Abstract
This chapter examines one example drawn from Australian chick lit, specifically several novels by best-selling Aboriginal author Anita Heiss. It argues that Heiss’s chick lit serves an educational and political purpose: her novels repurpose characteristics of the wider genre to represent Indigenous women navigating romantic, professional, and cultural scenarios. Anita Heiss’s “Koori lit” novels broaden what constitutes chick lit and subsequently challenges previous assertions that the genre is dominated by “white women.” The chapter explains several distinct textual strategies employed in Heiss’s Koori lit to prompt readers to reflect on Aboriginal culture, identity, and history. Like many chick lit novels, Heiss’s Koori lit utilizes the basic narrative conventions of romance while engaging with love and romance thematically to offer a cultural critique. Identifying the “society defined” where the romance occurs is especially important in Heiss’s Koori lit because it is largely a representation of contemporary Australia including its cultural politics.