Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Connecting Guatemala, Australia and the World : Violence in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences between the politically-motivated mass murders and consequent genocide of the Maya in Guatemala during the Civil War, and the frontier massacres in Australia during colonisation, to locate important commonalities. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2004 novel Senselessness, it identifies a libidinal investment in a Maya and Latin American Other as the site of the excessive enjoyment that Lacan calls jouissance: a projection responsible for love, hate and all varieties of discrimination. It identifies a similar investment in an Aboriginal Other in Mark McKenna’s 2002 nonfiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Castellanos Moya creates a narrator whose intense libidinal investment in the Maya Other’s suffering reveals not only the limits of reconciliation in Guatemala, but also how libidinal investments in Latin America as a site of literary jouissance trap the region between magic and violence. McKenna unearths a local narrative of denial in which Aboriginal Australians are cast as villains; this points to an ambivalent national narrative where Aboriginal Australians are either victims or victimisers, but always exceptional. What connects Guatemala, Australia and the world is a collective responsibility for the production of Others – of and for whom violence is expected.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Literary Studies vol. 35 no. 2 29 October 2020 20738432 2020 periodical issue 'For our second issue of 2020 we bring you a wide range of approaches to thinking about literature in Australia: these are essays that test the relationship between writing, politics, and history, undertake detailed consideration of language and imagery, and work at the intersection between literary and media history, and literary studies and pedagogy.' (Introduction)
     
    2020
Last amended 11 Nov 2020 07:44:37
https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/connecting-guatemala-australia-and-the-world-violence-in-horacio-castellanos-moyas-senselessness-and-mark-mckennas-looking-for-blackfellas-point Connecting Guatemala, Australia and the World : Violence in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Pointsmall AustLit logo Australian Literary Studies
Subjects:
  • c
    Guatemala,
    c
    Central America, Americas,
  • Bega area, Far South Coast, South Coast, New South Wales,
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