Mudrooroo


Book Description

"Mudrooroo: A Likely Story reads the fiction of one of Australia's most controversial and enigmatic literary figures against the backdrop of the likelihood that he assumed an Aboriginal identity to which he was not entitled. As he is neither black nor white, Colin Johnson (a.k.a. Mudrooroo) writes on issues of identity and belonging from the position of an outsider. The book argues that the experimental nature of Johnson's creative body of work coupled with the complexities of his 'in-between' status, mean that both the man and his writing evade neat categorisation within mainstream literary criticism. Also examined here is how the denial of his white mother impacts upon the gender politics of Johnson's fiction in a way that opens up exciting new possibilities for critical comment and textual analysis."--Back cover.




The Mudrooroo/Müller Project


Book Description

Documents a theatre project involving an Aboriginal theatre group performing a post-Brechtian German play by Heiner Mxller, set within a play by the Aboriginal playwright, poet and novelist, Mudrooroo. Recounts the genesis and development of the project, and gives separate texts for both plays. Mxller has also written an autobiography, TWar without Battle: Living in two dictatorships'.




Aboriginal Mythology


Book Description

Aboriginals believe they have lived in Australia since the Dreamtime, the beginning of all creation, and archaeological evidence shows the land has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years. Over this time, Aboriginal culture has grown a rich variety of mythologies in hundreds of different languages. Their unifying feature is a shared belief that the whole universe is alive, that we belong to the land and must care for it. This was the first book to collate and explain the many fascinating elements of Aboriginal culture: the song circles and stories, artefacts, landmarks, characters and customs.




Wild Cat Falling


Book Description




Master of the Ghost Dreaming


Book Description

Lost is the way to the skyland. Our souls wander forlornly in the land of ghosts. Our spirits become their play things; our bodies their food, to be ripped apart, and our gnawed bones are scattered. We are in despair; we are sickening unto death; we call to be healed. Anxiously we wait for our mapan, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming to deliver us. In the first years of the 19th century a small Aboriginal tribe reels under the threat of white invasion of their ancestral lands. Fada, a missionary from London, is attempting to impose a Christian God over their ancient beliefs. Fada and his wife Mada bring with them disease and despair, along with a message of hope - the result of their own Cockney dreaming. This novel by Mudrooroo, author of the acclaimed Wild Cat Falling, is a story of survival - physical, metaphysical and magical. It is also the story of Jangamuttuk, the custodian of the Ghost Dreaming, and his shamanistic efforts to will his tribe back to its own promised land. This is the first of the completed quartet known as his Vampyre Novels...




Writing from the Fringe


Book Description

Discusses the problems faced by Aboriginal writers, including pressures exerted by white editors and the tyranny of classification into genre. Explains and analyses the motives and objectives of leading Aboriginal writers..




The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean


Book Description

In this groundbreaking and imaginative study, Dashiell Moore explores the inter-colonial other as a mirror image in contemporary Caribbean and Aboriginal Australian literature. Identifying this image in writings across cultural boundaries, Moore offers radically new perspectives on the world generated by literary relation.




Indigenous Literature of Oceania


Book Description

Oceania has a rich and growing literary tradition. The imaginative literature that emerged in the 1960s often reflected the forms and structures of European literature, though the ideas expressed were typically anticolonial. After three decades, the literature of Oceania has become much more complex, in terms of style as well as content; and authors write in a multiplicity of styles and voices. While the written literature of Oceania is continuously gaining more critical attention, questions about the imposition of European literary standards and values as a further extension of colonialism in the Pacific have become a central issue. This book is a detailed survey of the expanding amount of critical and interpretive material written about the imaginative literature of authors from Oceania. It focuses on commentary and scholarship concerned with the poetry, fiction, and drama written in English by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. The criticisms have appeared in academic books and journals since the mid-1960s. They have developed to the point at which critical issues, related to decolonization and the expression of ideas without having to first satisfy foreign expectations, often determine the direction of such discussions. Entries are grouped in topical chapters, and each entry includes an extensive annotation. An introductory essay summarizes the evolution of Pacific literature.




Across the Lines


Book Description

This third volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the subject of intertextuality. Intertextual relations between oral and written versions of literature, text and performance, as well as problems emerging from media transitions, regionally instructed forms of intertextuality, and the works of individual authors are equally dealt with. Intertextuality as both a creative and a critical practice frequently exposes the essential arbitrariness of literary and cultural manifestations that have become canonized. The transformation and transfer of meanings which accompanies any crossing between texts rests not least on the nature of the artistic corpus embodied in the general framework of historically and socially determined cultural traditions. Traditions, however, result from selective forms of perception; they are as much inventions as they are based on exclusion. Intertextuality leads to a constant reinforcement of tradition, while, at the same time, intertextual relations between the new literatures and other English-language literatures are all too obvious. Despite the inevitable impact of tradition, the new literatures tend to employ a dynamic reading of culture which fosters social process and transition, thus promoting transcultural rather than intercultural modes of communication. Writing and reading across borders becomes a dialogue which reveals both differences and similarities. More than a decolonizing form of deconstruction, intertextuality is a strategy for communicating meaning across cultural boundaries.




Doin' Mudrooroo


Book Description