Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Capitalism Versus the Agency of Place : An Ecocritical Reading of That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria
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'Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) have put the Indigenous novel at the centre of Australian literature for the first time and established these authors as two of Australia’s most prominent and successful contemporary fiction writers. The novels have been widely acclaimed by scholars and critics; both won the Miles Franklin Award and were short-listed for major literary prizes. And yet both these novels trouble Australia’s national identity, drawing attention to and challenging the economic project—capitalism—upon which the nation is predicated. Against the singularity of the nation and the abstracting forces of capitalism these novels posit the particularity and agency of locale, of place. This paper will argue, therefore, that only an ecocritical reading of these novels can adequately account for the challenges—formal, political, epistemological, ontological—that they pose. Through an ecocritical examination of the conflict between capitalism and regional Indigenous management embodied in these novels, I will argue that they rewrite Australia in the voice of the regional, and offer ways of reconsidering the relation of human and non-human which contest our prevailing economic models and their role in the ecological crisis.'  (Introduction)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL The Colonies : Australia and New Zealand vol. 13 no. 2 2013 6723868 2013 periodical issue 2013
Last amended 20 Jul 2018 08:55:16
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9867/9756 Capitalism Versus the Agency of Place : An Ecocritical Reading of That Deadman Dance and Carpentariasmall AustLit logo JASAL
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