Patrick Brantlinger Patrick Brantlinger i(A145050 works by)
Gender: Male
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1 Notes on the Postmodernity of Fake(?)Aboriginal Literature Patrick Brantlinger , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Studies , vol. 14 no. 4 2011; (p. 355-371)

 'This article examines issues of authenticity in Australian culture. From the very beginning, Australia has been plagued and entertained by literary hoaxes. The recent revelation that Mudrooroo, who was for several decades Australia's leading Aboriginal author, is of African-white and not Aboriginal descent is an extreme yet typical example of the difficulties faced by many authors and artists who want to claim authentic Aboriginality. How does anyone claim such authenticity when there are no longer any authentic Aborigines (in the sense of indigenes whose culture has not been affected by the invasion of Europeans, modernity, and now postmodernity)? The impossible struggles over authenticity of authors and artists like Mudrooroo and Sally Morgan are a perfect (if ironic) fit with the postmodern stress on inauthenticity, or a commodified and globalized capitalist culture in which everything is a copy, nothing is original (let alone Aboriginal). The ‘Ern Malley’ hoax, the basis for Peter Carey's postmodern novel My Life as a Fake, is one of many that do not involve Aboriginality, but which show that it is not just Aboriginals who struggle with the problem of authenticity.' (Publication abstract)

1 Eating Tongues : Australian Colonial Literature and 'the Great Silence' Patrick Brantlinger , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Yearbook of English Studies , vol. 41 no. 2 2011; (p. 125-139)
'Colonial authors everywhere sought to create distinctive new literatures partly through "indigenization", or the process of both representing and giving voice to indigenous peoples. In the Australian colonies, writers up to the Second World War rendered the speech of Aboriginal characters as some version of comic, supposedly only semi-articulate, pidgin English. Typically, neither they nor white characters in their texts bothered to learn an Aboriginal language. By contrast, in North America, southern Africa, and New Zealand, white authors often rendered the speech of indigenous characters in a quasi-biblical rhetoric, and in some cases—George Grey in New Zealand, for example—became fluent in an indigenous language (Maori). This essay contends that, before the emergence of literature written by Aboriginal authors in the 1960s, Australian novelists and poets contributed to "the great Australian silence" through their own weak or failed patterns of indigenization.' Patrick Brantlinger.
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