Exploration through “Dyche”: an indigenous study of Yoikana and That Deadman Dance

Dyche, deals with analysing the psyche of the Dalit – “Dyche” - to redefine Dalit community and empower the victimised psyche of Dalit. The exploration of Dalit historiography and psychology through Dyche substantiates that there is cultural, spiritual and psychological uniformity among Dalits and other Indigenous people of the globe. Hence exploration through “Dyche” towards one’s culture, tradition and identity could edify the cause of psychical wounds and thus could facilitate deliverance to indigenous communities from their marginal predicament and bring back harmony. This paper attempts to apply some features of Dyche, the practical Dalit psyche theory, for studying Dalits, Sami people of Norway and Noongar people of Australian Aborigines and to explore their common life experiences, ethos and common self-assertion for liberation with reference to Indian Dalit writer M.C. Raj’s novel, Yoikana and Australian Aboriginal writer Kim Scott’s novel, That Deadman Dance. The paper also endeavours to differentiate between migrant psyche and indigenous psyche and discuss the compensatory mechanisms “Moralising” and “Open Rebellion” adopted by the Oppressor and the Oppressed respectively in their negotiation with the “other.

Can You Anchor a Shimmering Nation State via Regional Indigenous Roots? Kim Scott talks to Anne Brewster about That Deadman Dance

This interview focuses mainly on Kim Scott’s new novel That Deadman Dance which won the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize (Southeast Asian and Pacific region) and the Miles Franklin Award. The topics of conversation include Scott’s involvement in the Noongar language project (and the relationship of this project to the novel), the novel itself, the challenges of writing in English, the resistance paradigm and indigenous sovereignty and nationalism

Book Reviews

That Deadman Dance (Kim Scott) (Reviewed by Rich Carr, University of Alaska Fairbanks)The Waterboys (Peter Docker) (Reviewed by Nicole Gurley, University of Maryland)Prohibited Zone (Alastair Sarre) (Reviewed by John Fletcher, University of Edinburgh)Bereft (Chris Womersley) (Reviewed by Hans Burger, University of Alaska Fairbanks)Farming Ghosts (Jena Woodhouse) (Reviewed by Patrick Barney, Cincinnati, Ohio)End of the Night Girl (Amy T. Matthews) (Reviewed by Sarah Doetschman, Fairbanks, Alaska)Dark Bright Doors (Jill Jones) (Reviewed by Greg Lyons, Woodridge, IL)The West: Australian poems 1989–2009 (John Mateer) (Reviewed by Edward Kim, Seattle, Washington)Symptoms of Homesickness (Nathanael O’Reilly) (Reviewed by Melina Draper, Fairbanks, Alaska

Disputed Territories as Sites of Possibility: Kim Scott's Writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project

Kim Scott was the first Aboriginal author to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2000 for Benang, an award he won again in 2011 for That Deadman Dance. Yet despite these national accolades, Scott interrogates the very categories of Australian and Indigenous literatures to which his work is subjected. His writing reimagines, incorporates and challenges colonial ways of thinking about people and place. This thesis reveals the provocative proposal running through Scott’s collected works and projects that contemporary Australian society (and literature) should be grafted onto regional Aboriginal languages and stories as a way to express a national sense of “who we are and what we might be”. Scott’s vision of a truly postcolonial Australia and literature is articulated through his collected writings which form a network of social, historical, political and personal narratives. This thesis traces how Scott’s writing and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project (Wirlomin Project) reconfigure colonial power relationships in the disputed territories of place, language, history, identity and the globalised world of literature. Ultimately, Scott intends to create an empowered Noongar position in cross-cultural exchange and does so by disrupting the fixed categories inherent in these territories; territories constructed during the colonising and nationalising of Australia. Due to the range of the disputed territories identified in this thesis, there is an engagement with a variety of theoretical frameworks including Val Plumwood’s ecopoetics, Bakhtinian dialogic, Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction, David Damrosch’s world literature, Martin Nakata’s cultural interface and, importantly, Scott’s own writing on regional Noongar literature. Each of these approaches to Scott’s writing and the Wirlomin Project analyses how Scott begins a process of decolonisation, finding sites of Noongar empowerment, truth-telling and reciprocity in areas of cross-cultural dispute. Scott’s writing problematises the concept of a bound and unified nation in a constructive way. This thesis is broken into seven chapters that chronologically examine each of Scott’s texts within a particular disputed territory and critical framework. The first chapter performs an ecocritical reading of Scott’s short fiction and poetry (these works span the period from 1985 to 2015) and is followed by analyses of language and True Country, history and Benang, Noongar identity in Kayang and Me, the globalised world of literature and That Deadman Dance, Noongar empowerment through the Wirlomin Project, and a revisiting of these key areas in relation to Taboo. Increasingly, the Wirlomin Project becomes the nexus of Scott’s creative, personal and political trajectories and this thesis argues that, through the community-run project, Scott seeks to position an empowered Noongar heritage at the heart of a conflicted country and its stories

Fictorians: historians who \u27lie\u27 about the past, and like it

Debates about history and fiction tend to pitch novelist against historian in a battle over who owns or best represents the past. This article posits that things are not quite so dichotomous: novelists write non-fiction histories, and historians even sometimes write novels. In fact, these latter seem, anecdotally, to be increasing in number in recent decades. The author approached some of these historians to find out why they have turned to writing fictionalised versions of the past to complement, or sometimes replace, their non-fiction publications. For the sake of clarity, in the article I have playfully dubbed the historians who write historical fiction as ‘fictorians’. The article considers their responses within wider discussions about history and fiction, and reflects briefly upon the meaning of this ‘fictional turn’ for the future of the history discipline

2017 Commencement Program

The commencement program of the 2017 Columbia College Chicago graduation services.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/commencement/1053/thumbnail.jp

Review of A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott by BELINDA WHEELER (Ed.)

A review on the book A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott edited by Belinda Wheeler