Abstract
This article analyses the representation of environmental crisis and climate crisis in Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright. Building upon the groundbreaking work of environmental humanities scholars such as Heise (2008), Clark (2015), Trexler (2015) and Ghosh (2016), who have emphasised the main challenges faced by authors of climate fiction, it considers the novels as an entry point to address the climate-related crisis of culture – while acknowledging the problematic aspects of reading Indigenous texts as antidotes to the 'great derangement’ – and the danger of a singular Anthropocene narrative that silences the ‘unevenly universal’ (Nixon, 2011) responsibilities and vulnerabilities to environmental harm. Exploring themes such as environmental racism, ecological imperialism, and the slow violence of climate change, it suggests that Alexis Wright’s novels are of utmost importance for global conversations about the Anthropocene and its literary representations, as they bring the unevenness of environmental and climate crisis to visibility.
Highlights
Planet, species, justice – and the stories we tell about them
While Rigby stresses that in the world beyond the novel the incursion of the nonhuman rarely benefit the most vulnerable ones, and the erasure of the mine does not signal the end of ecological imperialism, Carpentaria’s hopeful conclusion comes from the various forms of resistance – spiritual and militant – to environmental exploitation offered by Dreamtime ancestral spirits, guardians of the Law like Normal Phantom, and Indigenous Australian guerrilla warriors like Will, who join hands to watch over the Country
While Oblivia is the main protagonist of The Swan Book, the female characters in Carpentaria seem to be quite peripheral to the main action, which revolves around the male protagonists Normal and Will Phantom, Elias Smith and Mozzie Fishman
Summary
Species, justice – and the stories we tell about them. In: Heise U. He reads Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book as an antidote to ‘the great derangement’ (Ghosh, 2016), linking Indigenous Australian ontology with magical realist fiction, and asserting that the magical elements of the text do not undermine the urgency of climate change, but rather help the reader to ‘understand the ‘real’ setting of climate change’ (Holgate, 2019: 9).
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