AustLit

'The article reviews the controversial 'Mudrooroo Affair' with reference to unpublished work by Mudrooroo in which he comments on the public debate about his rights to define himself as Aboriginal and, by extension, have his work credited as Aboriginal. Such work makes it pertinent to review Mudrooroo's creative output since 1965 as literary experiments with life writing and to reconsider Mudrooroo's many literary 'performances' from this perspective. They are not only explorations of Aboriginal identity politics over,- the last five decades, but may also be seen as a far more personal investment in exploring Aboriginal identity through a progressively shifting but interrelated series of subjectivities that reflect the writer's own experience and inform his claim to Aboriginality.' (Publication summary)

'Feminist Poetics in concerned with all of these questions, but also with the issue of rewriting an older poetics for what it does not say about the marginalisation of the feminine. The first half of the book traces the trajectory of a particular, feminine, academic subject learning to find her voice. The second half uses that differently disciplined voice to re-read the textual traces of the Governor murder stories, murders committed against white women and children by black men in Australia in 1900. This book is a feminist poetics for those who are engaged in the teaching of literacies, and in the making of Knowledge about literacies.' (Publication summary)