Double-Edged Files : Writing Back to the Colonial Archive in Stephen Kinnane’s Shadow Lines
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper seeks to bring to closer attention one of the recent tendencies in contemporary Australian Indigenous collaborative life writing, especially in the subgenre of inter-generational narratives in which typically a younger member elicits, records, transcribes and edits life stories of his or her elders, family members or other persons important for the community. For the lack of space I'm going to circumvent the political implications of Indigenous life writing in Australia and its reading as a symbol of survival, continuance, and a site of resistance to state intervention, to system of surveillance and to the denial of functional family relationships. Rather, in my short analysis of Kayang and Me—a collaborative life writing published in 2005 by Kim Scott and Hazel Brown—I'm going to focus on the narratological aspects of their collaboration: one of the most innovate ones, I believe, is inscribing the life stories in what I call a dual voice—a confluence of two alternating narrative voices, two subjectivities, that are formally separate, set in two different fonts, but still interwoven in their attempt to provide a truthful representation of Indigenous lives a generation apart. |
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