Alexis Wright, "Relation" in Carpentaria as a contribution to thinking decolonisation and ecopoetics

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Abstract

This paper while not directly engaging with particular schools that consider questions of decolonisation and ecopoetics, will contribute to debates in these fields by examining the work of the Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright (of the Waanyi people) through the prism of the idea of ‘relation’. In her essay ‘On Writing Carpentaria’ Wright cites the Caribbean writer and theorist Édouard Glissant and his work The Poetics of Relation. Discussing his idea of ‘nonhistory’ she argues, ‘through a writer’s relationship with the poetics of relation, which is a relationship with all of the senses of telling, listening, connection, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings, the key will be found to transforming mentalities and reshaping societies’ (Wright, ‘On Writing’, FN 10, 150). Glissant’s concept of relation, as others have noted, aligns with the work of the French philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Deleuze and Guattari (which in turn align with understandings apparent in Spinoza and certain of the pre-Socratics), wherein being is thought in terms of relationships and becoming rather than in terms of fixed and clearly separated entities. This idea — that relation is being, and that we are determined by the relations that comprise us and into which we enter — is also central to Aboriginal thinking, where identity, law, meaning and spiritual understanding are tied to relationships with country, people and the stories (or relations) that bind them together and renew them.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)61-68
Number of pages8
JournalFrontiers in Asia-Pacific Language and Culture Studies
Volume1
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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