Literature at the frontier of our commonwealth

Abstract

Taking as its starting point the most recent, failed Australian referendum, this essay considers the efficacy of the Commonwealth of Nations — of the attendant ideological principles and values upon which the political association is based and to which its member states subscribe. Tracing the colonial histories and legacies of two current member states, Australia and South Africa — nations whose genesis in settler colonialism follow somewhat similar contours — the essay explores, in their canonical literature, the evolution of a kind of whitewashed nationalism that is not just racially exclusory but also registers, inversely, the anxieties of the self in relation to the “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) endorsed in ideologies of nationhood. In a comparative, transnational reading of Patrick White’s Voss and J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands, this essay probes how this settler-colonial literary tradition simultaneously underwrites and complicates (continued) white imperialism and black un-belonging in ways that both suggest and test the conceptual prospects and limits of a universal, egalitarian “commonwealth”.