'Oodgeroo's writing is often a provocative and passionate plea for justice. My People is a collection of poetry and prose and a reminder of Oodgeroo's contribution to indigenous culture and the journey to reconciliation.' (Source: Reading Australia website)
Includes all poems from Oodgeroo's previous two collections, We Are Going and The Dawn Is at Hand, plus a number of new pieces in the second and third editions.
'In recent years, the study of Aboriginal literatures has moved from a marginal interest of Australian literature to a site of global inquiry. Due to limited Aboriginal representation in the formal institutions of literary studies, this shift has arguably not coincided with sufficient reciprocal interpretive mechanisms capable of situating the Aboriginal text in a dynamic relationship with Aboriginal culture. As such, many of these discourses have reconstituted culturally inappropriate anthropological mechanisms in their engagements with contemporary Aboriginal literatures (Araluen, ‘Shame’). The unstable entanglements of power, sovereignty and exclusion that frame the Australian conditions of settler coloniality are manifest in the institutions and disciplines that teach, publish, and interpret Aboriginal literature. In the space of Indigenous research discourse and practice, Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pioneering work on decolonial Indigenous methods and practices, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), demonstrates that the concept of the discipline is not only an organising system of knowledge but also a system of organising people and bodies. She argues that the intellectual productions of nineteenth-century imperialism, including notions of civilisation and the Other, are bound to and assert geographic and economic forces of appropriation, expropriation and incorporation (69). These knowledges not only form academic disciplines but have also been used to discipline the colonised through exclusion, marginalisation and denial.' (Publication abstract)
'The histories of Australian Aboriginal and African American peoples have been disregarded for more than two centuries. In the 1960s, Aboriginal and African American civil rights activists addressed this neglect. Each endeavoured to write a critical version of history that included their people(s). This article highlights the role of Aboriginal Australian poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) (1920–93) and African American poet Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) in reviving their peoples’ history. Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of ‘minor literature’, the essay shows how these poets deterritorialise the English language and English poetry and exploit their own poetries as counter-histories to record milestone events in the history of their peoples. It will also highlight the importance of these accounts in this ‘history war’. It examines selected poems from Oodgeroo's My People: A Kath Walker Collection and Sanchez's Home Coming and We A BaddDDD People to demonstrate that similarities in their poetic themes are the result of a common awareness of a global movement of black resistance. This shared awareness is significant despite the fact that the poets have different ethnicities and little direct literary impact upon each other.'
Source: Abstract.
