Cirrus@Austlit

'Dr Anita Heiss is a Wiradjuri author from Central NSW. Heiss was one of the nine applicants in Eatock v Bolt, the 2011 court case where Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Herald Sun journalist Andrew Bolt to have contravened Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth). Heiss later published a memoir entitled Am I Black Enough for You? in which she spoke to notions of Aboriginal identity and authenticity raised by the case. As she decisively put it in the opening pages of Am I Black Enough?: “I am an urban, beachside Blackfella, a concrete Koori with Westfield Dreaming, and I apologise to no-one”. Alongside her involvement in the court case, Heiss is well known as the author of ‘choc’-lit, a distinctive brand of popular women’s fiction that retains the chick lit genre’s focus on career, friendship, sex and shopping, but with a twist: Heiss’s writing features urban Aboriginal Australian women as the main characters. Heiss’s ‘choc’-lit further differentiates itself from normatively white articulations of the genre in its intent to educate a non-Aboriginal audience.

'The memoir genre, litigation in the Federal Court and ‘choc’-lit would appear to have little in common. Yet, Heiss pursues the same argument through each: that the rich diversity of contemporary Aboriginal identity far exceeds the limited stereotypes that dominate the Australian imagination. Until now, there has been very little scholarly interest in Heiss’s writing. My thesis recognises Heiss as a unique and important author whose writing broadens the available spaces for Aboriginal writers in Australian public life. I present my doctoral research as a thesis by compilation. The main body consists of five journal articles: three have already been published and two are under review. My papers move between two modes: literary analyses of plot, theme and character; and online reception studies. By paying attention to the way Heiss puts an ostensibly escapist genre to serious political ends, my research presents the first sustained academic account of Heiss’s published writing. Equally, I focus on online reception and amateur reviewing practices to highlight new ways of thinking about engagement and impact through popular literary forms.'

Source: Abstract.

' In this essay, I use a close reading of Anita Heiss’s five chick lit novels to argue that racial identity profoundly affects the relationship between the chick lit novel and advice manual genre. In Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit, Caroline Smith contends that the chick lit novel critiques and satirizes regimes of female control through its engagement with the domestic advice manual. This relationship, however, does not always work in the way Smith assumes because the protagonist is not always white: she may be Latina, Chinese, South-East Asian, or, as Anita Heiss shows, Aboriginal Australian: Heiss’s fiction serves as an advice manual, designed to expose readers to the correct norms and behaviors for interacting with Australia’s First Peoples.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.