Journal Article

Transformation and Collaboration in the Paratexts of Australian Indigenous Children's Literature

Xu Daozhi

2016

Overview

According to Bourdieu, the institution in a broad sense plays an important role in legitimating and transforming certain knowledge, skills, and value into a state of cultural capital; the \"power of instituting\" generates and secures belief in the value of books, thereby contributing to the formation of cultural capital derived from books and expanding the capability of that cultural capital (\"Forms\" 247-48).To subsume Meeks's story into the \"cultural heritage of his people\" might give a homogenized impression of Aboriginal Australians, ignore the diversity of their cultures, and maintain the divide between Aboriginal people and mainstream white society.[...]the brief introduction to the book sketches the Enora story with descriptive words such as \"lush,\" \"tropical,\" and \"native,\" constituting an exotic account of the Aboriginal Dreaming story and arousing a romantic imagination of Aboriginality in readers.[...]there is no intention to establish or maintain the binary opposition between mainstream publishers/editors and Aboriginal publishers/authors, and it is necessary to note that these two \"categories\" actually encompass a rich diversity.[...]as Clare Bradford points out, while the mainstream publisher tends to frame the Aborigi- nal texts with a market-oriented strategy so as to gratify a public readership, it is not \"always feasible for Indigenous authors to publish with Indigenous publishing companies, which are generally small-scale operations producing limited numbers of children's books\" (336).[...]though the collaborative approaches between Aboriginal authors and publishers, or between Aboriginal writers, usually operate on a limited scale, this paper shows that there has been a transformative tendency for Indigenous writers to seize the authorial control in the paratext.

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Subject: Aboriginal Australians / Authors / Book dedications / Bourdieu, Pierre (1930-2002) / Children & youth / Childrens literature / Collaboration / Criticism and interpretation / Cultural capital / Cultural differences / Cultural heritage / Cultural values / Culture / Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895) / Editing / Editorials / Editors / Essays, cont'd / Handbooks / Indigenous art / Influence / Institutionalization / Language / Morgan, Sally / Native peoples / Paratext / Picture books / Political aspects / Postcolonial literature / Postcolonialism / Publishing industry / Race / Readers / Readership / Scholarly publishing / Social aspects / Writers / Writing