Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Swansong or Songline?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indigenous-Australian fiction offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices the opportunity to carve out an Indigenous space within as well as without Australian identity after more than two centuries of silencing and oppression. Since the 1990s Indigenous authors such as Alexis Wright have broken new ground by going beyond the typical Indigenous autobiography known as life-writing as a means to recover their Indigenous history and to be heard. They do so by rewriting race and ethnicity from a non-European epistemology emanating from the Dreaming or Dreamtime, their spiritual and material universe or ontology holistically rooted in the land. This essay takes Indigeneity as fundamental in the postmodern and postcolonial construction of contemporary Australianness, and analyses how Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) questions the Enlightenment legacy that enthroned European civilisation and its hierarchical epistemology. In order to do so, it addresses the European encounter with the Indigenous Other through the notions of hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and friendship as developed by Kant in the late 1800s and their re-assessment as “hostipitality” by Jacques Derrida in the early 2000s, and applies these to the reading experience of Indigenous narratives.