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ABSTRACT
Kim Scott’s 1999 novel Benang has often been read in terms of the anxieties raised by Australia’s Stolen Generation Report. However, this article argues that the novel is not a direct attempt to lay bare white Australia’s neurosis. Rather, the novel aims to interrogate the colonial discourse that formed the basis of the exploitative, white, monologic, modern nation. Benang also deals with the strategic cultural resistance and negotiating manoeuvrings of the Nyoongars seeking to establish their distinct identity and envision an “ethnonation” within a modern nation. Benang thus examines how simultaneous and contrary discourses of nation formation, one modern and the other ethnic, one hegemonic and the other performative, simultaneously make and unmake Australia. The representation of these two contesting nations in Benang is assessed here with reference to modern theories of nation and nationalism.
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Arindam Das
Arindam Das is an associate professor of business communication at Alliance School of Business, Alliance University, Bangalore, India. He was a recipient of the “Australia-India Council Australian Studies Fellowship” (2010–11). He specializes in postcolonial literature and culture studies (especially Australia and India), consumption culture studies and communication studies. He has contributed to The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia and other journals, and published a chapter in A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott (ed. B. Wheeler). Currently, he is working on a project focusing on the culinary consumption culture of Anglo-Indians from the 18th century to the 21st.