Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 ‘For Their Fights Affect Our Fights’ : The Impact of African American Poetics and Politics on the Poetry of Lionel Fogarty
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Aboriginal Australian and African American poets of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and beyond were prominent in the connected struggles of their peoples. The poetry of some of these poets displays common elements that enable a comparative reading of their work. This essay traces the influence of poets from the African American Black Arts movement on the work of Aboriginal Australian poet Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). It proposes that the radical poetic structures of Fogarty’s poems share common features with those of African American poets such as Everett LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) (1934-2014) and Sonia Sanchez (born 1934). The explicitly militant tone in many of these poems can also be linked to the ideas of Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X). The essay examines the role of poetry in the political struggle of Aboriginal and African American communities and addresses issues of literary sovereignty by placing Aboriginal poetry within a transitional discourse concerning the struggle for civil rights.'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Empire/Dissent vol. 17 no. 1 2017 12713236 2017 periodical issue

    'Working with the archives of the North American frontier, non-Indigenous historian Richard White noted in 1997: ‘A large chunk of our early documents … are conversations between people who do not completely understand each other. We are connoisseurs of misreadings’ (93). White’s couching remains provocative for literary scholars and writers working in settler cultures—what does it mean to be skilled at misreading? What misreadings does a culture rely on, perpetuate? Is this a way to describe the mechanisms of denial at work in settler overwriting, re-interpreting and rhetoricising of Indigenous points of view and testimony, in so far as they are acknowledged in settler culture? Who is the ‘we’ here, more precisely; who is collected in White’s use of ‘our’?' (Nicole Moore : Editorial introduction)

    2017
Last amended 18 Jan 2018 14:16:59
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/11777/11490 ‘For Their Fights Affect Our Fights’ : The Impact of African American Poetics and Politics on the Poetry of Lionel Fogartysmall AustLit logo JASAL
X