Refusal and Desire: Aboriginal Inscription Against the Canon

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with contexts of Aboriginal textuality and the discursive, critical, and political conditions which structure access to our textuality both within and beyond academic contexts. Contemporary Aboriginal authors draw from a rich cultural inheritance of storytelling modes which have continued since time immemorial. It is an unavoidable, though invidious, fact that most Aboriginal writers first encounter the specific textualities of the English language and its literary genres through a history of violent colonisation and forcibly imposed epistemologies and values. As Chadwick Allen argues, global Indigenous literature is “an academic field that increasingly defines itself as sovereign from the obsessions of orthodox studies of literatures in English” (2012, p. xv). Commensurate with this shifting tendency, individual Indigenous writers increasingly frame their work outside the restrictive dialectic of settler and native subjectivities. At the synchronic level of the Australian publishing landscape, however, the refusal and deconstruction of settler colonial representations, and the illegitimate claims to nation they are predicated upon, remains a critical concern of contemporary Aboriginal literary practice.

This thesis stages critical, cultural, and philosophical considerations relevant to the study of contemporary Aboriginal literatures. With a discussion of the creative and intellectual work of Aboriginal women writers such as Jeanine Leane, Natalie Harkin, Alexis Wright, Tara June Winch, Melissa Lucashenko and others, I interrogate the discursive formations of Aboriginality as they pertain to Australian literature and global networks of Indigenous literary studies. By drawing first and foremost on Indigenous knowledges, I consider how Aboriginal literature engages scales of cultural localities, the settler colonial nation state, and the broader context of First Nations solidarity and relationality.