Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature

Practices of Proximity pays attention to the central issue of wide-spread discursive representations of the English language and writing as colonial properties. To this end, it offers a study of appropriation which may be fruitful in testing pre-conceived representations of the English language, opening up endless possibilities on the roles the “users of the English language can play, and – attitudinally – above all, how others view the importance of this use” (Kachru 1990, 4). Insisting on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of languages and writing by all who inhabit and use them, Practices of Proximity investigates the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between the official ‘white’ Australia – the apparent owners of both the land and the English language – and Indigenous Australian peoples.