[Download] "An Introductory Conversation." by JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: An Introductory Conversation.
- Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 165 KB
Description
ALICE TE PUNGA SOMERVILLE: So kia ora Chad--let's talk about comparative Indigenous methodologies. I'm talking about them a lot at the moment, as I meet with students who are working on their research essays for my "Indigenous writing in English' class; they have to design their own research projects, and it's interesting to think about the connections between their processes of working through their projects with the broader ways we 'grown ups' in the field similarly grapple with things. I think one of the things that surprises students is their realisation that they're working on really new ideas, or at least, they're working in a field whose key texts are located across a(n impossibly) broad range of disciplinary, geographic and formal spaces. One of the reasons I'm really pleased about this special issue of JNZL is that students (as well as the rest of us) will not only get to see a number of arguments about the process and possible parameters of comparison within the context of Indigenous 'stuff', but they (and we) will also see a diversity of possible approaches to comparative Indigenous scholarly work. CHADWICK ALLEN: Kia ora ano, Alice. And greetings from Ohio. The North American academic year just ended, so I've just finished reading final projects for my global Indigenous literatures class. Most of the students in this class plan to become teachers at the high school level, so after ten weeks focused on literary analysis, I design a final project that will help them with practical skills for their own future teaching. For these research exercises, students search the internet in order to locate two Indigenous web sites for analysis and comparison. One site has to be sponsored and run by a specific Indigenous band, tribe, or nation; the other site has to be sponsored and run by an intertribal, pan-tribal, or pan-indigenous coalition group or activist organization. Students are asked to think about how each site targets specific audiences for specific purposes, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of each site's particular rhetorical and aesthetic strategies. Through the web search, students are invited to think about the complicated and often politically and emotionally charged issues of Indigenous authenticity and self-representation (several wrote about how they had come upon numerous sites of dubious origin and purpose). And through the comparative analysis, they are invited to think about potential distinctions as well as potential relationships between the Indigenous 'local' and the Indigenous 'regional', 'national', or 'global'. Comparative methodologies seem particularly useful in this respect. Whether interpreting a novel, explicating a series of poems, or evaluating web sites, comparative methodologies can help us to take into account the contexts of both production and reception, as well as the context of our own highly situated roles as researchers. Most of the students in this class did not identify as Indigenous, and they saw quite clearly which aspects of individual web sites included 'outsiders' in their primary audiences (in roles such as potential tourists, potential political allies, or potential donors) and which did not. The students who wrote about sites based outside of North America found their role as outsider especially obvious; what surprised many of them, however, was how this outsider status, once identified, could enable rather than disable their analyses. It became clear to them which aspects of the sites they could write about with some authority and which they could not. As a result, most students were able to move beyond stereotypical and simplistic generalizations about Indigenous textual production. Instead, they were able to generate more focused and more nuanced arguments about the relative effectiveness of different examples of Indigenous self-representation.