IP, 2014)

Description

This course crosses languages, cultures and continents. We jump from the deep past to the present, and back into recent colonial histories. We read short fiction, poetry, a verse novel and all kinds of things in between. Everything you thought you knew about literature - including what it is, why it is written, and who is writing it - will be unsettled, turned upside down, and left to grow much richer. In this course we will see how literary forms have been of vital importance for indigenous peoples not only as modes of aesthetic expression, but as potent forms of political resistance to colonial and neo-colonial powers. As we travel across Australia, the Americas and the Pacific, we will see how these literatures imagine the possibility of spaces that don't correspond to the lines on national maps.

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