Concinnity : heterotopic possibilities in swamps and other spaces

Abstract

Alexis Wright is an award-winning Indigenous Australian writer who has brought into the national narrative of Australia a markedly Aboriginal voice. Alexis Wright's third novel, The Swan Book, tells an Aboriginal story that is deeply rooted in cultural pride while testifying to the contemporaneity of the Western colonial oppression against her people. The novel is celebrated for incorporating elements of Aboriginal cosmology within the Western literary form of the novel. In the critical component of this thesis, I suggest that Wright's unique treatment of place, based on an Aboriginal world-view, opens up possibilities for multiple discourses to operate within its seemingly ambiguous landscape. For the purpose of my thesis, I will employ Michel Foucault's notion of heterotopia to analyse the place of the swamp, the Swan Lake, as a central and consistent heterotopic space in the narrative. Swan Lake is constructed as a focused subversive space in Wright's narrative world where the protagonist originates from and makes a full narrative circle to return to. Foucault's heterotopic spaces have the uncanny quality of simultaneously representing as well as contesting power relations within a culture. Heterogeneity, an acknowledgement of diverse possibilities within a single space, is a productive starting point to generate a meaningful discussion on the polysemous world created in The Swan Book, its spatial representation in the narrative, and its political underpinnings. The creative component of this thesis is comprised of three short stories that are thematically interlinked in their explorations of three separate heterotopic spaces, and the way different characters navigate their way towards self-realization from within these spaces. The heterotopic spaces laid out in the stories echo the larger socio-political ideologies at play in the respective worlds of the narratives, and how the process of contestation occurs once the protagonists enter these sites.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English