Historicising Silence: An Introduction to Australian Aboriginal Poetry

Historicising Silence: An Introduction to Australian Aboriginal Poetry

Aboriginal

Colonisation

Empire

Historicisation

Poetry

Silence

The paper looks at texts selected from the Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter as well as poets chosen from the website Creative Spirits from Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) to Zelda Quakawoot to understand how gaze invents and reinvents people and their culture. The metaphor of the museum is used to question the Empire‟s attempt at erasing and archeologically reinventing ancient societies, while interrogating how dispossession leads to silencing of communities. The second part analytically delineates the evolution from a victim position to, consciousness raising, resistance, recovering and reconstruction of one‟s cultural heritage and voice. The third section of the paper conclusively argues how modern aboriginal poetry has attempted at non-choral, esoteric as well as representational identity formulations as a prelude to dehusking the valance of prejudice and civilisational arrogance, which continue to indent the First Citizen in cultural spaces.

P Chittampalli, Ravichandra

Artha Journal of Social Sciences; Vol. 17 No. 3 (2018): Artha Journal of Social Sciences; 1-13

0000-0000

0975-329X

Centre for Publications, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore

2018-07-01

Copyright (c) 2019 Artha - Journal of Social Sciences

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0

application/pdf

eng

info:eu-repo/semantics/article

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Peer-reviewed Article

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