Post-Mabo White Settler Fables and the Negotiation of Native Title Legislation in Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004)

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
Heinz Antor
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Australian Aborigines ◽  
Future Change ◽  
Native Title ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
White Settler ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
White Earth

Abstract In his novel The White Earth, Andrew McGahan engages with an important chapter in the history of his country, namely the period of the famous Mabo case of 1992, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, and the subsequent Native Title Act of 1993. This novel of initiation with gothic features draws attention to both the woeful history of the dispossession, maltreatment and partial elimination of Australian Aborigines and to the issue of how white Australians cope with this past as well as the guilt, anxieties, and loss of orientation this may create. The novel thus turns into a critical engagement with the legal history of race relations in Australia and probes possible paths for future change.

scholarly journals The condition of recognition: Gothic intimations in Andrew McGahan's The White Earth

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-94
Author(s):  
Stephanie Green
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Place Identity ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Native Title ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Terra Nullius ◽  
Rational Explanation ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
White Earth

AbstractThis article discusses the evocation of the Gothic as a narrative interrogation of the intersections between place, identity and power in Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004). The novel deploys common techniques of Gothic literary fiction to create a sense of disassociation from the grip of a European colonial sensibility. It achieves this in various ways, including by representing its central architectural figure of colonial dominance, Kuran House, as an emblem of aristocratic pastoral decline, then by invoking intimations of an ancient supernatural presence which intercedes in the linear descent of colonial possession and, ultimately, by providing a rational explanation for the novel's events. The White Earth further demonstrates the inherently adaptive qualities of Gothic narrative technique as a means of confronting the limits to white belonging in post-colonial Australia by referencing a key historical moment, the 1992 Mabo judgment, which rejected the concept of terra nullius and recognised native title under Australian common law. At once discursive and performative, the sustained way in which the work employs the tropic power of Gothic anxiety serves to reveal the uncertain terms in which its characters negotiate what it means to be Australian, more than 200 years after colonial invasion.

“Picture it all, Darley”

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sari Altschuler
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Media History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Stage ◽  
Race Politics ◽  
Current Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Representational Limits ◽  
History Of Race

Sari Altschuler “‘Picture it all, Darley’: Race Politics and the Media History of George Lippard’s The Quaker City” (pp. 65–101) This essay adresses two related questions. First, how did George Lippard’s The Quaker City develop from a multimedia story told through newspaper conventions, illustration, and two plays into the novel that appeared in May 1845? And second, how did Lippard’s white-seduction narrative come to pivot around the nightmare of an ambiguously raced Devil-Bug? Joining these questions of form and content, I argue that the media history of The Quaker City is inextricable from its history of race. In the wake of the almost riot around the mid-serialization of his Philadelphia play, Lippard moved away from fictionalizing current events toward the “grotesque-sublime” through a broader critique of Philadelphia less open to charges of libel. This shift took place through the transformation of Devil-Bug, a character Lippard rapidly developed in the middle installments until he was complex enough to carry the new story. Turning the once-black Devil-Bug into his protagonist, however, required character developments that necessarily complicated the story’s representation of race, a process that occurred concurrently with events related to the work that highlighted the systemic oppression of African Americans. In winter 1844, troubles with two stage productions and his illustrator highlighted the problems of representing race. After a several-month hiatus, Lippard published new installments vituperously condemning the representational limits of these nonprose forms and turned to prose to develop his antislavery position through Devil-Bug. As a result of these confluent developments, The Quaker City became an antislavery text through the process of opening Devil-Bug’s character up to its own hybridity and interiority.

scholarly journals Unsettling Australia: Disturbing White Settler Homemaking in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Sarah Heinz
Keyword(s):  
National Character ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Class ◽  
White Settler ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation

Proceeding from Australia’s specific situation as a settler colony, this article discusses how the ambivalences and fissures of settler subjectivity shape processes of homemaking. Settler homemaking depends on the disturbance of Indigenous Australians’ homelands via dispossession, exclusion, and genocide, but it equally depends upon the creation of a white settler subject as innocent, entitled, and belonging to what has been called ‘white indigeneity’. The article traces this double disturbance in Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey’s rewriting of the iconic Kelly legend uncovers the dangers of a possessive, male, white indigeneity based on effacement and exclusion. The novel’s critical staging of Ned Kelly’s construction of Australia as a home for a new class of ‘natives’ challenges an essentialist white Australianness and its narratives of embattled settlement, independence, mateship, and the Bush. The novel shows that the creation of this national character is based on the denial of Aboriginal ownership and agency. Ned’s narrative of Irish victimhood and his formation of a new sense of Australianness is therefore doomed to repeat the violence, discrimination, and exclusion of colonialism that he seems to decry.

Thomas Glyn Watkin, The Legal History of Wales

2007 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 460-461
Author(s):  
George L Gretton
Keyword(s):  
Legal History ◽  
History Of

“What Freedom?”

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Free Condition ◽  
Narrative Design ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
John Owen

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cottrol
Keyword(s):  
Antebellum America ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America 

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