The Poetics of Non-Indigenous Reflexive Self-awareness: Strategies of Embodiment and Delegation in Focus Group Discussions in Australia

• Published in: The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation pp. 159 - 176
• Main Authors: Stastny, Angélique, Henriss-Anderssen, Sasha, Clark, Tom
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Singapore Pte. Limited 2016; Springer Singapore
• Subjects: Australia; Cultural studies; Delegation; Embodiment; Focus groups; Non-Indigenous people; Personal pronouns; Poetics; POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; Reconciliation; Religious groups: social & cultural aspects
• ISBN: 981102653X; 9789811026539
• DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-2654-6_10

This chapter will explore how research into non-Indigenous attitudes and identities surfaces certain forms of reflexive self-awareness in the course of Australian conversations about Australia’s history and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. Emerging research from Canada and Australia highlights the ideational and connotative significance of non-Indigenous people’s discourse styles for their self-understanding ‘as non-Indigenous’. Recent focus group research in Canada (de Costa and Clark 2015) suggests that we may characterise variations in non-Indigenous attitudes to settler-colonial history and to Indigenous people and cultures in terms of ‘delegation’ and ‘embodiment’. This chapter will examine in close detail eight recent focus groups conducted at locations around Australia to ask what stylistic and semantic paradigms of reflexive self-awareness may characterise non-Indigenous discourses in Australia.