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Writing Belonging at the Millennium

Notes from the Field on Settler-Colonial Place

Emily Potter author Rod Giblett editor Warwick Mules editor Emily Potter editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Intellect

Published:15th Dec '19

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Writing Belonging at the Millennium cover

In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.

'To read Potter’s book is—if you have not already—to begin re-cognising an understanding of the way literary texts by non-Indigenous writers absorb, respond to, repeat and/or critically illuminate social discourses that co-construct historical moments. [...] The challenge is: how, during a time of intensifying ecological disaster, are we to avoid reactivating narratives that re-install and re-naturalise non-Indigenous presence while reaffirming Indigenous dispossession? Writing Belonging at the Millennium will not answer this question for you. But it will provide you with a map of some of what’s been done, and to what effect. I urge you to read this book. It’s clear. It’s urgent. Potter’s work is forensic and generous. There are no arrogant or generalist pronouncements here, no striding across the colonial stage.'

-- Hayley Singer, Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology

‘Writing Belonging at the Millennium continues Emily Potter’s passionate quest to understand Australia in all its contentious and contested facets… Against divisive histories and loyalties, and the pressing realities of the Anthropocene that continue to inform what Australia is, Potter argues forcefully that “we need stories that admit to a world in which our shadows are with us rather than erased.” This is a deeply critical and hopeful book that is essential reading if we are to fully reckon with those shadows.

Elspeth Probyn, professor of gender and cultural studies, University of Sydney. Author of Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press, 2016)

 

-- Elspeth Probyn

Emily Potter’s brilliant readings of a range of Australian literary texts launch the concept of belonging in a quite new way. Belonging is offered here as a strong alternative to simply being Australian… [instead it] is about having valued attributes or attachments, ones that are hard to acquire and to let go. Through storytelling, she argues, white Australia is beginning to recompose its attachments, to understand Indigenous custodianship and to share its political responsibilities.

Stephen Muecke, professor and jury chair of English language and literature, University of Adelaide

-- Stephen Mu

ISBN: 9781841505138

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

190 pages

New edition