'Writing Belonging at the Millennium brings together two pressing and interrelated matters: the global environmental impacts of post-industrial economies and the politics of place in settler-colonial societies. It focuses on Australia at the millennium, when the legacies of colonization intersected with intensifying environmental challenges in a climate of anxiety surrounding settler-colonial belonging. The question of what belonging means is central to the discussion of the unfolding politics of place in Australia and beyond.
'In this book, Emily Potter negotiates the meaning of belonging in a settler-colonial field and considers the role of literary texts in feeding and contesting these legacies and anxieties. Its intention is to interrogate the assumption that non-indigenous Australians' increasingly unsustainable environmental practices represent a failure on their part to adequately belong in the country. Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Anxious Belonging: Millenial Australia 13 and Andrew McGahan's The White Earth
Chapter 2. Literary Expectations: Ghounding Belonging
Chapter 3. Getting Lost with Nikki Gemmel: Reconciliation and Repair
Chapter 4. Redeeming Environments for Belonging: Tim Flannery's Australia Day Address
Chapter 5. Desiccated and Infective: Writing in Thea AstIey's Drylands
Chapter 6. The Past is All Around: Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime
Chapter 7. Toxic Imaginaries. Undoing Origins and Endings
Afterword: Postcolonial Atmospheres
References
Index
'History, Emily Potter proposes in Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place, ‘does not end when we stop telling a particular story of a particular time’ (146). The stories sit right here, in the ground. As Potter shows, they radiate in unpredictable ways. They continue to mark the present no matter how colonial culture attempts to encyst narratives of Indigenous knowledge, cultural practice and unextinguished connection to Indigenous Country.' (Introduction)
'History, Emily Potter proposes in Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place, ‘does not end when we stop telling a particular story of a particular time’ (146). The stories sit right here, in the ground. As Potter shows, they radiate in unpredictable ways. They continue to mark the present no matter how colonial culture attempts to encyst narratives of Indigenous knowledge, cultural practice and unextinguished connection to Indigenous Country.' (Introduction)