Cirrus@Austlit

'Recent works by Ambelin Kwaymullina (Palyku), Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki), and Nnedi Okorafor challenge ideas that YA speculative futures must be ethnoculturally monolithic and unavoidably bleak. While their stories share elements with YA dystopia, postcolonial sf and Afrofuturism, they utilize a distinct artistic and theoretical approach called Indigenous futurism that incorporates Native/Indigenous concepts of community, power, and responsibility. From this unique position, their non-Caucasian female leads explore vital questions of choice and purpose, gender, violence, technology, environmental and social consciousness, and even endings and triumph.' (Publication abstract)

'Ambelin Kwaymullina, an Aboriginal writer, illustrator, and assistant professor who comes from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, has most recently ventured into the popular realm of YA Dystopias with her Tribe trilogy: The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015). Although the Tribe series aligns with the ecological utopia and Bildungsroman, it is more importantly a “teaching story” whose strength resides in its use of the apocalypse and the centralizing of Country as collective tactics of survivance and cultural brokering relevant to the experiences of living in a (post)colonial world.' (Publication abstract)