Postcolonial displacements, popular music and the sacred

Abstract

This essay, through a theorized analysis of Australian popular song lyrics, investigates a range of understandings of “home”, including the exclusions and sacred connotations that inform the term. Against accusations of mere sentimentality or nostalgia regarding a desire for “home” as familiar and comforting and in response to Levinas’s related arguments that a desire for home is at the root of splitting “humanity into natives and strangers”, it argues that it is necessary for postcolonial Australia to embrace “homelessness” at the heart of any understanding of “home”.

Keywords:

• sacred
• home
• popular music
• homelessness
• Levinas

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the following copyright holders for the use of their song lyrics: Yothu Yindi for “Treaty”; Ivor Davies for “Great Southern Land”; Shane Howard for “Solid Rock”; Midnight Oil for “Beds are Burning” and “Maralinga”; and thanks to Midnight Oil for the use of the image on p. 223.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lyn McCredden

Lyn McCredden is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of several books including James McAuley (1992) and Bridgings: Readings in Australian Women’s Poetry (1996, with Rose Lucas), and editor of Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions (2002, with Frances Devlin‐Glass). Her current research focuses on forms of sacredness in postcolonial cultures.