Writing Belonging at the Millennium

Emily Potter

Description

In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.

Introduction

Chapter One: Anxious Belonging

Chapter Two: Literary Expectations: Grounding Belonging

Chapter Three: Getting Lost with Nikki Gemmell

Chapter Four: Redeeming Environments

Chapter Five: Desiccated and Infective: Writing in Thea Astley’s Drylands

Chapter Six: The Past is All Around: Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime

Chapter Seven: Toxic Imaginaries: Undoing Origins and Endings

Afterword

Sujets

• Environmental Policy
• Public Policy
• Environmental Economics
• Political Science
• ECONOMICS
• Literature
• General officer
• Activism
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Australia

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789381030
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Series: Part of the Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments series
Series editors: Rod Giblett and Warwick Mules
Series ISSN: 2043-7757
Electronic ISSN: 2043-7765
Copy editor: MPS
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover photo: Emily Potter
Production editor: Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-513-8
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-104-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-103-0
Printed and bound by Severn Print, UK
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This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Anxious Belonging: Millenial Australia and Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth
Chapter 2. Literary Expectations: Grounding Belonging
Chapter 3. Getting Lost with Nikki Gemmell: Reconciliation and Repair
Chapter 4. Redeeming Environments for Belonging: Tim Flannery’s Australia Day Address
Chapter 5. Desiccated and Infective: Writing in Thea Astley’s Drylands
Chapter 6. The Past is All Around: Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime
Chapter 7. Toxic Imaginaries: Undoing Origins and Endings
Afterword: Postcolonial Atmospheres
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Much thanks are due to many on this book’s journey. For their interventions, support and encouragement in the realisation of the manuscript I am particularly grateful to: Clare Bradford, Katya Johanson, Lyn McCredden, Rod Giblett, Alison Huber, Maria Tumarkin, Naomi Tootell, Brigid Magner and Joost Crouwel. I am also indebted to friends and colleagues who read and commented on the book at different stages: Alison Huber, Kirsten Seale, Samuel Meenahan, David Harris, Lisa Slater, Helen Young and especially Robyn Dunlop, who was there both at the beginning and at the end. Thanks to Intellect, and Mareike Wehner in particular, for their attention to detail and open communication. Thank you to my much-loved friends (some of you already named!) and family who keep me going, and with whom I can’t wait to – finally – toast this book’s completion. As always, it is W, A and T who are closest to my side.
This book is dedicated to a great mentor and friend, Kay Schaffer.
Some of this research has been published in earlier versions which have been revised, altered and built upon for this book:
Potter, Emily (2017), ‘‘‘No nails new under the sun”: Creativity, climate change, and the challenge to literary narrative in Thea Astley’s Drylands ’, TEXT , 21:1 (April), http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue40/Potter.pdf .
Potter, Emily (2015), ‘Postcolonial atmospheres: recalling our shadow places’, in P. Ashton, C. Gibson and R. Gibson (eds), By-Roads and Hidden Treasures: Mapping Cultural Assets in Regional Australia , Crawley, WA: UWA Press, pp. 75–86.
Potter, Emily (2012), ‘Climate change and non-indigenous belonging in postcolonial Australia’, Continuum , 27:1, pp. 30–40.
Potter, Emily (2006), ‘Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth and the ecological poetics of memory’, Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature , 20:2 (Dec), pp. 177–83.
Potter, Emily (2004), ‘Disorienting horizons: Encountering the past in Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature , 3, pp. 95–102.
Potter, Emily (2001), ‘The “empty highway” and the “yelling silence”: Moving beyond Nikki Gemmell’s landscapes’, Critical Review of New Literatures in English , pp. 47–52.
Introduction
Grounding stories
It’s Adelaide Writers Week in early March 2002, hot as usual under the cover of the signature white plastic tents. To the north of where we are, the Torrens River, that is really an artificial lake, ripples in the breeze but does not flow. To the south of the tents, beyond the gridded city streets, lie the Adelaide Park Lands, unpeopled, dry and exposed to the sun, while cars move in lines around their edges. Back at the tents, British-Australian author Drusilla Modjeska is addressing the crowd. Her topic is the state of Australian fiction at the turn of the millennium. She sees a problem and is not hesitant to put it forward. Australian fiction, she insists, is disengaged from the things that press on the contemporary nation. It is out of touch with ‘conditions on the ground’ (Modjeska 2002).
Her argument goes like this: the Australian reading public is turning away from home-grown fiction. Non-fiction has soared in popularity. American novelists such as Jonathan Franzen, whose blockbuster The Corrections (2001) focused on a modern middle-class American family and the threads of their lives, model the kind of fiction missing from the Australian literary terrain. Instead, Australian authors are fixated with the past, producing historical set pieces that render Australia too abstract to recognize, or too distant to affect. These works have little to say about Australian lives today. Our fiction has become safe, without risk and, correspondingly, the capacity for insight or impact.
The speech is well received by its audience, the usual writers’ festival mix of students, retirees and white-collar workers on their lunch break. It is – as with many large-scale arts events in this city – an almost exclusively non-indigenous audience in attendance. In some way, they have heard it all before. Living in this place, with its strange river-lake on one side, and empty civic lands on the other, and in the early years of a new millennium, this narrative is echoic: it bounces back a familiar hum of disquiet to those who are listening. Australian fiction is ungrounded, Modjeska says: and so, goes the implication, are you, too.
Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place critically reflects on this disquiet through a particular moment of Australian cultural life – what this book terms ‘the millennial years’ – loosely defined here as stretching from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. In these years, a series of concerns around time, place and ecological pressures coalesced in the heightened reiteration of an anxiety long-held in this colonized country: the status of non-indigenous belonging to land never ceded by Indigenous presence or claim. In response, and in the decade surrounding that Adelaide Writers’ Week, a potent articulation of non-indigenous insecurity and alienation found renewed public voice.
The ‘notes from the field’ of my subtitle refers to my own position as a non-indigenous Australian, inextricable from what I critique here, and to a method of tracking and assembling this period in Australia and the debates that attended it. Rather than a study of non-indigenous belonging as a reality or a possibility, Writing Belonging is interested in how the idea of non-indigenous belonging – as something desired, asserted, contested and unrealized – was produced and circulated in the millennial years. The ‘field’ at issue also is the range of practices deployed for this purpose, specifically narrative practices that reiterated and generated different discourses of non-indigenous belonging, across non-fiction and, especially, literary fiction of the time. The book considers these literary practices to be more than representational. While the texts discussed here all engage with questions of non-indigenous belonging thematically and representationally, they also do so performatively, via their poetics, and in the particular focus of this book, through spatialized poetics, or their ‘spatial imagination’ (Howitt 2001: 242).
Modjeska’s concern with the state of Australian literature provides an apt framing to this endeavour. Her frustration with what she perceived as an absence of engagement with the nation’s most pressing matters – and its implicit address to a non-indigenous cohort – recalls an expectation that has been attached to Australian literature since British colonization. That is, to undertake work on behalf of the developing nation, to give shape to nascent collective, located identities: identities that were to be ‘truly’ Australian. What troubled Modjeska about the apparently passive state of Australian literature and informed her appeal to Australian literary authors (from whom she sat consciously askew as a first-generation British migrant) was this imminent expectation to which the national debates of the millennial years posed a challenge.
What was pressing on the nation at this time that Modjeska wanted acknowledged in Australian fiction? September 11 and its geopolitical reactions were still monopolizing attention in the news media, while the recent toughening stance of the Australian government to the issue of border protection and the introduction of off-shore detention was being hotly debated amongst the populace. An anti-globalist sentiment and increasing distrust of institutions, both private and public, was brewing both domestically and internationally. ‘When the press is full of government fictions and lies, and corporate fictions and lies’, Modjeska quipped, ‘it’s hard for a novel to compete’ (2002).
The ‘underside’ of global modernity was being explored, both in terms of its human and environmental impacts. And in this, the matter of historical reckoning was key. In postcolonial contexts around the world, the 1990s had seen a