Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally : Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethi
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'This essay is an enquiry into literary subversions of the colonial myth that civilization began with recognizable forms of labour practiced under sedentary agriculture and that land rights rest with precisely those who built complex systems of farming on fixed territory year after year. It draws from my doctoral research on the intersections between Indigenous literature produced in Australia and India. In Australia, Indigenous peoples were en masse labelled as hunter-gatherers or nomads as opposed to the colonists who arrived in 1770. Historian Prathama Banerjee has noted that in India, ‘those who came to be classified as tribes in modern times were precisely communities who were not fully identifiable as sedentary cultivators, though many communities were indeed agriculturists of various sorts, and therefore could not be mobilized simply in the name of labour and productivity’ (11-12). In a revisionist mode, Bunurong, Yuin, Tasmanian historian and author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) and Malayarayar writer Narayan’s Kocharethi (2011) challenge us to rethink concepts of land rights, ownership, wasteland vs. agricultural land, and human labour. By presenting a transnational reading of Dark Emu and Kocharethi, this essay intends to explore how land-labour relations have been imagined, valued and practiced within Indigenous literatures and how writers continue to resist colonial and (post)colonial ideas on the same.'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon JASAL Conference Issue : Reading and Writing Australian Literature vol. 21 no. 2 2021 22894191 2021 periodical issue 'This issue of JASAL publishes essays first presented at ASAL2020 Virtual, an online conference that replaced a conference at James Cook University, Cairns, after COVID-19 restrictions necessitated a reimagination of the face-to-face program. At the time of writing this introduction, twelve months after ASAL2020, many of those who attended the conference are again in lockdown as new strains of COVID-19 test the capacities of health and civic authorities, and the patience of a population seeking to comprehend this ‘new normal.’ Many of those who attended ASAL2020 also logged on again in July 2021 to join the Australian Literary Studies Convention, hosted by Victoria University, confirming the value of virtual communion to the development of the work we do as literary scholars and the spirit in which we do that work.' (Roger Osborne : Reading and Writing Australian Literature: Introduction 2021
Last amended 2 Sep 2021 13:27:57
https://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/14911 Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally : Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethismall AustLit logo JASAL
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