Laura Deane Laura Deane i(A86045 works by)
Born: Established: 1965 ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 1 y separately published work icon Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature : Australian Psychoses Laura Deane , Lanham : Lexington Books , 2017 11496118 2017 single work criticism

'This book offers an original and compelling analysis of women’s madness, gender and the Australian family. Taking up Anne McClintock’s call for critical works that psychoanalyze colonialism, this radical re-assessment of novels by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville provides a sustained account of women’s madness and masculine colonial psychosis from a feminist postcolonial perspective. This book rethinks women’s madness in the context of Australian colonialism. Taking novels of madness by Christina Stead and Kate Grenville as its point of critical departure, it applies a post-Reconciliation lens to the study of Australia’s gender and racial codes, to place Australian sexism and misogyny in their proper colonial context. Employing madness as a frame to rethink postcolonial theorizing in Australia, Gender, Madness, and Colonial Paranoia in Australian Literature psychoanalyses colonialism to argue that Australia suffers from a cultural pathology based in the strategic forgetting of colonial violence. This pathology takes the form of colonial paranoia about ‘race’ and gender, producing distorted gender codes and ways of being Australian. This book maps the contours of Australian colonial paranoia, weaving feminist literary theory, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory with poststructuralist approaches to reassess the traditional canon of critical madness scholarship, and the place of women’s writing within it. This provocative work marks a radical departure from much recent feminist, cultural, and postcolonial criticism, and will be essential reading for students of Australian literature, cultural studies and gender studies wanting a new insight into how the Australian psyche is shaped by settler colonialism.' (Publication Summary)

1 Reconciliation, a Postcolonial Settlement and the Constitutional Recognition Debates : A Review Essay Laura Deane , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , May vol. 9 no. 2 2017;
'In 2017, with a Parliament that features the newly-elected Senator Pauline Hanson, flanked by a handful of One Nation members, Australia seems to be entering a new Culture Wars. Senator Hanson’s 2016 maiden speech, much criticised for its scapegoating of Muslim Australians, revisited old ground. Indeed, much of the criticism remarked upon the fact that she seemed to have simply inserted ‘Muslim Australians’ in place of the ‘Asians’ or ‘Aboriginal Australians’ who were represented as the ‘problem’ for Australia back in 1996, when the Culture Wars polarised the nation. The Culture Wars 1.0 were characterised by an over-reaction to the Mabo decision of 1992, which polarised the nation by recognising that Native Title was not extinguished by white settlement, and that Terra Nullius was a ‘legal fiction’. The newly recognised rights of Indigenous Australians to their lands resulted in concerted opposition by powerful mining and pastoral lobbies, who argued that the Mabo decision diluted their rights to exploit Australian land. The Howard Government joined in, falsely claiming that Native Title legislation would threaten family homes. When the High Court found in the Wik case of 1996 that pastoral leases were not extinguished by Native Title, but could ‘co-exist’, the Government seized on the decision to find ways to extinguish Native Title. Howard’s Wik 10-point plan inserted a ‘national interest’ provision over Crown lands, and restricted both the time limits for claims to be lodged, and the types of lands that could be claimed. Mining and pastoral interests were reframed as ‘national’ interests’ , while Indigenous claims to territory were diluted, with Indigenous Land Use agreements effectively extinguishing Native Title when Indigenous and non-Indigenous parties reached an agreement. However, compensatory royalties would be provided to Indigenous traditional owners in exchange for mining or other commercial activities on their lands. In its dominant usage, ‘settlement’ in the Australian context implies the peaceable takeover of Indigenous territories in the name of the British Empire since 1788, with resultant waves of British immigration leading to the production of ‘Australia’ as a nation-state in 1901. These debates demonstrated that it was land – white possession and ownership – that was at stake throughout the following decade in an increasingly divisive debate about the politics of Reconciliation.' (Introduction)
1 Review : The Intervention : An Anthology Laura Deane , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , May vol. 8 no. 2 2016;

— Review of The Intervention : An Anthology 2015 anthology poetry essay prose
1 [Review] Cal Flyn, Thicker than Water Laura Deane , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 9 no. 1 2016;

— Review of Thicker Than Water Cal Flyn , 2016 single work biography
1 Review of Decolonizing the Landscape : Indigenous Cultures in Australia Edited by Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer Laura Deane , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 7 no. 1 2014;

— Review of Decolonizing the Landscape : Indigenous Cultures in Australia 2014 anthology criticism
1 Cannibalism and Colonialism : Lilian's Story and (White) Women's Belonging Laura Deane , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;

'In 1985, when Kate Grenville’s novel about a fat, unlovely bag lady appeared on the Australian literary landscape, Lilian’s Story was celebrated as a feminist and postcolonial text. By locating Lilian as ex-centric to the nation, to inhabit the abjected zones of the colony—the bush, the asylum, the streets of post-Federation Sydney—Grenville is commonly read as a feminist writer intervening into the gender politics that shaped Australia. Feminists celebrate the ways in which she carves out discursive spaces for women who have existed largely in the interstices between public memory and official history. Postcolonial critical interpretations of Lilian being ‘colonised’ by her father, provoked by the rape narrative, have tended to reproduce the postcolonial trope of Australia’s shift from a colonial relationship to a national structure. Such readings largely neglect the colonial violence of Australian patriarchy, and the skewed gender norms that result when a host culture is transplanted to an imperial outpost. Taking up the colonial metaphor structuring the relationship between Lilian and her father, I read Lilian’s ‘madness’ as a response to discourses of ‘race’ and gender that circulate in the colonial Imaginary to position women as the site for racial anxiety about colonial ‘dirt’, contamination and disorder. While Lilian approaches the rebellious female grotesque celebrated in postcolonial feminist theorising, her obese body also signifies the devouring nature of colonialism. This paper engages with the white politics of women’s ‘belonging’ inscribed in Lilian’s Story to disinter the schizoid nature of white women’s relationship to colonial patriarchy.' (Publication abstract)

1 y separately published work icon Australian Psychoses : Women's Madness and Colonial Psychosis Laura Deane , South Australia : 2012 6856499 2012 single work thesis
1 Theorising the Madwoman : Fictocritical Incursions - A Performance Laura Deane , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 14 no. 2 2010;
'‘Theorising the madwoman : fictocritical incursions - a performance’ is an intervention into the politics of naming and writing about women’s madness in literature. Using fictocritical tactics, this article stages a dialogue between the madwoman and the critic to make visible ‘the fiction of the disembodied scholar’ deployed in textual criticism. Sometimes speaking as the madwoman, sometimes as the feminist critic, I aim to destabilise the voice of the objective scholar, while continuing to lay some claim to it. Polyvocal in arrangement, discordant and offbeat in its strategies, and fictocritical in its tactics and stylistics, this article is an incursion into, rather than an interpretation of, women’s madness. Using a hybrid of fictional strategies, feminist scholarship, and personal experience, I allow the madwoman to interrupt, challenge and resist the interpretive project, by careening into it. Provisional, disorderly and subversive, fictocriticism offers a way of thinking through, rather than thinking about women’s madness. It seems particularly suited to an investigation of the madwoman in literature, as it dramatises the very disorder and instability the madwoman is said to embody.' (Author's abstract)
1 Psychotic Fictions and Terrible Truths: Reading Madness, Femininity and Excessive Speech Laura Deane , 2005 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antithesis , vol. 15 no. 2005; (p. 74-90)
1 y separately published work icon The Regenerative Spirit : Volume 2 : (Un)settling, (Dis)locations, (Post-)colonial, (Re)presentations - Australian Post-Colonial Reflections Sue Williams (editor), Dymphna Lonergan (editor), Rick Hosking (editor), Laura Deane (editor), Nena Bierbaum (editor), Adelaide : Lythrum Press , 2004 Z1165484 2004 anthology criticism
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