Inscribing Difference and Resistance

The book Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America explores how the literary and essayistic work of Indigenous women in the USA, Canada, and Australia, published in the 1990s, contributed to the formation of the theoretical foundations of Indigenous feminism, while also helping to rewrite the dominant historiography in the context of these settler colonies. An analysis of texts by Paula Gunn Allen and Anna Lee Walters from the USA, Lee Maracle and Shirley Sterling from Canada, and Jackie Huggins and Doris Pilkington Garimara from Australia shows how these authors use a hybrid, multi-genre style, combining literary criticism, historiography, auto/biographical writing, and fictionalised stories, to give literary expression to their distinct cultural identity, transgenerational trauma from colonisation, and resistance to forced assimilation.