AustLit

'As one of Australia's most innovative, outspoken, and prolific Indigenous poets, Lionel Fogarty has been the subject of a great number of studies and analysis over the years, particularly since the publication of his New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera in 1995. Here, Alizadeh uses other radically different reading strategy to consider one of Fogarty's best-known poems, "Biral Biral." By drawing on the work of the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou, Alizadeh argues that far from presenting the reader with an affirmative and positivist portrayal of an existing Aboriginal identity, Fogarty's poem in fact challenges and reinvents identitarian assumptions apropos of Aboriginality in contemporary, multicultural Australia. In addition, Badiou, as a (post-) Marxist thinker, is an apt choice for providing a progressive perspective that does not repeat the existing postcolonial and postmodernist assumptions apropos of aesthetics, multiculturality, and identity.' (Publication abstract)