Alexis Wright's The Swan Book (2013) as 'crisis fiction'
Date
2022
Authors
Neave, Lucy
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
Brunner - Routledge (US)
Abstract
Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013) has been read as contesting imperialist histories in its use of ironic magical realism: asengaging with debates in Australian indigenous communities about sovereignty; and, as world-making in its portrayal of conflicting and overlapping material forces and temporalities. Previous readings have examined the text’s dramatisation of biopolitical interventions into the lives of Aboriginal people, and the novel’s near-simultaneous evocation of different time periods. To date, scholarship on The Swan Book has not fully conceptualised its assault on western narrative forms. The following paper focuses on the novel’s contestation of crisis and catastrophe as metonyms for colonial and western ways of being and knowledge, and its narratival focus on what could be termed ‘survivance’, a term used (after Derrida) by Native American fiction writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, to whose novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), Wright’s book makes intertextual references. The following paper contends that Wright’s novel offers radical structures of feeling that counter western notions of narrative,history, time and the individual. These are manifest in the text’s inclusion of nested narratives, its critique of western notions of history, its de-hierarchisation of time, and in its disputation of the centrality of the individual.
Description
Keywords
Crisis fiction, Indigenous Australian writing, Alexis Wright, fiction and time
Citation
Collections
Source
Textual Practice
Type
Journal article
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DOI
10.1080/0950236X.2021.1977379
Restricted until
2099-12-31