White Fantasy, Indigenous Sovereignty: Tools for an Ethics of Representation in Settler-Colonial Creative Writing Practice

Abstract

"White is a colour. A page is not a neutral cultural object. The white imagination is indeed colour blind. It is blind to its own colour - whiteness; and to its own cultural standpoint that is neither neutral nor universal." - Jeanine Leane (2021, para. 26)

First Nations scholars and writers have spent considerable time and thought critiquing mainstream methods with which white Australian writers tell stories about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, issues, culture and Country. While some white settler-colonial writers and scholars have responded to the authority of First Nations knowledge holders and makers, the uptake of Indigenous instruction in wider settler-colonial creative discourse remains limited. Nonetheless, white desire to tell stories that 'get it right' in representing Indigeneity has remained and intensified in anxiety, without significant questioning among white writers about what 'getting it right' is, who determines this achievement, whom it serves, and what that means.

In this thesis, I present how I have used my creative practice and positionality as a white colonial-settler middle-class woman, to participate in this questioning. This PhD project articulates how attempts at representing First Peoples become political projects as I see and understand myself, my concerns, my creative practice and my words in the context of colonising racial categories, and the insistence and values of unceded Indigenous sovereignty. As a result of this questioning - guided by critical race and whiteness studies, Indigenous-led literary and knowledge production studies, and phenomenological cultural studies - I develop five conceptual tools that decentre the goal of representational perfection of Indigenous subjects from white subjectivity, on the grounds that this is a false, and colonising, project. Instead, these conceptual tools - of unfinishedness, apology, honesty, contextualisation and turning - support a practical, lived redefinition of what it means to be a writer who is accountable to those with a vested interest in a story. This thesis contributes to understanding how, in the context of Indigenous sovereignty, settler-colonial storytellers might realise and loosen the tight grip of normative narrative production that encourages a closed, hurried, and possessive creative and representational practice.