Legacies of Indigenous Resistance: Pemulwuy, Jandamarra and Yagan in Australian Indigenous Film, Theatre and Literature Anne Brewster 9781788745413

This book explores the ways in which Australian Indigenous filmmakers, performers and writers work within their Indigenous communities to tell the stories of early Indigenous resistance leaders who fought against British invaders and settlers, thus keeping their legacies alive and connected to community in the present. It offers the first comprehensive and trans-disciplinary analysis of how the stories of Pemulwuy, Jandamarra and Yagan (Bidjigal, Bunuba and Noongar freedom fighters, respectively) have been retold in the past forty years across different media. Combining textual and historical analysis with original interviews with Indigenous cultural producers, it foregrounds the multimodal nature of Indigenous storytelling and the dynamic relationship of these stories to reclamations of sovereignty in the present. It adds a significant new chapter to the study of Indigenous history-making as political action, while modelling a new approach to stories of frontier resistance leaders and providing a greater understanding of how the decolonizing power of Indigenous screen, stage and text production connects past, present and future acts of resistance.

Matteo Dutto is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His current research explores how cultural producers collaborate with Indigenous, migrant and multiethnic communities to produce transmedia and transcultural counter-narratives of belonging and identity. His work has been published in Studies in Documentary Film and Fulgor and he recently collaborated on the production of the Australian Indigenous Film and Television (AIFTV) online knowledge sharing platform (aiftv-research.net).

"Legacies of Resistance is an exemplary book! Dutto explores how contemporary Indigenous Australian artists/filmmakers are retelling the lives of three key Indigenous Australians, famed for their resistance to British colonial violence, warriors for Indigenous rights during extreme frontier violence. This work will appeal to scholars of screen/media studies, Indigenous studies, anthropology and cultural studies, and historical studies." (Faye Ginsburg David B. Kriser Professor of Anthropology and Director, NYU Center for Media, Culture and History, New York University)

"Matteo Dutto combines meticulously well-researched knowledge and understanding of Australia's First Nation resistance fighters, expert moving image textual analysis and an inspired appropriation of the concept of "crosshatching" from China Mieville's novel The City & the City. In this highly original and significant contribution to scholarship, Dutto's love of storytelling and his own considerable storytelling skills are informed and enhanced by what proves to be an invaluable perspective: that of an outsider." (Associate Professor Jane Mills, University of New South Wales, Sydney)