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March 17, 2008
In his Visiting Aboriginal Australia published in Postcolonial Studies Stephen Muecke says about academia in the 1970s that:
A sea-change was happening in the humanities, I had intuitions born of my time in France in ‘68; paradigms were groaning and shifting. The intellectual distance marked by the knowing subject and the object of knowledge was about to be broached from multiple directions: indigenous knowledges were starting to assume overt agency in the determinations of research agendas; the subjectivity or identity of the academic researcher was challenged and was leading to self-reflexivity, narrativisation and negotiation of one’s speaking position: real friendships were beginning to count more; urgent Aboriginal political agendas were installing themselves in the quid pro quo of fieldwork relations, so that the exchange of knowledge for chewing tobacco was exposed as laughably trivial. Anthropologically-inspired protectionist and preservationist strategies were now less relevant as key Aboriginal professionals and activists, like Gloria Brennan, were emerging and asserting self-determination.
He says that in the mid 1970s my work on Aboriginal English had to work against entrenched assumptions about the ‘worthlessness’ of Aboriginal English, a pidgin language, becoming a creole. These assumptions were present among, for instance, primary school teachers in the Kimberley who had never been taught about the (multi-) linguistic background of Aboriginal children. To them the ‘funny talk’ of such children would therefore end to be understood as part and parcel of racial inadequacy in a social Darwinist framework. Language was in place as one of the barriers which sustained racial segregation in this frontier society.
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