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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.'
— Hayley Singer, Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology
Emily Potter is an associate professor in writing and literature in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University.
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