- Title
- Framed by reconciliation : Reading cross-cultural space in early twenty-first century Australian literature
- Creator
- Hall, Demelza
- Date
- 2015
- Type
- Text; Thesis; PhD
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/97682
- Identifier
- vital:10247
- Identifier
- http://library.federation.edu.au/record=b2679981
- Abstract
- This thesis analyses literary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian writers, focussing on the production and function of space in scenes of constructive cross-cultural interaction. All of the novels examined can be read as pedagogies of reconciliation due to their engagement with – and subversion of – the goals, processes, issues, and outcomes of the 1990s reconciliation movement. Yet, while these texts are all broadly framed by reconciliation, this thesis argues that it is their commitment to reimagining spaces of home which marks them as particularly productive reconciliatory pedagogies. One of the primary assertions of this thesis is that for reconciliatory discourses to become useful pedagogies – to educate and inspire and connect people, rather than just inform and unsettle – they need to create spaces of hope. Home became a contested site during the reconciliation years, with processes of historical revisioning and reports such as Bringing Them Home forcing a reconsideration of what it might actually mean to be at home. By moving away from traditional domestic spaces and staid conceptions of dwelling, these narratives attempt to heterogeneously reconfigure notions of home and nation. This thesis is organised around specific spaces and spatial metaphors, and the critical paradigms informing them. Chapter 2, for example, examines ways in which the metaphor of ‘the Gap’ structures ideas of intercultural exchange in reconciliatory discourse and postcolonial criticism. Chapter 3 – which analyses Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye – focusses on the space of the colonial homestead and how it is used to frame notions of impasse, or unbelonging. Chapter 4 examines a series of “interspaces” and how “dwelling-in-motion” frames cross-cultural transformation in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country, Gail Jones’s Sorry and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. Moving away from traditional conceptions of home, Chapter 5 analyses how heterotopic spaces are deployed to frame scenes of exile in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Tim Winton’s Dirt Music and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. Chapter 6 explores how conceptions of being in country frame notions of belonging and well-being in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance. Finally, in conclusion, Chapter 7 suggests that spaces of hope can emerge in reconciliatory discourses when home, like nation, is recognised as a site of entanglement.; Doctor of Philosophy
- Publisher
- Federation University Australia
- Rights
- Copyright (c) Demelza Hall
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- Cross-cultural space; Twenty-first century Australian literature
- Full Text
- Thesis Supervisor
- Tasker, Meg
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