The international reception of Kim Scott’s works: a case study featuring Benang

[Excerpt]: This chapter draws on recent trends in Australian literary criticism to scan new horizons for readings of Kim Scott’s novel Benang (1999) and to consider what these readings indicate about the networks that shape various scenes of reading and interpretive communities for the production and reception of Australian Indigenous writing.1 Scott is devoted to the language and country of the Noongar people and this inspires the generic and linguistic innovation of Benang and That Deadman Dance (2010), as well as the innovative collaborative life writing of Kayang and Me (2005). Benang and its author travel out of country and offshore on the currents of international book festivals and prizes and the transnational scholarly networks of Australian literary studies, postcolonialism, and Indigenous literature. This chapter is, in part, a history of Benang— we are interested in overseas publications and translations, and in pursuing this book and its author in an international literary space beyond the horizon of the nation. It also explores some transnational scenes of reading that produce different communities of interpretation for Benang in venues such as conferences and online sites, where the novel has a distinctive career, and the history of the Noongar people speaks to other histories and “memoryscapes” of dispossession, dispersal, and genocide (Phillips and Reyes, 14)