We must become gatekeepers : editing indigenous writing

With the proliferation of Indigenous texts currently published by specialist and mainstream publishers, non-Indigenous editors increasingly find themselves negotiating the uncomfortable territories of race, politics and power for which current training (in an Australian context) leaves them poorly prepared. Indigenous writer Anita Heiss advocates the employment of Indigenous editors as an 'ideal' solution, though few are currently working in the Australian industry. Margaret McDonell, an experienced non-Indigenous editor of Indigenous texts, suggests non-Indigenous editors need to 'undertake a journey of learning' during which 'assumptions, biases, tastes and preconceptions' are examined. Yet this presents a difficult task within a postcolonial society, when, as identified by Clare Bradford, even the classification of texts into genres such as fiction and the short story represents an entirely Eurocentric construct, 'not readily correspond[ing] with Aboriginal schemata'. The Australian Society of Authors' discussion paper 'Writing about Indigenous Australia: Some Issues to Consider and Protocols to Follow' provides practical guidelines that may be adapted for editorial use. This article canvasses these and other ideas with a focus on establishing an ethical and appropriately sensitive cross-cultural approach to editing Indigenous writing.

Black and white : in search of an ‘apt’ response to Indigenous writing

‘The good editor,’ suggests Thomas McCormack in his Fiction Editor, the Novel and the Novelist, ‘reads, and … responds aptly’ to the writer’s work, ‘where “aptly” means “as the ideal appropriate reader would”.’ McCormack develops an argument that encompasses the dual ideas of sensibility and craft as essential characteristics of the fiction editor. But at an historical juncture that has seen increasing interest in the publication of Indigenous writing, and when Indigenous writers themselves may envisage a multiplicity of readers (writing, for instance, for family and community, and to educate a wider white audience), who is the ‘ideal appropriate reader’ for the literary works of the current generation of Australian Indigenous writers? And what should the work of this ‘good editor’ be when engaging with the text of an Indigenous writer? This paper examines such questions using the work of Margaret McDonell and Jennifer Jones, among others, to explore ways in which non-Indigenous editors may apply aspects of McCormack’s ‘apt response’ to the editing of Indigenous texts.

Critical injuries ; collaborative Indigenous life writing and the ethics of criticism

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 critical commentary itself. The critical work of G Thomas Couser and his concern for vulnerable subjects, whose life narratives reach published form through the efforts or with the assistance of another, has its
parallel in the critical attention given to collaboratively produced Indigenous life writing in Australia and Canada. In some cases, however, such analysis is generated without consultation with the Indigenous producers of collaborative texts. Criticism directing its arguments toward the conditions
of editorial constraint by which the Indigenous subject is enclosed or silenced has the ironic and surely unintended consequence of removing the Indigenous participants of collaboration from the field of critical engagement. With particular regard to the collaborative texts Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs and 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.

Cross talk : collaborative indigenous life writing in Australia and Canada

This thesis argues that the critical reading of Indigenous life writing needs to move beyond its concern for power relations operating between the narrators and editors of collaboratively produced texts. It discusses the role of Indigenous families and communities in both the production and the reading of Indigenous texts.

Exploration archives and indigenous histories: an introduction

Since the 1990s, a number of scholars have sought to uncover ‘hidden histories’ of exploration, as Felix Driver and Lowri Jones have referred to it.1 Working against a conventional emphasis on the exploits and achievements of the singular heroic explorer, imperial and colonial exploration is recast as a collective enterprise involving a diverse labour force and upon which expeditions were dependent for their progress and success.2 Various approaches are pursued for writing a more representative history of exploration, such as recuperatingfrom the archives the stories of little- or lesser-known participants; rewriting histories of particular expeditions through the lens of their encounters and interactions with indigenous people; or giving greater prominence to the work of intermediaries of many kinds, including interpreters, brokers, guides, porters and other labourers.3 The result is a more complex and multivocal account of the practices and politics of European exploration, the social and historical contexts in which it occurred, and the relationships, networks and institutions it createdand on which it depended.

Indigenous cultural studies: intersections between cultural studies and Indigenous studies

History, Power, Text collects together selected contributions on Indigenous themes published between 1996 and 2013 in the journal first known as UTS Review and now known as Cultural Studies Review. Since the journal’s inception, successive editors have sought to open up a space for new kinds of politics, new styles of writing and new modes of interdisciplinary engagement. Like the journal it draws its material from, this collection has been conceived and assembled as an exercise in institution building beyond ‘the Institution’. We call this institution, tentatively, ‘Indigenous cultural studies’ and see it as a disciplinary space that is built iteratively through events, single articles and books. We do not seek to prescribe or delimit this project but rather to give it density and energise those working in the overlapping fields represented here.