(Re)Narrating the Self: Cross-Cultural Identity and Multivocality in Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010)

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Written by an Australian author of mixed descent, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance has received high critical appraisal as a major canonical text in Australian literature. The novel hosts the early years of British colonization in Australia that witnessed the initial encounter between Europeans and the Noongars (the original people) on the Southern coast of western Australia, interrogating the nature of this unique moment of cross-cultural encounter and its implications on the history of Australia. For both indigenous Australians as well as the colonial settlers, identity formation and history have long been entangled with their relationship to the land. For long, colonial narratives have erupted to dispossess the natives from their land as well as historical representation and to legitimize the colonial scheme. As a result, violence has emerged giving way to various modes of resistance of which narratology is a basic constituent. As a representative work of Scott’s idea of reconciliation between opposites manifested in the relationship between the colonizer and colonized, That Deadman Dance strives to bring the Indigenous heritage into contemporary culture through language revival and storytelling, underscoring the opposing cosmologies shaping this unique experience and offering the notion of reconciliation as a mode of resistance and cultural revival. To trace this idea of reconciliation, the present study uses the narratological approach as a tool of analysis, specifically Bakhtin’s concept of multivocal narration examining the role of literature as an artistic implementation of human ideology to achieve reconciliation. By doing this, this paper attempts to investigate Scott’s polyphonic narrative technique in dealing with this unique moment of cultural encounter as demonstrated through the novel’s content and structure.