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Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2018

Alison Ravenscroft
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Abstract

The essay looks at the challenges Australian Indigenous materialisms make to the Western concept of human and its relation to the inhuman, and it does this through reading the novels of Waanyi writer, critic, and activist Alexis Wright. In the Australian context, a highly productive knot is being tied between post-humanism and postcolonialism, such that the binary of “culture” and “nature” is understood in relation to another binary couple that sits snugly within “culture” and “nature,” and that is “colonizer” and “native.” The place of Indigenous-signed literary texts in critiques of Western materialisms cannot be underestimated. It is through the arts that most encounters between Indigenous and settler Australians take place. How non-Indigenous readers might approach these literary texts is a key ethical question with implications for new materialist and post-humanist projects.

Keywords

new materialismAustralian Indigenous literatureAlexis Wright
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 353 - 370
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

*

My thanks to Kate Foord and Ryan Gustafsson for their engagement with the ideas in this essay, and for the anonymous reviewers from Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry for their invaluable advice.

References

1 Watson, Irene, “Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?” Sovereign Subject: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2007), 16–17 Google Scholar.

2 Ellen van Neerven, “The Country Is Like a Body,” Right Now: Human Rights in Australia. rightnow.org.au.

3 Ahmed, Sarah, “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism,’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15.1 (2008): 23–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an analysis of feminist engagements with new materialism see Willey, Angela, “A World of Materialisms: Postcolonial Feminist Science Studies and the New Natural,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 41.6 (2016): 991–1014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Irni, Sari, “The Politics of Materiality: Affective Encounters in a Transdisciplinary Debate,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 20.4 (2013): 357 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Irni points out that “one of the crucial challenges within material feminisms is whether this strand of feminism can effectively answer to the call to question the whiteness of feminism.”

4 For a discussion on masculinity and the anthropocene, see Colebrook, Claire, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, vol. 1 (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, with Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Barthes, Roland, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” trans. J. A. Underwood, in Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye (London, England: Penguin, 2001), 119–127 Google Scholar. Wright, Alexis. Croire en l’incroyable (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2000)Google Scholar.

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7 Biddle, “Breasts, Bodies, Art,” 38.

8 In Australian Aboriginal discourses, “Country” often appears written with initial capitalization, indicating its significance as a living being. “Country,” then, can be thought of as a proper name.

9 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), viii Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., vii.

11 Barad, Karen, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28.3 (2003): 829 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, fn 38.

12 Kenelm Burridge suggests that Australian Aboriginal life is “perhaps the most complicated representative of human life,” quoted in Bird Rose, Deborah, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25 Google Scholar.

13 Shaviro, Steve, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism. (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997)Google Scholar. Quoted in Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 801.

14 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 819.

15 Todd, Zoe, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn,” 6–7.

17 Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 819.

18 Ibid.

19 Van Toorn, Penny, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

20 Wright, Alexis: “On Writing Carpentaria,” Heat 13 (2007): 87 Google Scholar.

21 Wright’s work is among those poetical texts that refuse the lyrical in their depiction of nature and climate, instead reaching for aesthetic modes that perform the unsettlement that they describe. This recalls Joan Retallack’s work in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

22 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vi.

23 Wright, Alexis, Carpentaria (Sydney, Australia: Giramondo, 2006), 466 Google Scholar.

24 Wright, Alexis, Plains of Promise (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Wright, Carpentaria; Wright, Alexis, The Swan Book (Sydney, Australia: Giramondo, 2013)Google Scholar.

25 Wright, The Swan Book, 6.

26 A recent essay by Linda Davey marks a shift in some of the main trends in critical approaches to this novel by placing it in relation to debates around materialism and the relationship between language and non-linguistic forces. See Daley, Linda, “Alexis Wright’s Fiction as World Making,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 10.1 (2016): 8–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 I have discussed white Australian sexual desire, violence, and colonialism in the literary texts of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott in The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race, especially chapters 3, 9, and 10.

28 Australian Human Rights Commission, Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. (Sydney, Australia: Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997)Google Scholar.

29 Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human.

30 Ibid., 57.

31 Stanner, W. E. H., “Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,” in Religion in Aboriginal Australia: An Anthology, eds. Max Charlesworth, Howard Morphy, Diane Bell, and Kenneth Maddock (St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia.: Queensland University Press, 1984), 166 Google Scholar.

32 Doug Campbell, senior Yarralin man, quoted by Rose in Dingo Makes Us Human, 56.

33 Hobbles, “boss” for the Pantimi ritual, quoted by Rose in Dingo Makes Us Human, 57.

34 Bradley, John with Families, Yanyuwa, Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2010), 228 Google Scholar.

35 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (Durham, NC; London, England: Duke University Press, 2016), 35 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Ibid., 34.

37 Ibid., 32.

38 Hage, Ghassan, “Etat de siege: A Dying Domesticating Colonialism,” American Ethnologist 43.1 (2016): 48 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Wright, The Swan Book, 80.

40 Wright, Plains of Promise, 84.

41 Diprose, Rosalyn, Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 1994), 109 Google Scholar.

42 For a fuller account of this argument please see Ravenscroft, The Postcolonial Eye, 31–44.

43 Indigenous philosopher Mary Graham uses lowercase “law” to refer to white man’s law and uppercase “Law” to refer to Aboriginal Law. See Graham, Mary, “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews,” Australian Humanities Review 45(2008): 181–194 Google Scholar.

44 Daley, “Alexis Wright’s Fiction as World Making,” 8–23. Daley draws on Graham, “Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews.”

45 Gleeson-White, Jane, “Capitalism versus the Agency of Place”: An Ecocritical Reading of That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria ,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 13.2 (2013):1–12 Google Scholar.

46 Gleeson-White, “Capitalism versus the Agency of Place,” 8–9.

47 Rigby, “The Poetics of Decolonization,” 123. Rigby acknowledges her debts to the Australian ecologist and poet Judith Wright and another Australian ecological theorist Val Plumwood, especially Plumwood’s critique of anthropocentrism and Deep Ecology’s privileging of identity over alterity.

48 Ibid., 130.

49 Alexis Wright, quoted in ibid., 123.

50 Ibid.

51 Alexis Wright, quoted in ibid.

52 Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human, 109.

53 Ibid.

54 Stanner, “Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,” 166.

55 Amnesia is often associated in Australia with the colonizers forgetting the fact of invasion, sometimes consciously so, in an act of denial, but also unconsciously forgetting, in an act of repression. That is, in this colonial position one does not know that one is amnesiac: for instance, one would believe in one’s own stories of the heroism of the pioneer. Here in Elias Smith, however, is a man who knows he is suffering from amnesia; he is, you might say, “awake” to his loss. In The Swan Book, Ethyl Oblivia also suffers amnesia, in her case because of the degree of her suffering, and she must be called into wakefulness.

56 Wright, The Swan Book, 25.

57 Ravenscroft, The Postcolonial Eye.

58 White, Jessica, “Fluid Worlds: Reflecting Climate Change in The Swan Book and The Sunlit Zone ,” Southerly 74.1 (2014): 144 Google Scholar.

59 James Bradley quoted in ibid.

60 Potter, Emily, “Postcolonial Australia, Indigenous Realism and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book,” in Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, eds. Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall, and Stephen LeMenager (Oxfordshire, England: Taylor and Francis, 2016.) http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/latrobe/details.action?docID=47f0872 Google Scholar.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid., 269.

65 Ibid., 295.

66 Ibid., 271.

67 Ibid., 270.

68 Ibid., 287.

69 Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye.”