Presentation Title: Reading Indigenous Australian Literature Transnationally: An Act of Juxtaposition
Theme: International Ethics and Environment and Governance 
Presenter: Ms Priyanka Shivadas

This paper draws from my research on the intersections between Indigenous literatures produced in Australia and India. It is an enquiry into subversions of the colonial myth that civilization began with recognizable forms of labour practiced under sedentary agriculture and that land-right rests with precisely those who built complex systems of farming on fixed territory year after year. In India, “those who came to be classified as tribes in modern times were precisely communities who were not fully identifiable as sedentary cultivators, though many communities were indeed agriculturists of various sorts, and therefore could not be mobilized simply in the name of labour and productivity” (Banerjee 11-12). In Australia, Indigenous peoples were en masse labelled as hunter-gatherers or nomads as opposed to the colonists who arrived in 1788 and laid claim on the land. In a revisionist mode, Malayarayar writer Narayan’s Kocharethi (1998) and Bunurong, Punniler panner and Yuin historian and author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) challenge us to rethink concepts of land-right, ownership, wasteland vs. agricultural land, and human labour. This paper would like to explore how land-labour relations were imagined, valued and practiced within Indigenous communities and how they continue to resist colonial and (post)colonial ideas on the same by presenting a transnational reading of Dark Emu and Kocharethi.

Ms Priyanka Shivadas is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia. Her current research focuses on Global Indigenous Literary Studies. She has published “The Bone People of New Zealand: Identity Politics in the South Pacific” in Homogeneity in Heterogeneity: Memory, Culture, and Resistance in Aboriginal Literatures from Around the World, edited by KBS Krishna and Hem Raj Bansal (Authorspress, 2018) and “The Practice of Public Apology: Australia Says Sorry to the Stolen Generations” in The Culture of Dissenting Memory: Truth Commissions in the Global South, edited by Veronique Tadjo (Routledge, 2019).