AustLit

'The publication of collaborative Indigenous life writing places both the text and its production under public scrutiny. The same is true for the criticism of life writing. For each, publication has consequences. Taking as its starting point the recent critical concern for harm occasioned in life writing, this article argues that in the reading of collaborative Indigenous life writing, injury may eventuate from the commentary itself .... With particular regard to the collaborative texts Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs and [the Canadian work] Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, this article argues that literary criticism can benefit from the practice of consultation with the Indigenous subjects whose representations it comments upon.' (p.55)

Alan Marshall ... wrote for a popular audience, to which he conveyed an image of the ordinary Australian as a decent, egalitarian battler, suspicious of authority but always ready to help his mates ... he also created an image of himself as one of them who had, helped by his rural community, overcome the particular disadvantage of infantile paralysis with courage and good humour ... Toward the end of his life, however, he published a collection of stories that show a dark underside of violence and brutality beneath the surface geniality. Far from destroying the earlier image of the Australian, however, these stories discover a strength by which his people endured their darkness.' (p.85)

'Focusing on the diversity of experience evoked by notions of cultural belonging ... [this essay] argues against the prevalent tendency within diaspora studies to engage in a rhetoric of cultural essentialism. The literatures of diaspora deserve to be read as documents of unique and complex cultural experiences rather than mere illustrations of archetypes.' (p.101)