Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Becoming a Settler Descendant : Critical Engagements with Inherited Family Narratives of Indigeneity, Agriculture and Land in a (Post)Colonial Context
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Using personal reflections from my experiences as a descendant of settlers, I undertake an autoethnographic interpretation of how my inherited family history of agriculture and memory structures my relationship to land. Agricultural identities have been foundational to the formation of the Australian nation and in the metamorphosis of settlers into settler descendants. Memories formed by settlers and inherited by their descendants as family stories become a consubstantive force in the determination of relationships to land. At the same time, I recognise how the dispossessory overtures of these sentiments continue the erasure of autochthonous Indigenous belonging by the colonial settler state. Thus, my work critically engages with how an autoethnographic approach to issues of settler colonial identity in the historical past might stifle or conversely open up critical engagement with ethical responsibility to Indigenous peoples in the political present. This analysis reflects on the broader society’s proclivity toward agricultural identities, borne out in the recent debates surrounding Indigenous author Bruce Pascoe's book. Dark Emu [Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books monograph], which positions Indigenous people as Australia’s first agriculturalists. These trends follow scholarship that seeks to expose normative and racist beliefs about Indigenous others through attentiveness to troubled colonial history.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Life Writing Self/Culture/Writing: Autoethnography in the 21st Century vol. 18 no. 3 2021 23360180 2021 periodical issue

    'Life Writing’s choice to feature twenty-first century autoethnography offers interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of constructed self and culture in writing around the globe. It captures a broad range of autobiographical and anthropological intersections shared from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt, Turkey, and the USA in two parts. This first issue ‘Autoethnography and Beyond: Colonialism, Immigration, Embodiment, and Belonging,’ gathers recent applications of autoethnography as a decolonising and dehegemonising practice in the allegedly post-racial, post-colonial, and post-(hetero)sexist twenty-first century. Derived from colonial populations in which peoples have been systematically denied by modern anthropology the ability to record their experiences and explore the subjectivities, in their own voices, autoethnographic practices referred to as ‘native ethnography’ emerged as a post-colonial practice enabling subjects to engage with their representers on their own terms (Pratt 1992, 7). The continued expansion of autoethnography’s applications in the twentieth century showed ethnographers’ first efforts to acknowledge their presence as narrators of their fieldwork accounts. Deemed ‘autobiographical ethnography,’ the hybrid genre gave way to cultural anthropologists’ experimentation with interjecting self-exploration into their ethnographic writing (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2). Tracts of detailed ‘thick description’ in which they narrated their observations of their subjects’ cultures gave way to mutually biographical cultural explication in which the interpretive and experiential lens of the narrative of the anthropologist’s subjectivity became more transparent (Geertz 1973, 15). This new form reframed the authority of the ethnographer’s knowledge as second to that of the populations their representations had marginalised and took the first steps toward acknowledging the ideological hegemony of anthropologists ‘speaking for’ their subjects of investigation. In this issue, the innovative forms of resistance to dominant forms of representation include critiques of the academic job market, caregiving, parenthood, and museum curation where this issue’s contributors problematise the paradigms of insider/outsider, work/family, and spectacle/spectator with critically self-reflective accounts of our human condition in its embodiment and need for belonging.' (Editorial introduction)

    2021
    pg. 355-370
Last amended 1 Nov 2021 12:16:44
355-370 Becoming a Settler Descendant : Critical Engagements with Inherited Family Narratives of Indigeneity, Agriculture and Land in a (Post)Colonial Contextsmall AustLit logo Life Writing
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