Aboriginality In Fringe Literature

A single English word "Aborigines" homogenizes all indigenous people in Australia into the fringe group, to whom a wide range of negative stereotypes and functions can be applied by the postcolonial White dominant culture. As the literature of this fringe group, Aboriginal literature, the literature of Aboriginality, makes its unique contribution against the neo-colonial literary hegemony that has silenced and denigrated Aboriginal literary productions. In the special context of the postcolonial Australia, the aesthetic value of Aboriginal literature lies in the force of the social-political statement that it makes, which in itself is Aboriginality. The concept of Aboriginality in Aboriginal literature must counter the systematic destruction of the Western hegemonic literary formation through the deployment of specific Aboriginal technologies in the fringe literature as poetry, drama, and fiction. So the social-political commitment is integral to Aboriginality, thus making the Aboriginal writers write authentic black words on white page.My thesis will focus on Aboriginality depicted in the fringe literature as poetry, drama and fiction by different literary means, and attempt to argue the social-political commitment of Aboriginality in the fringe literature. The thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter one will give a general introduction of Aborigines and the fringe literature, and dwell on the self-defining Aboriginality by Aborigines against the homogenized negative stereotypes by the Whites; Chapter two, through abundant instances of poems by Aboriginal writers, distinctly demonstrates Aboriginality in the poetry of politics; in the third chapter, the approach of anti-aesthetics deployed in Aboriginal drama and fiction is used to lay out Aboriginality; and finally, in the last chapter, all analysis comes to the conclusion that in the special period and the special situation, the concept of Aboriginality, depicted in the fringe literature with different means in poetry, drama, and fiction, is committed to the social-political nature, as a resistant strategy by Aborigines to contest the neo-colonial hegemonic literary standards in the Western canon, so as to strive after the Aboriginal thoroughgoing autonomy.