Unsettling the Colonial Linear Perspective in Kim Scott’s Benang
At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, social Darwinism in Australia gave scientific legitimacy to the colonial representation of the Aborigines as the “dying race.” The “half-caste” himself was described as a mere “passing phase” in the history of white conquest. This paper w...
Đã lưu trong:
| Xuất bản năm: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ces, |
|---|---|
| Tác giả chính: | |
| Định dạng: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Ngôn ngữ: | Anglais |
| Được phát hành: |
Commonwealth Essays and Studies
2022
|
| Truy cập trực tuyến: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Tóm tắt: | At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, social Darwinism in Australia gave scientific legitimacy to the colonial representation of the Aborigines as the “dying race.” The “half-caste” himself was described as a mere “passing phase” in the history of white conquest. This paper will focus on how Kim Scott undertakes in his novel Benang (1999) to subvert the simplistic, destructive and ultimately self-defeating doctrine of progress championed by colonists whose eugenicist policies aimed at “breeding out” the Aboriginal heritage. Scott shows how pioneering megalomania drove those white visionaries of the future Australian race to aspire to being their own beginning and their own end. To counter this colonial narrative which maps out progress as a process of purification, and posits sameness as the only desirable goal on the national horizon, he deploys a circuitous and ultimately circular exploration of time and space. This narrative is informed both by the memories of his narrator’s Aboriginal relatives and by the narrator’s imaginative empathy with his ancestors, which eventually enables him to substitute a pattern of return and permanence for the narcissistic and misguided abstraction of linear progress. |
|---|