Does it matter who authorises the discourse?: Michel de Certeau's Heterologies and black and white Australian literary criticism

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of the ‘particularity of the place where discourse is produced’ in two literary histories to discover if de Certeau's distinction, in Heterologies, between historiography and psychoanalysis, helps to determine if and how a work written by a white writer who writes about Aboriginal literature differs from the work of a black writer who does the same thing. It concludes that the status of the author is not a matter of indifference, neither is it simply a matter of personal experience. It ushers in the need to differentiate subject positions in relation to incremental moments of the past and in relation to constructs of the ‘other’.