Issue Details: First known date: 2024... 2024 Reading as Cousins : Indigenous Texts, Pacific Bookshelves
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In a 1973 article “Aboriginal Literature” published in the magazine New Dawn, Oodgeroo Noonuccal writes: “It would also be to our benefit to meet with and know writers of New Zealand and the Pacific and of other lands where the indigene has made his or her way into the field of literature.” In this lecture I will respond, almost 50 years later, to her invitation to imagine the intellectual, political and creative “benefit” of Indigenous-Indigenous connection in the context of literary studies. Specifically, I will reflect on the idea of being ‘cousins’ – close kin in some contexts but virtual strangers in others – as a possible approach to thinking about the relational work of Indigenous and Pacific literary studies.  As a Māori scholar of Pacific literatures, I ask: How and where do Indigenous writers and literary scholars from the Pacific “meet with” Indigenous Australia? What does it mean to “know” one another as Indigenous peoples from cultural and historical contexts that are vastly different yet also deeply familiar? How is the Pacific bookshelf reconfigured when texts and writers from Indigenous Australia are present, and vice versa? What texts, writers, networks and intellectual work become visible when Indigenous-Indigenous relationships are the starting point for a story about the study of Australian literatures? How might conversations about settler colonialism, trans-Indigenous literary methodologies and Native Pacific Cultural Studies contribute to our thinking about – and creation of – modes of relationship that centre and stand in solidarity with Indigenous sovereignty?' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Special Issue : ASAL2022 Conference Issue vol. 23 no. 2 4 November 2024 27896608 2024 periodical issue

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    'For many years, the week scheduled for the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) has coincided with NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Commemoration) Week, the event that celebrates the histories and cultures, and achievements and struggles, of Australia’s First Nations peoples. In 2022, the coincidence of these events was particularly apposite given that the focus of ASAL’s conference was the thirtieth anniversary, and the ongoing legacies on Australian writing, of the 1992 High Court Mabo decision. Over five days in early July 2022, on the Sandy Bay campus of the University of Tasmania (UTas), a program of speakers and papers, including five keynote presentations from First Nations writers and critics, explored the scholarship and analysis of the enduring repercussions of the landmark court case on Australian literary and cultural imaginaries.' (Introduction to Special Issue)

    2024
Last amended 22 Apr 2024 10:29:37
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/17954 Reading as Cousins : Indigenous Texts, Pacific Bookshelvessmall AustLit logo JASAL
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