AustLit

'Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright develops magical realism in new directions by drawing on Aboriginal mythology, spirituality and traditional oral storytelling techniques. A critical difference between Wright’s novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book and other postcolonial magical realism, however, is that the author regards Indigenous Australians as still being colonized, even though Australia is officially a decolonized nation. Wright’s view reflects what Robert Young calls the “fourth world”, where in an officially decolonized country there is still colonization of first inhabitants, “who seek the basic rights of legal and social equality”. This scenario prompts a modification of Stephen Slemon’s influential theory of magical realism as postcolonial discourse: that the narrative mode involves two oppositional systems locked in a continuous battle with one another, the magical and the real, usually taken to mean the colonized and the colonizer. Instead, the article proposes that magical realist fiction which portrays ongoing colonization in a supposedly postcolonial nation incorporates three oppositional systems: the Indigenous colonized; the white settler colonizer; and global economic forces that help perpetuate the ongoing colonization.' (Source: Abstract)

'Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Aboriginal writings from the 1920s are among the earliest, by a communist, to represent Aboriginal workers in the Australian cattle industry. However, critics have not, in general, situated these writings in relation to Prichard’s Marxist politics or to left-wing discourse more generally. Indeed, there is a general consensus that Prichard’s socialism could not inform her writings about colonial relationships in the way it informed those about white workers. This article reassesses this position by situating her rarely read play Brumby Innes in relation to discourses about race and labour in the Communist Party and on the left in Australia in the 1920s. It argues that Brumby Innes grapples with the disconnection between the concerns of the Australian left and the conditions of Aboriginal workers, at times explicitly pointing to the left’s failure to address the exploitation of Aborigines working on cattle stations. It suggests that Prichard’s own orthodox Marxist commitments were stretched and challenged by her encounter with the Aboriginal worker, and that Brumby Innes constitutes a crucial meditation on silence, political inarticulacy and rage.' (Source: Abstract)

'In what is presented as a moment of truth in Gail Jones’s novel Sorry, the narrator’s brief statement that “Shakespeare was wrong” appears to call into question the English dramatist’s literary and epistemological supremacy. Starting from this unsettling premise, this article seeks to define Jones’s counter-discursive use of Shakespearean intertextuality. While it has, for decades, proved a risky task for both historians and novelists to write about the delicate issue of silence in Australia without risking the appropriation of an Aboriginal voice, the article examines how Jones exploits defamiliarizing techniques in order to undermine the dominant European discourse (as encoded in the Shakespearean text) without assuming an Aboriginal perspective. Her aim is to facilitate the emergence of an incipient, tentatively defined counter-discourse sufficiently attuned to the specific realities of Australia. The article argues that by adopting an Australian cultural perspective designed to decentre Shakespeare, Jones hopes to reconcile history and writing, and also the divided aspects of White Australia’s twofold identity at a time of profound national changes.' (Source: Abstract)