Power of country: Indigenous relationality and reading Indigenous climate fiction in Australia

Abstract

As a curriculum area, English has been foundational to empire, invasion, and colonisation of Indigenous peoples the world over. It therefore requires considered scholarship to reimagine how to engage with and teach literature in English. In this article, we explore the enduring problem of English and its inheritances, as well as the ways in which Indigenous voices are currently manifest in classroom contexts. We then propose Indigenous relationality as the foundation and frame for new ways to read literature and understand the world. We consider the ways in which Indigenous cli-fi texts refuture relations and invite new modes of reading, focussing specifically on the way the concepts are taken up in Wright’s Carpentaria.