Cirrus@Austlit

'A reconciliation movement spread across Australia during the 1990s, bringing significant marches, speeches, and policies across the country. Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians began imagining race relations in new ways and articulations of place, belonging, and being together began informing literature of a unique new genre. This book explores the political and poetic paradigms of reconciliation represented in Australian writing of this period. The author brings together textual evidence of themes and a vernacular contributing to the emergent genre of reconciliatory literature. The nexus between resistance and reconciliation is explored as a complex process to understanding sovereignty, colonial history, and the future of society. Moreover, this book argues it is creative writing that is most necessary for a deeper understanding of each other and of place, because it is writing that calls one to witness, to feel, and to imagine all at the same time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The trickster features in a wide range of folkloric, mythic, popular, and literary texts. Spanning antiquity and the contemporary world, tricksters appear in African, Arabic, Asian, Caribbean, European (including Greek, Norse, and Slavic), Pacific, and South American cultures, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in settler nations. Literary trickster figures include the Odyssean wandering hero, the animals in Aesop's fables, the Shakespearean wise fool, and the confidence man in nineteenth-century novels by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. More recently, trickster figures have been deployed across a range of minority literatures. Jeanne Rosier Smith, for example, discusses the trickster's recent resurgence in the fiction of what she terms ethnic American women writers., Trickster figures have also appeared in Indigenous writing from both the USA and Canada. '  (Introduction)

'Reading and writing must be more than passive processes of mimetic display; rather, they should offer a platform for psychological transformations across race and gender. Thus literary sovereignty vis-a-vis ownership of creative expression and representations of self can be reclaimed.This essay offers close analysis of contemporary Australian Indigenous literature to explore the sovereignty of feminist psychologies. Does creative writing reflect a strengthening of female Indigenous psychologies, and how might this implicate race relations and the decolonization of textual worlds? These questions are inspired by Alexis Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book where she writes about “the quest to regain sovereignty over [her] own brain.” This article will explore the term craziness in a metaphorical sense: looking at whether rejecting dominant white culture equates to psychological sovereignty, improved mental well-being, and better race relations in imaginary realms. Indigenous characters in Wright’s The Swan Book and Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing may appear “crazy” for living in a state of indifference, but paradoxically, it is this state of “craziness” or indifference that empowers them to find psycho-logical peace and resist assimilation. Seeking psychological sovereignty means assuming a position so averse to patriarchy and colonization that it renders transformation in imaginary worlds,and urges transformation in the psyches of white readers too.'  (Publication abstract)

In this chapter the author explores the creation of humor in recent publications by Aboriginal authors who address issues of social injustice and racism.