Regional Dissensions and the Construction of Locality in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

This paper analyzes the way in which Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria recreates the space of Indigenous country. Looking at the environment and the focus on locality from a regional perspective, I argue that geographic space is used as a subversive place of reality and history so that Indigeneity is a matter of intersubjective relations (M. Langton) and is constantly conceptualized in a process of dialogue, representation, and imagination. I thus examine the focal positioning of the natural environment to show how the manifestation of place and Dreaming tracks annihilate an imagined colonial reality and tend to reconfigure the postcolonial present.