Daniel Fisher Daniel Fisher i(9144066 works by)
Gender: Male
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.

Works By

Preview all
1 Sound and Contingency in Tess Lea’s Darwin Daniel Fisher , 2016 single work essay
— Appears in: Postcolonial Studies , vol. 19 no. 1 2016; (p. 100-106)
'Tess Lea's Darwin unfolds as at once autobiography, history, and ethnography, nimbly traversing a series of difficult questions that must face such an ambitious project. How might one account for an abiding Indigenous presence, both historically and as a contemporary force in the Top End, while remaining attuned to other agencies, human and non-human, and their contribution to the shape this city takes? How might that story provide a critical counter-narrative to durable tropes of heroic settlement, colonial nostalgia, romantic primitivism and pastoral largesse? How might one celebrate Darwin's human diversity, its biological diversity, and its beauty and sensory particularity, without papering over the violence, at times wilful ignorance, and racialising force of recent history? And finally, last but I imagine far from least, how do you craft that story for a non-academic audience, opening the topic to critical reflection and taking seriously lessons learned in scholarship, ethnography and conversation? Darwin provides a sharp, riveting, and generative response to these and other questions in a narrative that speaks with audiences and interlocutors who will bring their own expectations and demands to reading. The book succeeds in this, in part, by mobilising and thinking through the senses, through sound, smell, and the lively, vulnerable surface of the skin. It also succeeds, I would argue, because of the manifest care and respect that Lea brings to her topic.'(Introduction)
1 From: The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher , 2016 extract criticism (The Voice and Its Doubles : Media and Music in Northern Australia)
— Appears in: Journal of Poetics Research , September no. 5 2016;
1 1 y separately published work icon The Voice and Its Doubles : Media and Music in Northern Australia Daniel Fisher , Durham : Duke University Press , 2015 9144103 2015 single work criticism

'Beginning in the early 1980s Aboriginal Australians found in music, radio, and filmic media a means to make themselves heard across the country and to insert themselves into the center of Australian political life. In The Voice and Its Doubles Daniel Fisher analyses the great success of this endeavor, asking what is at stake in the sounds of such media for Aboriginal Australians. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Northern Australia, Fisher describes the close proximity of musical media, shifting forms of governmental intervention, and those public expressions of intimacy and kinship that suffuse Aboriginal Australian social life. Today’s Aboriginal media include genres of country music and hip hop; radio requests and broadcast speech; the visual graphs of a digital audio timeline; as well as the statistical media of audience research and the discursive and numerical figures of state audits and cultural policy formation. In each of these diverse instances the mediatized voice has become a site for overlapping and at times discordant forms of political, expressive, and institutional creativity. ' (Source: Publisher's website)

X