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The Aboriginal-White Relationship in The Secret River and Carpentaria
XING Chun-li
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2015.11.001
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Beihang University, Beijing, China University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
This paper mainly explores the Australian Aboriginal-white relationship in two novels: The Secret River (2005) by non-Indigenous writer Kate Grenville, and Carpentaria (2006) by Indigenous novelist Alexis Wright, and compares the discursive strategies and narrative devices the authors have adopted to represent whiteness and Indigeneity, one from the European settlers’ point of view, the other from the standpoint of an Aboriginal author. In The Secret River, Grenville resorts to the genre of historical novel as a way of reconciling the past. Though the novel challenges the racialised stereotypes of the Aboriginal people by adopting a double perspective (a reconfigured white perspective to refute the colonists’ views), the moral ambiguity of the settler identity is still complicit with the colonial discourse. On the other hand, Carpentaria rejects a narrow, essentialist categorization of the Aboriginal people and defamiliarises the concept of whiteness by foregrounding it in a critique rather than as the default norm. Set in a narrative related to the oral tradition, the novel brings Aboriginal cosmology into full play. A comparison of the two novels provides a panoramic view of how the Aboriginal-white relationships are presented through the literary imaginary in Australia.
whiteness, Indigeneity, double perspective, Aboriginal cosmology, comparison
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