The Intimacy in Survival Poetics

Abstract

In these epistolary, ficto-critical responses to Harkin’s lead essay, Ellen van Neerven underscores contemporary Australia as a site of always-already colonial crisis. Calling the names of Indigenous writer-activists into her paper, van Neerven explores complexities between text, body, and community as sites of joyous, intimate communion, places from which to epistemologize a shift beyond the yoke of settler logic. Through this amalgam of anecdotal, epigrammatic, non-linear texts, van Neerven demonstrates a newly subversive means by which the unfinished business of Indigenous peoples is framed as not only political, but revolutionary work.