
Imagined Topographies : From Colonial Resource to Postcolonial Homeland.
Title:
Imagined Topographies : From Colonial Resource to Postcolonial Homeland.
Author:
Highfield, Jonathan Bishop.
ISBN:
9781453909232
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (194 pages)
Series:
Postcolonial Studies ; v.20
Postcolonial Studies
Contents:
Contents -- Acknowledgments vii -- Chapter One. Introduction 1 -- Chapter Two. "An Irish Way" 19 -- History, dispossession, and the poetics of landscape 19 -- Speaking the bog: Landscape and identity in the works of Seamus Heaney, John Dunne, and Catherine Harper 26 -- Archaeology of reconciliation: Ciaran Carson's Belfast Confetti and John Kindness's Belfast Frescoes 39 -- Chapter Three. Mapping Amazonia 51 -- "Relief data unreliable" 51 -- Rewriting the epic: Wilson Harris's Eternity to Season 60 -- Press your face to the earth and check out the real situation: Sustainable economies in Amazonia 75 -- Chapter Four. Dreaming Outback 83 -- Constructing a national identity in Australia 83 -- "A breath out of the heart of the country": The landscapes of David Malouf 94 -- "Danger, Danger, Danger": Anticolonialism and the animal world in Peter Carey's Illywhacker 107 -- "By Crikey, he's a naughty boy": The dreaming of Steve Irwin 116 -- Many canoes and land rights 123 -- Chapter Five. Conclusion: "Trodding on the wine press" 133 -- Notes 149 -- Bibliography 167 -- Index 175.
Abstract:
One important legacy of colonialism is the separation of a culture from the land upon which its people live. Populations are displaced; topographical objects are renamed, and the land becomes a resource to be exploited. Starting with three landscapes viewed as threatening by the Europeans who colonized them, Imagined Topographies examines the ways artists, writers, and musicians distill new meaning in formerly colonized spaces through the articulation of landscapes that are homelands, not commodities. In the Irish bog Seamus Heaney explores legacies of violence, John Dunne looks at rural poverty and religious faith, and Catherine Harper creates art connecting landscape and gender. Influenced by the Amazon, Wilson Harris creates dense multi-layered Guyanese epics, Karen Tei Yamashita plays with the telenovela to explore the role of multinational corporations in deforestation, and in recordings Douglas Quin combines the natural world with the technological, raising questions of connected cultural and natural loss. The two landscapes of Australia, the empty land of the colonizers and the fertile land known by the original inhabitants, are explored in the novels of David Malouf, while Peter Carey turns to the animal world to define the Australian national character, and the people of Ramingining, in films and a website created in collaboration with the filmmaker Rolf de Heer, intervene in the Australian land rights struggle. Challenging the dominant perceptions of land in these regions, artists, musicians, and writers create new visions of landscapes tied to cultures where social and ecological justice offer choices other than emigration and habitat destruction.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
Click to View