Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally: Juxtaposing Dark Emu and Kocharethi

Authors

  • Priyanka Shivadas UNSW Canberra

Keywords:

Chadwick Allen, land rights

Abstract

Abstract

This essay is an enquiry into literary subversions of the colonial myth that civilization began with recognizable forms of labour practiced under sedentary agriculture and that land rights rest with precisely those who built complex systems of farming on fixed territory year after year. It draws from my doctoral research on the intersections between Indigenous literature produced in Australia and India. In Australia, Indigenous peoples were en masse labelled as hunter-gatherers or nomads as opposed to the colonists who arrived in 1770. Historian Prathama Banerjee has noted that in India, ‘those who came to be classified as tribes in modern times were precisely communities who were not fully identifiable as sedentary cultivators, though many communities were indeed agriculturists of various sorts, and therefore could not be mobilized simply in the name of labour and productivity’ (11-12). In a revisionist mode, Bunurong, Yuin, Tasmanian historian and author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) and Malayarayar writer Narayan’s Kocharethi (2011) challenge us to rethink concepts of land rights, ownership, wasteland vs. agricultural land, and human labour. By presenting a transnational reading of Dark Emu and Kocharethi, this essay intends to explore how land-labour relations have been imagined, valued and practiced within Indigenous literatures and how writers continue to resist colonial and (post)colonial ideas on the same.

Author Biography

  • Priyanka Shivadas, UNSW Canberra
    Ms. Priyanka Shivadas is a PhD student at University of New South Wales Canberra, located at the Australian Defence Force Academy.  Her research focuses on Global Indigenous Literary Studies. She has published “The Bone People of New Zealand: Identity Politics in the South Pacific” in a book which is a collection of essays called Homogeneity in Heterogeneity: Memory, Culture, and Resistance in Aboriginal Literatures from Around the World (New Delhi: Authorspress, 2018)  and “The Practice of Public Apology: Australia Says Sorry to the Stolen Generations” in The Culture of Dissenting Memory: Truth Commissions in the Global South, edited by Veronique Tadjo (Routledge, 2019).

References

Works Cited

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Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2012.

---. ‘Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka: Patterns of Indigenous Settlement in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka’. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2012. 193-248.

Banerjee, Prathama. ‘Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53.1 (2016) 1-23. JSTOR. 29 November 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019464615619549.

Guha, Ranajit. A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1982.

Jayasree, G.S. ‘Introduction’. Kocharethi: the araya woman. Trans. Catherine Thankamma. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2011. xv-xxx.

Narayan. Cries in the Wilderness. Ed. K M Sherrif. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 2009.

---. Kocharethi: the araya woman. Trans. Catherine Thankamma. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2011.

---. Personal Interview. 19 November 2019.

Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. New Ed. Broome: Magabala Books, 2018.

---. Young Dark Emu. Broome: Magabala Books, 2019.

Sherrif, K M. ‘“Watching a Fight is more exciting than Fighting—It's no skin off your nose!”’. Cries in the Wilderness. Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya Akademi, 2009. 94-101.

‘Sovereignty’. Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. 31 May 2003. 29 November 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty/.

Thomas, Tom. ‘A Green Postcolonial Reading of Kocharethi and Mother Forest’. Voice and Memory: Indigenous Expression and Imagination. Eds. G. N. Devy, Geoffrey V. Davis, and K. K. Chakravarty. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2011. 224-233.

Whitehead, Judy. ‘John Locke and the Governance of India's Landscape: The Category of Wasteland in Colonial Revenue and Forest Legislation’. Economic and Political Weekly 45.50 (2010): 83-93. JSTOR. 29 November 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/25764218.

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Published

2022-07-09