KUPPERS READING

Decolonizing disability, indigeneity, and poetic methods: hanging out in Australia

Main Idea:

The main idea of the article focuses on productive unknowability, on finding machines that respectfully align research methods and cultural production at the site of encounter.

Thesis:

Kuppers and Marcus engaged with a number of Aboriginal Australian disabled people. Which raised the question about indigeneity and embodiment.
In this article, two short creative nonfiction essays and two poems share how decolonizing methods and experiences encountering "disability" in Australia inform creative practice. This article, with its arts-based methodology, is partnered by a literature review tracing Australian literature on disability.

Major Arguments:

Disability as a health and social welfare issue maps onto the interface between Aboriginal societies and the dominant culture, and needs to be seen through the lens of the ongoing effects of postcolonial violence.
Gathering data on disabled Aboriginal artists in Australia is not something anyone could easily undertake. There were many historical reasons for this, including who is enabled to speak for whom-contemporary Aboriginal communities are diverse and heterogeneous, and visiting with people in Canberra, Adelaide, and Sydney was very different from meeting people in Darwin or Alice Springs, or in smaller rural communities.
Within Aboriginal communities there still exists an uneasy tension between different systems of knowledge and information and who controls them.

Reference:

Kuppers, P. (2013). Decolonizing disability, indigeneity, and poetic methods: hanging out in Australia. Journal of literary and cultural disability studies, 7 (2).