AustLit

'Part history, part theory, and part examination of children’s literature focused on Indigenous experience, Indigenous Cultural Capital explores efforts to bring First Nations life and culture into the mainstream through books aimed at young readers. Xu Daozhi begins her work with this assertion: “The representations of Aboriginal life and cultures in Australian children’s books, throughout much of Australia’s post-contact history, have been plagued by racial stereotypes and prejudice” (1). (The author includes Torres Strait Islanders under the term “Aboriginal.”) To develop her ideas, she employs Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital”: “Cultural capital, in such forms as knowledge, skills, and educational qualifications, refers to cognitive acquisition and competence in deciphering cultural codes” (13). Family, to Bourdieu, is the foundational point for such capital; children from middle- or upper-class families enter the educational system with resources that ready them to acquire cultural capital successfully and thus achieve “scholastic success” (13) and an adult life of power and privilege. She identifies the longstanding absence of Indigenous knowledge and cultures from Australian education as a key factor in enduring racial discrimination in schools and society at large and “the widening gap between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal students in academic performance” (17). Introducing the concept of “Indigenous cultural capital” and applying it to children’s literature, the author contends that the dissemination of narratives to young readers centred on the Aboriginal experience and the corresponding apparatus of curricular changes, prizes, reviews, and appropriate paratextual matter has the potential to transform Australian society. Indigenous cultural capital can shape young readers’ “worldview, opinions, and behaviour” (18) and guide them toward a more racially inclusive social structure.' 

(Introduction)