Unsettling Subjects: Critical Perspectives on Selves in Writing and Writing Selves

Abstract

Writing about AboriginesSince their emergence following the earliest incursions of colonialism, Indigenous Australian cultures of the written word have been both constituted by and resistant to paradigms of Western literacybased formations of knowledge and representation. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been written by Europeans into the historical and cultural record of the West since the earliest encounters between settlers and indigenes in post-contact Australia; as with other Indigenous peoples across the globe, this process has been inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.1 The record is an exceedingly dense one. Documentary representations (literary and visual) of Aboriginal peoples in what is now Australia appear as early as 16062 and persist throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the diaries, letters, log books, court records, memoirs, fictions, and reports of colonial administrators, missionaries, travellers, explorers, squatters, and policemen. Indigenous Australian customs, communities, cosmologies, and knowledges across the continent have been the subject of numerous treatises and studies by anthropologists, ethnographers, archaeologists, and historians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present.A corollary of the fact that Aborigines are among the most researched peoples in the world is that they are also among the most heavily textualized peoples in the world, as European scholars and theorists - many of whom never set foot in Australia - sought to use Aboriginal peoples, their languages, cultures and bodies, in an evidentiary fashion as part of the bid for advancing and refining the central, globalizing narratives of modernity. D.J. Mulvaney, for example, provides valuable documentation of how the autochthonous inhabitants of Australia were incorporated into a range of competing theoretical frameworks of interest to 'natural philosophy,' evolution, and anthropology in tiie nineteenth century,3 while W.H. Stanner describes the ways in which the 'new ethnography' was enthusiastically put to use by intellectuals such as McLennan, Tylor, and Frazer in the 1860s and 1870s, and by Hobhouse, Freud, and Durkheim in the early decades of the twentieth century, all of whom were influential in creating for Aborigines a reputation of extraordinary primitivity that would serve comparatively to highlight triumph Western advance under a regime of Enlightenment-based thought, society, and economy.4In this regard, one might say that, for Australian Aboriginal peoples as for colonized peoples in general, the introduction of writing and textuality was neither innocent, nor neutral, nor 'natural,' but was in the first instance something that happened to them - that is, literacy may be understood both politically and culturally as an event as well as a structure,5 one that, arriving on Australian shores as a key element of imperial domination, radically interrupts and disrupts (but never eliminates) pre-existing Aboriginal epistemologies by displacing and disenfranchising Aboriginal ways of viewing and being in the world, and by introducing new ways of organizing meaning and knowledge that would subsequently be taken up in varying ways and degrees by Aboriginal peoples themselves. The historical introduction of writing to Aboriginal societies thus signifies in part both invasiveness and a form of what Gayatri Spivak terms epistemic violence,6 insinuating an order of knowledge, classification, and value that attempts to transform Aboriginal consciousness both through suppressing and marginalizing its previously orally constituted systems of meaning and by re-shaping the ways in which Aboriginal peoples come to know and relate to themselves, to each other, and to settler colonialism.Writing is also something that happens to Aboriginal peoples under colonialism because, in the first instance, they are written about in a way first made famous by Roland Barthes in his formulation of 'gossip' and later extended by Trinh T. …