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In Writing Belonging at the Millennium, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today; the recognition of colonization’s destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia’s contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place – something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.
'To read Potter’s book is—if you have not already—to begin re-cognising an understanding of the way literary texts by non-Indigenous writers absorb, respond to, repeat and/or critically illuminate social discourses that co-construct historical moments. [...] The challenge is: how, during a time of intensifying ecological disaster, are we to avoid reactivating narratives that re-install and re-naturalise non-Indigenous presence while reaffirming Indigenous dispossession? Writing Belonging at the Millennium will not answer this question for you. But it will provide you with a map of some of what’s been done, and to what effect. I urge you to read this book. It’s clear. It’s urgent. Potter’s work is forensic and generous. There are no arrogant or generalist pronouncements here, no striding across the colonial stage.'
Introduction
Chapter One: Anxious Belonging
Chapter Two: Literary Expectations: Grounding Belonging
Chapter Three: Getting Lost with Nikki Gemmell
Chapter Four: Redeeming Environments
Chapter Five: Desiccated and Infective: Writing in Thea Astley’s Drylands
Chapter Six: The Past is All Around: Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime
Chapter Seven: Toxic Imaginaries: Undoing Origins and Endings
Afterword