My research project explores the ways in which Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies and New Materialist and Posthuman thinking intersect and interact, and how these relationships are negotiated and articulated in contemporary Indigenous Australian literatures. These literary works often address ecological themes, including human and more-than-human relationships, materiality, and agency. They are embedded with Indigenous cultural philosophies and challenge Western dualisms and anthropocentric subjectivity. I am particularly interested in the role of First Nations literary works as vessels for the transmission of vital knowledges and as sites of public pedagogy that foreground environmental sustainability and relationality to wider, more diverse audiences. Using a diffractive methodology, I argue that contemporary Indigenous Australia literatures function as a “third archive” (Margo Neale 2020) – a space in which the Indigenous master archive (knowledge held in Country) and the Western archive (contemporary Western knowledge systems) come together.
The focus on how different knowledges intersect and interact in this literary space demands engagement with new ways of performing literary analysis. As a second-year doctoral student, I am currently in the process of developing the diffractive reading methodology I intend to employ in my research. Inspired by Karen Barad’s writings on diffraction, this involves reading literary and theoretical texts, as well as artworks from the Indigenous-led touring exhibition “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters” (National Museum of Australia) dialogically through one another to come to new insights. This approach disrupts the representational style of preforming traditional close readings of literary texts, whereby texts and theories are read against one another, and instead emphasises the interconnectedness and mutual influence of texts. In developing this method, I seek to navigate away from the practice of applying Western theory to First Nations narratives which are already inherently embedded with Indigenous cultural philosophies. Furthermore, this approach contributes to addressing the noteworthy absence of Indigenous philosophies within both New Materialist and Posthuman scholarship that engages with notions of relationality and non-human agency.
Sample list of literary works:
- Ellen van Neerven, Heat and Light (2014)
- Tara June Winch, The Yield (2019)
- Anita Heiss, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (2021)
- Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (2023)
- Claire G. Coleman, Terra Nullius (2018)
- Evelyn Araluen, DropBear (2021)
- Ali Cobby Eckermann, Inside my Mother (2015)
