Abstract

Anita Heiss is a prolific but little-studied Australian Aboriginal writer, and the first Indigenous Australian woman to use the genre of chick lit to explore historical and contemporary Indigenous women’s lives – what she calls “choc lit”. This essay argues that Heiss’s contemporary choc lit novels enact what the Canadian political philosopher James Tully calls “citizenization”: the process by which people become citizens, through ongoing participation, negotiation, and agonistic civic engagement, rather than simply possessing citizenship as a legal status. Reading Heiss’s novels through Tully’s framework, I track citizenization as it recurs across five linked domains – reading and discussion, historiographical contest, governance and sovereignty, canon-formation, and the “response-abilities” of non-Indigenous citizens – before turning, in a final section, to romance itself as a reparative and citizenizing practice. Throughout, the essay asks a single recurring question of each example: how does this episode enact participation, negotiation, civic agency, response-ability, or agonism, and how does it model the difference between possessing citizenship and becoming a citizen? In answering that question repeatedly, the essay argues that Heiss transforms commercial women’s fiction into a sustained civic pedagogy: that it is not only Black lives but Black love that matter in her ameliorative discourse of citizenship.