Cirrus@Austlit

'These notes on Alexis Wright’s fiction are about issues within (and beyond) Indigenous intellectual and political life in contemporary Australia that her fiction seems to address in imaginative and narrative ways. They’re predominantly contextual rather than interpretative. In the context of our MLA panel (9 January 2015) on Wright’s ‘(other)worldly’ fiction I offered these contextual considerations, working from the outside in, as intended to assist with reading The Swan Book (2013), particularly for a non-Australian readership; a reading from the inside out would include consideration of Indigenous storytelling modes and their adaptation of dystopian generics, and the thematics of climate theft and ecological racism (see Rose). The Swan Book and Carpentaria (2006) currently circulate as world novels where they have a powerful and distinctive presence as complex literary narratives within transnational Indigenous and, to a lesser degree, non-Indigenous literary circuits (see Osborne and Whitlock). 1 At the same time these fictions emerge out of and address native (and national) historical and political matrices that include deeply contested, volatile ideas about state sovereignty, land rights, the history of settlement, and Indigenous policy. In this connection ‘sovereignty’ is the word I would like to draw attention to. A significant aspect of The Swan Book is the complex and self-reflexive ways in which it addresses the political and social debate about ‘sovereignty,’ although this aspect of Wright’s fiction is not restricted to that novel.' (Publication abstract)