Indigenous Literatures of Australia and India

Indigenous Literatures of Australia and India: A Trans-Indigenous Perspective follows the “trans-Indigenous” turn in Indigenous literary studies, which encourages connections between texts from diverse Indigenous contexts. It juxtaposes Indigenous Australian literature situated in an Anglophone, white settler-nation in the hemispheric south and Adivasi/tribal literature from India, a non-Anglophone, postcolonial nation-state in the Global South.

Both represent literary traditions animated by a vision of self-governance, even as they emerge from markedly different contexts and continue to negotiate varying degrees of external influences on their publication and reception. Beginning from a place of accepted difference and distance, this book explores commonalities across these traditions by identifying parallel literary strategies of resistance. These shared strategies also structure and organize this book. The overarching aim is to step outside established formulas and boundaries in both comparative and Indigenous literary studies. A considerable amount of scholarship brings together the literatures of Indigenous Australians, Māori, Native American, and First Nations peoples of Canada, who share much in their responses to European settler-colonialism, but little ventures into a study of literatures of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and India alongside each other.

This book is recommended on university courses which center Indigenous literatures, comparative methodologies, and decolonization of the literary canon, and it may serve as a notable reference to researchers in these areas.

Priyanka Shivadas is a lecturer in Literature at Pathways School, Trinity College, University of Melbourne, specializing in global Indigenous literary studies. She is also an adjunct associate lecturer at UNSW Canberra. Her work appears in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and edited collections including Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere and The Culture of Dissenting Memory: Truth Commissions in the Global South.