Sydney Indigenous Research Network at the University of Sydney is proud to host visiting scholar Professor Brenda Machosky

Listen! The Sounds and Silence of Aboriginal Literature

Before they were writers, they were storytellers. And they still are. In this presentation I consider how contemporary Aboriginal novelists write to be heard, literally, to have their readers listen. Writers like Waanyi woman Alexis Wright and Wirlomin Noongar man Kim Scott appropriate the western novel form and turn it into something different: the storytelling novel. Story is not a synonym for narrative. Story is part of the Law, the lore of the law, and thus also connected to the everwhen of the Dreaming. Creative stories, even as they borrow from western forms, are a suitable foundation for Dreaming/Law/Lore to be announced, shared, protected, projected. Aboriginal people are speaking and writing. Non-Indigenous people need to listen. We must listen to language and listen to silence. We must share in the experience of story. The most appropriate way to engage with storytelling novels is to listen while reading, to listen instead of reading. We need to let go of the desire to know, which is to appropriate, which is to repeat a version of the oppressive cycle of colonization. As an outsider academic, my quest is to develop a way of listening to what I cannot understand, engaging with this literature on its own terms, its own words, its own world. In this presentation, I begin to propose ways that non-Indigenous academics can write about the storytelling novel without reducing it and appropriating it into western epistemologies and systems. I look forward to a rigorous and respectful discussion of ways to share and to consider Aboriginal stories on their own terms and in the context of world literature.

Presentation followed by discussion.

Brenda Machosky is Professor of English and Humanities at the University of Hawai`i West O`ahu, a regional university with a majority of Native Hawaiian, Samoan and Pacific Islander students and a diverse range of ethnicities from the Pacific region and the continental United States. Professor Machosky teaches courses in world literature, postcolonial literatures and theory, English literature, and literary theory. Currently, she is focused on literature by (Australian) Aboriginal and Māori writers. Brenda is editor of Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australia/New Zealand Studies, an American-based journal that publishes scholarly work about literature, media and culture of the Antipodes and also creative work by in-country and non-resident writers. The journal has a goal to include more writing about and by Indigenous people of these regions. Brenda also serves as president of the American Association for Australasian Literary Studies. Her current research focuses on Indigenous literatures of Australia and Aotearoa as well as her lifelong study of allegory, and she is developing a book that brings these two interests together, called World Without Fall. Her published books include Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature (Fordham 2013) and the edited volume, Thinking Allegory Otherwise (Stanford 2010). Recent essays include “Allegory and the work of Aboriginal Dreaming/Law/Lore” in the Routledge collection, Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives; and “Alexis Wright’s Storytelling Novel and its ‘particular kind of knowledge’,” in Ellipsis: Alexis Wright. Forthcoming is an essay on Phenomenology and Allegory in the Oxford University Press Handbook on Allegory, edited by David Parry.

Professor Machosky acknowledges the kānaka maoli of Hawai`i, the traditional owners of the unceded lands on which she lives and works. She pays her respects to the many Aboriginal peoples of Australia on whose Countries she has been working and traveling on over the past year.