AustLit

'Poetics and Politics of Relationality in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Fiction is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, it illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their Land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.' (Publication summary)

'Contemporary Aboriginal fiction frequently emphasises the significance of being interrelated with the land, or Country, which is often described as a bodily feeling. In this chapter, I draw on recent approaches to embodiment to explore the various ways in which novels by Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and Tara June Winch convey a notion of feeling the land through embodied simulation. Examining a range of textual markers that evoke bodily reactions, I seek to show how Aboriginal fiction implicates the reader’s body to convey the vitality of the land and to potentially elicit moments of corporeal interconnectedness. This chapter shows that linking attention to form with cognitive approaches constitutes a helpful framework to explain the political and cultural work Aboriginal narratives do as literary interventions into current discourses about humanity’s relationship with the environment.'

Source: Abstract.