Mongrel Signatures reviews the Australian writer Mudrooroo's career and deals with central issues of identity, authenticity and truth. After 1996, academics and writers in Australia and around the world endorsed or denied Mudrooroo's Aboriginality after research had dramatically called his Indigenous identity into question. There has also been a long silence among fans of Mudrooroo, who has not commented publicly on his racial belonging. These challenging and lively “reflections” by European and Australian scholars and writers are not meant to discuss whether Mudrooroo can legitimately sign his works with an Aboriginal name (an essentialist and problematic view of identity and authenticity). Instead, they explore how Mudrooroo's writing restages the drama of subjectivity in terms of ‘articulation’ rather than ‘authentication’, and ask how we are to read him now in the face of current accusations and the cultural scenario of Aboriginal arts and studies. The contributors - in disagreement or in dialogue - treat questions of identity and representation, reading Mudrooroo's work through the lenses of such perspectives as psychoanalysis, postmodernism, postcolonialism, deconstruction and queer theory. The essays are designed to provoke debate and to dissolve the rigid polarities hitherto characterizing discussion of this highly influential creative artist. Contributors are: Clare Archer-Lean, Maureen Clark, Graziella Englaro, Eva Rask Knudsen, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Maggie Nolan, Annalisa Oboe, Wendy Pearson, Lorenzo Perrona, Cassandra Pybus, Adam Shoemaker, and Gerry Turcotte

"Mudrooroo: A Likely Story reads the fiction of one of Australia's most controversial and enigmatic literary figures against the backdrop of the likelihood that he assumed an Aboriginal identity to which he was not entitled. As he is neither black nor white, Colin Johnson (a.k.a. Mudrooroo) writes on issues of identity and belonging from the position of an outsider. The book argues that the experimental nature of Johnson's creative body of work coupled with the complexities of his 'in-between' status, mean that both the man and his writing evade neat categorisation within mainstream literary criticism. Also examined here is how the denial of his white mother impacts upon the gender politics of Johnson's fiction in a way that opens up exciting new possibilities for critical comment and textual analysis."--Back cover.

Explores the undertheorized convergence of postcoloniality and whiteness.

Provides a scholarly account of the striking interplay between the Gothic and theory over two-and-a-half centuries This collection provides a thorough representation of the early and ongoing conversation between Gothic and theory - philosophical, aesthetic, psychological and cultural - both in the many modes of Gothic and in many of the realms of theory now current in the modern world. Each essay focuses on a particular kind of theory-Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today. Key FeaturesProvides the first detailed discussion of the interrelationship between literary theory and the Gothic from the inception of the Gothic to the present dayEnables students to connect what otherwise seem a wide variety of diverse phenomena, from the rise of philosophical 'emotivism' to poetic tales of terror and Gothic filmAdvances current scholarly investigation, by invigorating debates within both Gothic studies and literary theory. Makes connections between a wide variety of issues, from eco-crisis and contemporary culture wars to the persistent problem of the 'other'

The articles investigate representations in literature, both by the colonizers and colonized. Many deal with the effect the dominant culture had on the self image of native inhabitants. They cover areas on all continents that were colonized by European countries.

English summary: At the heart of the Gothic novel proper lies the discursive binary of self and other, which in colonial literature was quickly filled with representations of the colonial master and his indigenous subject. Contemporary black Australian artists have usurped this colonial Gothic discourse, torn it to pieces, and finally transformed it into an Aboriginal Gothic. This study first develops the theoretical concept of an Aboriginal Gothic and then uses this term as a tool to analyse novels by Vivienne Cleven, Mudrooroo, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright as well as films directed by Beck Cole and Tracey Moffatt. It centres on the question of how a genuinely European mode, the Gothic, can be permeated and thus digested by elements of indigenous Australian culture in order to portray the current situation of Aboriginal Australians and to celebrate a recovered cultural identity.

This title considers a wide range of 20th and 21st century literary works that feature literary deceptions and false memories and in which the relationship between text and author is not what it seems. By exploring a variety of examples of false or embellished memoirs, purportedly autobiographical novels that are in fact thoroughly fictional, as well as bogus authorial personae, it discusses whether it is possible to judge veracity by means of textual clues alone. It also argues that literary deceptions and false memoirs have particular cultural value and significance.