Abstract
Bradley explores the tensions that exist in regards to his long-term collaborations with Indigenous Australians; the expectations of the Yanyuwa community in regards to what he has come to know and how this knowledge translates into academic life. He reflects on the tensions inherent in such an epistemic project, problematizing the flattening tendencies of western education and addressing the challenges that come with contest between various understandings and logics. Writing through his relationships with Yanyuwa he reflects on translatability, working from a culture that values orality as an important way of knowing. Throughout this chapter he asks, what happens when oral traditions are written down? What is lost? What is sustained? And who is the audience for the texts we create?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Australian Government. 1976. Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00111. Accessed 22 May 2019.
Bakhtin, M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bradley, J., and K. Seton. 2005. Self-Determination or “Deep Colonising.” In Unfinished Constitutional Business, ed. Barbara Hocking, 32–46. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
Bradley, J., with Yanyuwa Families. 2010. Singing Saltwater Country. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Butt, D. 2010. Whose Knowledge? Reflexivity and “Knowledge Transfer” in Postcolonial Practice-Based Research. Keynote address to On Making: Integrating Approaches in Practice‐Led Research in Art and Design Symposium, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg, 15th October 2009. Available at: http://www.dannybutt.net/acp/2009/10/20/whose‐knowledge‐reflexivity‐and‐knowledge‐transfer‐in‐postcolonial‐practice‐based‐research/. Accessed 16 April 2019.
Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frankl, V. 1963. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Pocket Books.
Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Kearney, A. 2014. Cultural Wounding, Healing and Emerging Ethnicities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kearney, A. 2017. Violence in Place: Cultural and Environmental Wounding. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge.
Lauterbach, J. 2004. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael. Nebraska: Edward E. Elson Classic Series, University of Nebraska Press.
Mignolo, W. 2008. Racism as We Sense It Today. Modern Language Association 123 (5): 1737–1742.
Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge.
Rosaldo, R. 1993. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rose, D.B. 1992. Dingo Makes Us Human, Life and Land in and Aboriginal Australian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, D.B. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonization. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Sousanis, N. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turner, V. 1982. Performing Ethnography. The Drama Review 26: 33–35.
Vasquez, R. 2011. Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence. Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1): 27–44.
West, C. 1990. The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bradley, J. (2020). Writing from the Edge: Writing What Was Never Meant to Be Written. In: Kearney, A., Bradley, J. (eds) Reflexive Ethnographic Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34898-4_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34897-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34898-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)