'Indigenous Australian cultures were long known to the world mainly from the writing of anthropologists, ethnographers, historians, missionaries, and others. Indigenous Australians themselves have worked across a range of genres to challenge and reconfigure this textual legacy, so that they are now strongly represented through their own life-narratives of identity, history, politics, and culture. Even as Indigenous-authored texts have opened up new horizons of engagement with Aboriginal knowledge and representation, however, the textual politics of some of these narratives - particularly when cross-culturally produced or edited - can remain haunted by colonially grounded assumptions about orality and literacy.
Through an examination of key moments in the theorizing of orality and literacy and key texts in cross-culturally produced Indigenous life-writing, Entangled Subjects explores how some of these works can sustain, rather than trouble, the frontier zone established by modernity in relation to 'talk' and 'text'. Yet contemporary Indigenous vernaculars offer radical new approaches to how we might move beyond the orality-literacy 'frontier', and how modernity and the a-modern are productively entangled in the process. ' (Source: Angus & Robertson website www.angusrobertson.com.au)
Contents include:
'Entangled subjects: Indigenous/Australian cross cultures of talk, text and modernity by Michele Grossman is an exploration into the area of contemporary collaborative Australian Indigenous life writing. Grossman positions this research in the context of her cultural history, location and heritage as part of a HungarianJewish diaspora in New York. Because this has deeply informed her interpretative practices and, in her own words, ‘blind spots’, this self-reflexive approach has led her to question the norms that guide cultural desires, assumptions and expectations that Western readers bring to texts and their understanding and value of reading and writing more generally. The result is a critique of the conventional anthropological and literary binary between orality and literacy' (Introduction)
'Entangled subjects: Indigenous/Australian cross cultures of talk, text and modernity by Michele Grossman is an exploration into the area of contemporary collaborative Australian Indigenous life writing. Grossman positions this research in the context of her cultural history, location and heritage as part of a HungarianJewish diaspora in New York. Because this has deeply informed her interpretative practices and, in her own words, ‘blind spots’, this self-reflexive approach has led her to question the norms that guide cultural desires, assumptions and expectations that Western readers bring to texts and their understanding and value of reading and writing more generally. The result is a critique of the conventional anthropological and literary binary between orality and literacy' (Introduction)