AustLit

'This article examines two works of fiction that speculatively rewrite settler histories in South Africa and Australia, J.M. Coetzee’s Dusklands and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting. In the interest of critically addressing the silences, elisions, and ideological simplifications of imperialist histories of the colonial encounter, both texts imaginatively attend to the lived experiences of European settlers and indigenous peoples during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In their respective accounts of the colonial encounter, Coetzee and Flanagan represent how racist, anthropocentric, and ecophobic mentalities are unsettled by affective intensities that instantiate the body’s resistance to the political, economic, social, and religious logics of colonialism. Both authors coordinate the body’s resistance with animality, which in its turn is posited as a kind of affective power that has the potential to ethically and aesthetically reconfigure the human-animal binary of western discourse. Inasmuch as they rewrite history, imaginatively recuperate the value of indigenous sensibilities, and positively reinscribe human animality, this essay proposes that Coetzee and Flanagan attempt to resituate the human ecologically.' (Publication summary)

'This article proposes a rethinking of biological invasion in contemporary South African and Australian literature. It argues that the literary representation of pest proliferation can offer a privileged insight into the intersection between the legacy of settler colonialism and current ecological concerns. Indeed, the question of invasive species can be connected to both unreconciled histories of colonial expansion and pressing biodiversity and conservation issues. This essay adopts Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialisation in order to explore the description of invasive species in Henrietta Rose-Innes's Nineveh and The Rabbits, a visual narrative by John Mardsen and Shaun Tan. A reading inspired by the anti-metaphorical value of the concept of deterritorialisation overcomes an anthropocentric view that would reduce animals to mere metaphorical stand-ins for humans. The intimate link between nature and culture posited by Deleuze and Guattari's generalised ecology is conceptualised as a shifting interface between postcolonial and ecocritical agendas in the reading of postcolonial literature from South Africa and Australia.'

source: Abstract.