Abstract
ABSTRACTWorld literature has a double edge. On the one hand, it is a matter of turning the eyes of a local literature and culture toward the world at large; on the other hand, it catches the literatures of other cultures and continents with the local radar. In this article, I will turn the radar toward Australia in an attempt to see the literatures of that continent in a world literature perspective. Australia is both an old colony and a modern nation state which, at the same time, embraces a whole continent, scarcely populated on most of its territory, densely populated in its urban areas, with indigenous first nation peoples with the longest unbroken history on Earth and with an increasing influx of migrants. The complexity of modernity and prehistorical reality, of postcolonial conditions and realities of migration makes Australia a complex continent. This complexity has been understood under various headings in the about one hundred years since 1901 of independent Australia, and these differences have influenced questions of individual and collective identity and belonging, questions which have been crucial for Australian literature. Among the writers will be Patrick White (Australian native), Mudrooroo (Aboriginal origin), Richard Flanagan (Australian native – from Tasmania) and Christof Tsiolkas (Greek origin).
Highlights
Australia is a continent of its own and a nation of its own with one national language
The complexity of modernity and prehistorical reality, of postcolonial conditions and realities of migration makes Australia a complex continent. This complexity has been understood under various headings in the about one hundred years since 1901 of independent Australia, and these differences have influenced questions of individual and collective identity and belonging, questions which have been crucial for Australian literature
Apart from the enormous space with almost no people, still partly unknown to white people in 1901, two new important cultural issues topped the new national agenda and have done so ever since, in spite of economic, political, economic and social changes: the relation to the indigenous people, the aborigines, and to immigration, both of which redefined the relationship to space, ideally seen as the place of all Australians
Summary
In Mudrooroo’s Masters of the Ghost Dreaming, we get the chance to look both at space in an aboriginal perspective and into the way that this landscape embraces both an imaginary and a material dimension, which together and inseparably so, form their identity which is out of reach for the white people they live with. Jangamuttuk tries to induce the right knowledge in his two pupils, while he himself and feels some kind of relation to the ancestors when mapping the space, even in exile He chooses a place with an ancestral echo hidden from the white gaze for his private dwelling: One place which still retained traces of power was high on the hill overlooking the bay where the ghosts had deposited them, and where Fada had ordered them to stay. The point is that embodied performative actions creates a material relationship as part of a mutual identity formation between people, or as in the case of the aboriginal practices, between humans and anthropomorphic units like a landscape conceived as a living organism upheld by active ancestral spirits. While the aborigines recreate their collective memory unbroken through generations, Chatwin creates a new identity out of a memorial void every time he engages in writing before he travels on to the place he has never encountered before
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