AustLit

Ross Gibson argues that Watling's text can be read 'to understand some of the complicated issues of subjectivity and creativity in a colonial situation' (4).

'The question raised by this study is that if one sees the symbolic order as constitutive of subjectivitiy (the possibility of saying 'I' and 'you'), then what happens to the subject-in-process when passing from one actual language system to another? What kind of subjectivity is created and what form of repression takes place when the subject is forced to enter a new symbolic order? What happens to the other and prior language attached to a specific culture? Is the first language subsequently rendered alien, shameful, transgressive, praticularly if it is outside the acceptable repertoire of "foreign langauges"?' (p. 37). Gunew focuses the main part of her essay on the work of Anna Couani, which Gunew argues 'does not simply reproduce the discourses of nostalgia, but rather contrasts and dislocates the various forms of memory, desire, intimacy which play within them' (pp. 38-39).