Unsettling narratives: Re-evaluating magical realism as postcolonial discourse through Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book

Abstract

Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright develops magical realism in new directions by drawing on Aboriginal mythology, spirituality and traditional oral storytelling techniques. A critical difference between Wright’s novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book and other postcolonial magical realism, however, is that the author regards Indigenous Australians as still being colonized, even though Australia is officially a decolonized nation. Wright’s view reflects what Robert Young calls the “fourth world”, where in an officially decolonized country there is still colonization of first inhabitants, “who seek the basic rights of legal and social equality”. This scenario prompts a modification of Stephen Slemon’s influential theory of magical realism as postcolonial discourse: that the narrative mode involves two oppositional systems locked in a continuous battle with one another, the magical and the real, usually taken to mean the colonized and the colonizer. Instead, the article proposes that magical realist fiction which portrays ongoing colonization in a supposedly postcolonial nation incorporates three oppositional systems: the Indigenous colonized; the white settler colonizer; and global economic forces that help perpetuate the ongoing colonization.