Ways of Postcolonial Belonging : Writing Spatial History as a Personal Journey
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In my paper, I will offer a short reflection on a group of narratives written by Australian historians around the turn of the 21st century, narratives which transgress conventional historiography by interweaving elements of academic/intellectual memoir, travelogue, and storytelling. While the personal turn in history writing is neither new nor unique in Australia, these narratives, I believe, are specific in their attempt to articulate one of the many versions of Reconciliation and provide one of the many perspectives on "postcolonial justice" in relation to the dispossession of Indigenous people. I will focus on those aspects of the narratives which express subjectivity, ambivalence, doubt, estrangement, self-reflection, sense of complicity, spatial anxiety and desire of belonging, and lend the narratives the air of an innovative, hybrid mode of writing spatial history. References to Peter Read's Belonging, Mark McKenna's Looking for Blackfella's Point, Inga Clendinnen's Tiger's Eye, Bruce Pascoe's Convincing Ground and Deborah Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country will be provided in order to illustrate different ways of transcending what seems to be an impasse in searching for an ethically correct relationship to land and its first peoples in the postcolonial space. |
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