Michael R. Griffiths Michael R. Griffiths i(A137903 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 The Performative Politics of Reconciliation in David Milroy’s Waltzing the Wilarra Michael R. Griffiths , 2024 single work criticism
— Appears in: Theatre, Margins and Politics : An Introduction 2024;
1 White Writing, Indigenous Australia, and the Chronotopes of the Settler Novel Michael R. Griffiths , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 69-82)

'This chapter critically analyzes the work of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century white settler colonial writers who represented Indigenous characters and stories. It will examines how certain tropes persisted, from Rolf Boldrewood’s late romanticism to Eleanor Darks reconstructive modernism. It explores how novels by these writers manifest a contradictory set of ideas towards race and landscape, which it takes as emblematic of wider white Australian culture.' (Publication abstract)

1 Whiteness, Aboriginality and Representation in the Twentieth Century Australian Novel Michael R. Griffiths , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 Questions of Genre, Refusal, and Cultural Adaptation in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Michael R. Griffiths , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , vol. 44 no. 2 2022;

'A number of critics have deployed the generic category of magical realism in reading Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria. While accepting that the novel has something in common with this generic classification and a relation to texts and writers associated with it, this essay seeks to show the limitations inherent in reducing Carpentaria to this (or other) generic classifications. While Carpentaria enacts and explores elements of the representation of time and the sacred that are congruent to magical realism, it also refuses to be reduced to either magical realism or genre as such.'(Publication abstract)

1 Michael Griffiths Reviews Boots by Nadia Rhook Michael R. Griffiths , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , November 2020;

— Review of Boots Nadia Rhook , 2020 selected work poetry
1 Australian Literature’s Legacies of Cultural Appropriation Michael R. Griffiths , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 23 October 2018;

'Non-Indigenous Australian writers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they can risk writing about Aboriginal people and culture and getting it wrong. On the other, they can avoid writing about Aboriginal culture and characters, but by doing so, erase Aboriginality from the story they tell.' (Introduction)

1 2 y separately published work icon The Distribution of Settlement : Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture Michael R. Griffiths , Nedlands : UWA Publishing , 2018 14700950 2018 multi chapter work criticism

'Settler representations of Indigenous culture and identity weigh heavily on the way Indigenous people tell their stories in the present. These representations affect the way Indigenous writers themselves operate to represent themselves and their people. The rendering visible of Indigenous culture involves a fraught history riven with appropriation, misrepresentation and material and discursive forms of violence.

'The Distribution of Settlement tells a partial story about the effect of these histories within Australian literature and culture. Tracking such cases of appropriation and misrepresentation in white Australian writing from the middle of the twentieth century, the book also turns to the legacy of these acts on and in contemporary Aboriginal writers as diverse as Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Tony Birch and Tara June Winch.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Anne Brewster, Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia Michael R. Griffiths , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;

'From Barthes to Foucault, declarations of the death of the author have been crucial in defetishizing the singular authority of a work’s originator as the guarantor of that text’s meaning. Writers from colonised backgrounds, however, have often worried about the erasure of identity and cultural specificity implicit in this nonetheless crucial caveat. Postcolonial theorists who have nuanced or challenged the claim of authorial death/absence include Edward Said in his Beginnings: Intention and Method and Édouard Glissant across multiple topoi within his oeuvre.i If the modernist author had to die to reopen the possibility of multiple interpretations, the Indigenous subject has often been absented in advance from any role in the interpretive paradigm surrounding their work. Aboriginal authors in Australia have been conscious of such limits of the ‘death of the author’ thesis for some time, but it seems that this past year heralded a new attention and reorientation in relation to this question. In her keynote, delivered at the opening of the 2015 ASAL Conference, held at UNSW Canberra, Melissa Lucashenko boldly stated: the ‘Aboriginal author is not dead.’ Non-Indigenous scholars of Aboriginal literature will, it seems, need to be increasingly self-conscious of the ethics of methodology today and it is into this situation that Anne Brewster’s new work inserts itself in a timely fashion.' (Introduction)

1 Form, Frame and Allegory in Recent Transnational Short Fictions Michael R. Griffiths , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 62 2017;

Sri Lankan Tamil Asylum Seeker on a Leaky boat finds his story interspersed with that of an Australian case worker in a wavering marriage, a ‘spoiled Emirati rich girl’ ridicules a Ukrainian sex worker online, a young Peruvian man cares for his girlfriend while concealing their relationship from her overbearing Gujarati mother. Which recent collection of short stories are these vignettes blurbing from? The answer is that each comes from a separate collection: the first from Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil, the second from Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions, the third from Daniel Alarcón’s War By Candlelight. Yet, in the context of these short stories and their paratexts, this list could ironically also be said to read as a cohesive blurb. Such global short stories of overlap and interconnectivity have become a staple of the transnational publishing world, with such Australian-based writers as Beneba Clarke, Alizadeh, and Nam Le winning multiple awards, making multiple bestseller lists, and joining a wider transnational phenomenon which includes such U. S. based writers as Alarcón and Jhumpa Lahiri. In this essay, I build on the work of Ken Gelder, Wenche Ommundsen, Nicholas Jose, Lachlan Brown and Marita Bullock to proximately examine the way Beneba Clark, Alizadeh and Le—the Australian writers on this list—engage with the transnational by calling attention to the ambivalent position of migrant and diasporic inscriptions of self-reference (Gelder).' (Introduction)

1 Of Cartilage i "If there is order to this world,", Michael R. Griffiths , 2016 single work poetry
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , September no. 19 2016;
1 Sidney Poitier Sighs i "Now the green waste truck has gone,", Michael R. Griffiths , 2016 single work poetry
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , September no. 19 2016;
1 New Literatures : Australia Michael R. Griffiths , Paul Sharrad , 2015 single work bibliography
— Appears in: The Year's Work in English Studies , vol. 94 no. 1 2015; (p. 1099-1233)

'Apart from a renewed interest in indigenous literature displayed across several volumes, topics this year ranged from an extensive survey of Christian mysticism to the life-writing of sons in relation to fathers...'

1 Winton’s Spectralities or What Haunts Cloudstreet? Michael R. Griffiths , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Tim Winton : Critical Essays 2014; (p. 75-95)

'First published in 1991, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is now presented in one of its several Penguin editions as a 'Modern Australian Classic'. Might this detail of the book' marketing reveal something about the novel's metatextual status? It might be seen to imply that Cloudstreet figures a certain Australian modernity. Indeed, this modernity would have to be commensurable with something classic, standard, which is also to say formative. And insofar as it is formative of the present, a classic is also implicitly, at least in part, of the past. Cloudstreet's metatextual status, then, implies that the novel figures Australia's modernity even as it relies on a classicism that is spectral: haunting the present in all its modernity. If the paradoxical canonical status claimed by the novel implies a certain spectrality, in this way then it is perhaps not surprising that in fleeting but essential moments the novel functions not only as a family epic, but also as a ghost story.' (Author's introduction, 75)

1 Indigenous Life Writing : Rethinking Poetics and Practice Michael R. Griffiths , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature 2013; (p. 15-33)

Aboriginal life writing... 'is a syncretic practice: bound to postcolonial structure of mourning and trauma which while also deeply engaged with tradition and its restoration.' In this essay, the author offers a brief and partial survey of the bounds of life writing, and frames his approach to life writing.

1 y separately published work icon Unsettling Artifacts : Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)Settler Colony Michael R. Griffiths , Texas : Dissertation Abstracts International , 2012 7792174 2012 single work thesis

'My dissertation employed intellectual historian Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—which can be most broadly parsed as the political organization of life—to examine the way the lives of Aboriginal people were regulated and surveilled in relation to settler European norms. The study is a focused investigation into a topic with global ramifications: the governance of race and sexuality and the effect of such governance on the production of apparently inclusive cultural productions within the public spheres. I argue that the way in which subaltern peoples have been governed in the past and the way their cultures have been appropriated continue to be in the present is not extraneous to but rather formative of what is often misleadingly called “the” public sphere of dominant societies. In the second part, I analyze the legacies of this biopolitical moment and emphasize, particularly, the cultural politics of affect and trauma in relation to this (not quite) past. Authors addressed include: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen, Rex Ingamells, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and others. I also examine Australian Aboriginal policy texts throughout the twentieth century up to the "Bringing Them Home" Report (1997).' (Author's summary)

1 Biopolitical Correspondences : Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity Michael R. Griffiths , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , June vol. 26 no. 2 2011; (p. 20-42)
'How does (post)colonial literary culture, so often annexed to nationalist concerns, interface with what Michel Foucalt called biopolitics? Biopolitics can be defined as the regularisation of a population according to the perceived insistence on norms. Indeed, biopolitics is crucially concerned with what is perceptible at the macroscopic level of an entire population - often rendering its operations blind to more singular, small, identitarian, or even communitarian representations and imaginaries. Unlike the diffuse, microscopic, governmental mechanisms of surveillance that identify the need for disciplinary interventions, biopolitics concerns itself with the regularisation of societies on a large scale, notably through demography. As Ann Laura Stoler has put it, Foucault's identification of these two forms of power, 'the disciplining of individual bodies...and the regularization of life processes of aggregate human populations' has led to much productive work in the postcolonialist critique of 'the discursive management of the sexual practices of the colonized', and the resultant 'colonial order of things' (4).' (Author's introduction, 20)
1 1 Need I Repeat? : Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Postcolonial Iterability in Kim Scott’s Benang Michael R. Griffiths , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature 2010; (p. 157-183)
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