Title: Troubling Relations: Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker, Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs, and The Sun Dancin’
Abstract: I FIRST ENCOUNTERED MARGARET SOMERVILLE'S COLLABORATIVE WORK with Patsy Cohen on Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs1 in 1994 through a reflective essay on the book's production written by Somerville. That essay2 appeared a year after Ingelbas publication in a 1991 issue of Hecate, an influential Australian feminist journal concentrating largely on issues related to Australian and international feminism, history, and politics, and with a long-standing interest in feminist perspectives on various aspects of Indigenous culture and representation. In many ways, Somerville's reflexive critique of her role as editor of Ingelba and the history of her interactions with Patsy Cohen provided the springboard for this book, largely because I found it so disturbing and unsettling an instance of how anglocentric feminist politics could be used to disenfranchise on one level the very women it claimed to empower on another in the context of refiguring both Indigenous cultural difference and eurocentric hierarchies of value and power. A few years later, I came across William McGregor's collaboration with Jack Bohemia on Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker and discerned similar issues arising in McGregor's own painstaking review of the editorial choices and strategies he deploys to represent Jack Bohemia's narrative and knowledge. Accordingly, I explore here the issues I think are at stake in how a variety of discipline-based approaches (for McGregor, primarily ethnolinguistic, for Somerville, broadly radical-feminist) to the politics of collaboration on Indigenous life-writing can founder in their efforts to rationalize continuing forms of appropriation and occlusion in the name of other kinds of interests and alliances. I also offer, perforce, an account of my own intellectual and political entanglements with the knotty dilemmas that both McGregor and Somerville have been candid enough - however flawed their models of cross-cultural collaborative practice may be - to foreground reflexively in their own excursions and incursions into the domain of orality-literacy relations and cross-cultural textuality.Writing in 1986, James Clifford observed:The historical predicament of ethnography [is] that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures [...]. Ethnographic work has indeed been enmeshed in a world of enduring and changing power inequalities, and it continues to be implicated. It enacts power relations. But its function within these relations is complex, often ambivalent, potentially counter-hegemonic.4As I have already suggested, much the same can be said about the historical predicament of editing in the field of collaborative Aboriginal life-writing. It, too, has been caught up in the invention of cultures, both Indigenous and Western; it, too, is implicated in and enacts power-relations; its functions are also complex, also ambivalent, and also potentially counter-hegemonic. I consider below the ways in which some contemporary instances of editorial and collaborative practice in this genre have heeded the counter-hegemonic imperative. My focus here, however, is on what I see as the frequent (though not universal) tendency of editing in this realm to display the ambivalence and anxiety that have characteristically marked the colonial impulse in its treatment of the other(ed). The task of much editing of these 'other' texts has historically been to manage such representations in ways that both rehearse and assuage the anxieties such work generates in the colonizing culture. This has created parallel anxieties regarding Aboriginal textuality and its reception for a number of Aboriginal authors, as Jackie Huggins has remarked.5I suggested earlier that the editorial-textual apparatuses which characterize a range of collaboratively produced Indigenous life-writing often disrupt readerly expectations of how such work might be consumed and interpreted as autobiographical or other kinds of literary texts. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot