AustLit

'This article analyzes a young Aboriginal man’s search to belong and the triangulated violence that complicates his relationship with his white father and the young men of the Aboriginal family that he seeks to join. It investigates how Roo and the young Aboriginal men struggle against the systemic racialized differentiation and segregation of white and black subjects and bodies. Roo, and the Aboriginal family into which he is eventually incorporated, negotiate his ambiguous whiteness and, with it, the legacy of the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Roo’s story articulates a countervailing narrative to this assimilationist policy – a narrative of indigenous autonomy. The novel’s parallel but inverse story of Roo’s violent white policeman father, it is argued, figures a traumatized “mainstream” whiteness that refuses intersubjectivity with its racialized others. The affective labor that these two intertwined stories (Roo and his father and Roo and the young Aboriginal men) perform and the ways in which it positions white liberal readers and critics is examined. The analysis of the anger articulated in this novel cautions against first-world intellectuals’ identification with indigenous anger. It is argued that the novel’s affective labor defamiliarizes and functions as a readerly corrective to the universalism of whiteness.' (Publication abstract)