Black Writers, White Editors: Episodes of collaboration and compromise in Australian publishing history

Description

When white people act as textual midwives for Aboriginal women writers, what happens to the baby? Black Writers, White Editors explores the outcomes of the editorial relationship for three foundational Indigenous women writers. These women, dogged advocates of Aboriginal rights, wrote their life-stories in the 1970s. Their manuscripts addressed experiences of dispossession, racism, forced child removal and the struggle to right these situations. These distinctly Aboriginal priorities, perspectives and voices were vulnerable to editorial alteration. Jennifer Jones examines the nature of the cross-cultural collaborations between these Indigenous writers and their white editors and demonstrates how the transformation of their manuscripts into published texts came at a political price.