Postcolonizing the Australian Corpus: Indigeneity in the Fiction of Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Sally Morgan, and Mudrooroo

Abstract

This study of Indigenous-Australian literature has its seeds in a concern with the uncanniness embedded in multicultural developments in contemporary Western societies and how this affects identity formation. As such, the manifestation of the uncanny allows us to look into how postcoloniality and postmodernity link up. These are times when European identity is in flux, but there have been others. In a well-known essay published in 1919, Sigmund Freud reflected on the decline of Empire and on the Great War that had been questioning Europe’s modernity, and analyzed the existential anxiety of the period in terms of the uncanny: a disquieting, even frightening sensation rooted in the familiar becoming strange.