AustLit

'Recently, scholars dissatisfied with accounts that assume the novelty of indigenous literary production have drawn attention to the depth and breadth of indigenous writing traditions. This essay reflects on the stakes and implications of such genealogical projects through a reading of Aboriginal writer Kim Scott’s novel Benang, about the effects of Australian state-sponsored intervention into Aboriginal intimate and family life. Noting the extent to which Scott’s narrative foregrounds Aboriginal engagements with the written word, I suggest that Benang frames writing as at once a medium through which to reconnect with family, and itself a fraught family legacy. If indigenous authorship has been taken to constitute a form of self-determination, and reading this writing an exercise in “intellectual sovereignty,” Benang invites us, I argue, to specify the political charge of reading as inhering (at least partly) in the uncomfortable intimacies the act entails and provokes.' [Author's abstract]

'Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel (2004) and Inaam Kachachi's The American Granddaughter (2008) both deal with the crisis in Iraq and its ramifications. Recognizing the important ideological and humanistic role played by literature, both writers choose to assume their moral responsibility in the face of injustice, war and violence. The paper attempts to show how each of them follows a humanistic approach that advocates human rights and equality. It also compares how each evades or otherwise succumbs to the pitfalls of Humanism that turns the sign "human' to a universal category representing humanity according to the Western model. In so doing it examines how the fact of their coming from opposite sides of the cultural divide influences the cross-cultural negotiation of publicly disseminated representations of both the self and its other(s).' [Author's abstract]