Cirrus

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'Alexis Wright is a master storyteller. The power of her writing derives not only from her capacity to conjure words into spellbinding tales but from the troubled thinking she brings to bear on narrative forms themselves. Wright has an incisive grasp of storytelling as a primary vehicle of political power and its potential transformation. Who has the right to tell a story? This question, so simple on the face of it, simultaneously invokes the ethical basis of Aboriginal society as well as the settler-colonial hubris that legitimises dispossession and locates authority elsewhere.' (Introduction)

Notes

Epigraph: I knew the style and intent of the national narrative would always be one of the greatest challenges I would have as a writer… The way that this country shapes its people would constantly be on my mind while trying to tell stories of what we are, how we see the world, what our traditional ground means to us, and our desires and ambitions. The cloud is always present… We have been boxed in by the Australian psyche… Take your pick. All the statistics are linked to the national narrative, to story-making, to the way that stories are told, to keep the status quo in place. —Alexis Wright, ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story’, Meanjin, 2016

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y Arena Magazine no. 153 April 2018 13969008 2018 periodical issue Abstract
'Fifty years since May ’68, and the promise, as it was understood then, of freedom. From what, and to what? The unfettering of the imagination was one cry, the flowering of the social capacities of human being another. Here was the definitive opening to ‘make our own history’—to defy the experience of alienation that was now a condition of student life, not just that of the factory. It was a revolt, or revolution, that sought to defy the structures of the received political Left as much as it was a rejection of the structures and effects of (late) capitalism. At least, this was how it largely understood itself: a revolt against authority, a flowering of possibilities, the chance for individuals to become ‘whole’. It was believed that, starting in the ‘nerve centres’ of society— the universities—this completely novel form of revolt would flow out to destabilise the whole.' (Alison Caddick :‘To the Edge of Freedom’: May ’68 and Now' Editorial)
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2018
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pg. 52-54