The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya to Hear and Feel Across Difference
RIS ID
130044
Abstract
Slater's focus is settler Australia's inability to hear Aboriginal people on their own terms. The chapter explores a five-day cultural immersion and knowledge programme-run at the KALACC festival, Kimberley, Western Australia-in which government and non-government agencies were invited to 'listen in' to how traditional owners envision the 'problems' and 'solutions' to pressing issues in their lives, and how the grant-makers might support community-driven solutions. The festival is an untranslatable space-an anti-festival-in which the Kimberley Aboriginal world is not readily accessible and understandable to non-Indigenous people. She examines the event as an invitation for non-Indigenous Australians to recognise their crisis of hearing and listen across difference. Ethical listening, and thus transforming the foundations of settler colonialism, requires creating spaces for respectful non-comprehension.
Publication Details
Slater, L. (2018). The Anti-Festival: Kimberley Aboriginal Cultural Politics and the Artful Business of Creating Spaces for Kardiya to Hear and Feel Across Difference. In T. Dreher & A. A. Mondal (Eds.), Ethical Responsiveness and the Politics of Difference (pp. 169-186). United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.