In Search of Blak Magic : Magic Realism ~ Aboriginal Novels
Ultimo
:
2024
28277078
2024
single work
thesis
'As a published writer who applies magic realism to my works of fiction, I undertook this practice-related research project to contribute to existing global research on magic realism in literature, and to better understand my own creative practice. This research focused on two questions: what are key attributes of magic realist literature? And to what extent can magic realism be identified in Aboriginal authored novels?'
Source: Abstract.
'Engagements with walking, wandering, roaming the land are not new to Australian writers or filmmakers. A recognition of ambulation as discursive, as world-making, continues today: “First you have to learn to walk,” announces Stephen Muecke in a new book, co-authored with Paddy Roe, on learning how to move on Country. Muecke’s teachers and guides are Indigenous knowledge-holders; he walks only in their footsteps. But in post-Mabo narratives more generally, whose lands are being walked on? Whose worlds are being made as mobility is performed? This essay examines the trope of roaming and of the foot in contemporary Australian Indigenous-authored narratives, wherein walking or mobility in story invokes not only a connection to Country but an enactment of law making and an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty. In a seminal speech in Adelaide in 2003, Indigenous legal philosopher Irene Watson asked “Are we Free to Roam?” Watson asserted the freedom to walk, “to sing and to live with the land of [one’s] ancestors” as a measure of the attainment of Indigenous sovereignty. She called for Aboriginal voices to look “beyond the limited horizon” of the time towards a moment and place of sovereignty. I argue that these voices have now emerged. Beginning with an examination of Ivan Sen’s film Beneath Clouds (2002), I then examine walking and movement in a selection of more recent Indigenous-authored novels (by Alexis Wright, Kim Scott and Julie Janson) and film (by Richard J. Frankland), as well as in new legal thinking which suggests that law-walking might be more prevalent in Australia than previously known.' (Publication abstract)
'Australian Aboriginal stories have thrived for thousands of years through oral tradition and Aboriginal author Alexis Wright invokes this tradition in the construction of her novel Carpentaria. This article investigates the orality of Carpentaria, which stages “oral” narrators who speak differently to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readerships. First, using Bakhtin’s notion of “speech genre”, the article explores why Wright creates these two narrative layers. Second, it investigates the language use and tone of voice in the framing narrative that addresses non-Indigenous readers. Third, it looks closely at Wright’s linguistic experimentation in the embedded narrative, creating multiple oral effects through language and mobilising the storytelling dynamics of performance, spontaneity, rhythms and mnemonics. Finally, it discusses how her creative use of orality plays off and with its Western literary conceptions and enacts cross-cultural communication between the two readerships.' (Publication abstract)
'This chapter considers Alexis Wright’s trajectory as a writer from Grog War (1997) to The Swan Book (2013), arguing that her body of work presents a consistent vision that is “at once Aboriginal and Australian, modern and ancient, local and yet outward-looking.” It pays special attention to the notion of “all times,” the relation between form and politics, and how imaginative sovereignty underpins Wright’s work.' (Publication abstract)
Wright describes what drove her to write her novel Carpentaria, stating that 'For a long time while I was exploring how to write Carpentaria, I tried to come to some understanding of two principal questions: firstly, how to understand the idea of Indigenous people living with the stories of all the times of this country, and secondly, how to write from this perspective.'
