Author Description

Practices of Proximity investigates the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official â ~whiteâ (TM) Australiaâ "the apparent owners of both the land and the English languageâ "and Australian Indigenous peoples. Rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locationsâ "the â ~emptyâ (TM) Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban marginâ "it insists on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit the intersubjective space of literature, rendering the inherited authority of who â ~ownsâ (TM) meaning problematical and ethically suspect. Documenting the complex practices of bricolage and re-lexification of a multi-accentuated Australia, the book invites readers to consider Australian Indigenous literature as a space from which a re-routing of issues of co-habitation, sovereignty, and being and becoming Australian might begin. This interdisciplinary study of Australian Indigenous practices of appropriation ranges from texts produced during the first encounters of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to the work of established and rising authors, such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Jack Davis, Lionel Fogarty, Romaine Moreton and Kim Scott.