Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Anne Brewster, Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia
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'From Barthes to Foucault, declarations of the death of the author have been crucial in defetishizing the singular authority of a work’s originator as the guarantor of that text’s meaning. Writers from colonised backgrounds, however, have often worried about the erasure of identity and cultural specificity implicit in this nonetheless crucial caveat. Postcolonial theorists who have nuanced or challenged the claim of authorial death/absence include Edward Said in his Beginnings: Intention and Method and Édouard Glissant across multiple topoi within his oeuvre.i If the modernist author had to die to reopen the possibility of multiple interpretations, the Indigenous subject has often been absented in advance from any role in the interpretive paradigm surrounding their work. Aboriginal authors in Australia have been conscious of such limits of the ‘death of the author’ thesis for some time, but it seems that this past year heralded a new attention and reorientation in relation to this question. In her keynote, delivered at the opening of the 2015 ASAL Conference, held at UNSW Canberra, Melissa Lucashenko boldly stated: the ‘Aboriginal author is not dead.’ Non-Indigenous scholars of Aboriginal literature will, it seems, need to be increasingly self-conscious of the ethics of methodology today and it is into this situation that Anne Brewster’s new work inserts itself in a timely fashion.' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL General Issue vol. 17 no. 2 2018 13378541 2018 periodical issue

    'This general issue of JASAL brings together a diverse collection of essays on a range of writers, texts and concerns in the field. The critical and conceptual rubrics informing the essays are similarly diverse, however there are also to be found productive points of interconnection and resonance, of shared interest and engagement. These shared concerns might be grouped loosely under the two broad terms from the issue title: networks and genealogies. The essays variously examine texts, writers and literary practices within the material, economic, and industrial as well as the representational and discursive networks of literary practice instated and supported by changing historical formations such as settler colonialism, nationalism, and the mobilities of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, they share a concern with practices of literary and intellectual recollection and acknowledgment, for instance in the processes of canon formation and its concomitants of obscurity and literary neglect.' (Brigitta Olubas Antonio Jose Simoes Da Silva : Introduction)

    2018
Last amended 19 Mar 2018 11:01:07
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/12561/11550 Anne Brewster, Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australiasmall AustLit logo JASAL
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