256 pages
Paperback, 23.4 x 15.3 cm
Published October 2018
ISBN 9781925336429
After Aboriginal author Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria won the Miles Franklin Award in 2007, it rapidly achieved the status of a classic. Carpentaria is now widely read and studied in Australia and overseas, and valued for its imaginative power, its epic reach, and its remarkable use of language.
Indigenous Transnationalism brings together essays by critics from seven different countries, each analysing Carpentaria from a different national perspective. Taken together, they highlight themes that resonate across cultures and continents: the primacy of the land; the battles that indigenous peoples have fought, and continue to fight, for their language, culture and sovereignty; concern for the environment and the effects of pollution. At the same time, by comparing the Aboriginal experience to that of other indigenous peoples, they demonstrate the means by which a transnational approach can highlight resistance to, or the subversion of, national prejudices.
The contributors are Russell West-Pavlov, Nicholas Birns, Lars Jensen, Anne Heith, Estelle Castro-Koshy, Sei Kosugi, Peter Minter and Lynda Ng, who also edited the collection. There is an afterword by Jeanine Leane, and the collection concludes with Alexis Wright’s essay ‘On Writing Carpentaria’, first published in HEAT magazine.