Challenging and Reinventing White Australia's Historical Narrativity and Identitarian Assumptions Apropos of Aboriginality

• Main Author: Čerče, Danica
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Australian indigenous poetry; historical narrativity; identity constructs; Jeanine Leane; postcolonial protest
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss37/11; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1882/viewcontent/KK_2037_2C_202021_2011_20Regular_20Section_20__20_C4_8Cer_C4_8De.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Framed by an interest in literature as “a space for exploring the possibilities of change” (Levine 2000), the article deals with the contemporary Australian Indigenous poetry. Until very recently a marginalized voice in Australian literary studies, this poetry has obtained an important role in the articulation of Indigenous peoples’ political thought, successfully contesting the myth of historical objectivity as embedded in a single representation of the past. By focusing on Jeanine Leane’s 2010 collection Dark Secrets: After Dreaming (AD 1887-1961), the article investigates how the poet uses her medium to interpellate the historical construction of a Eurocentric world. More specifically, it shows how, by filling the gaps in the official records with “transgenerational blood memory” and creating the awareness of the variety of ways of historical representation, Leane challenges the strategies by which white Australia disseminated and maintained the patterns that established whites as superior and all others as necessarily inferior. As such, Leane’s poetry intervenes in the ongoing reproduction of whiteness as a system of dominance and contributes to the recreation of independent and vital Indigenous identity.