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No More Boomerang": Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry in Global Indigeneities and the Environment
Published (Version of record)CC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open
Book chapter
"No More Boomerang": Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry
Global Indigeneities and the Environment, pp.222-244
MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
2016
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13 Record Views
Abstract
Based in oral traditions and song cycles, contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry is full of allusions to the environment. Not merely a physical backdrop for human activities, the ancient Aboriginal landscape is a nexus of ecological, spiritual, material, and more-than-human overlays-and one which is increasingly compromised by modern technological impositions. In literary studies, while Aboriginal poetry has become the subject of critical interest, few studies have foregrounded the interconnections between environment and technology. Instead, scholarship tends to focus on the socio-political and cultural dimensions of the writing. How have contemporary Australian Aboriginal poets responded to the impacts of environmental change and degradation? How have poets addressed the effects of modern technology in ancestral environments, or country? This article will develop an ecocritical and technology-focused perspective on contemporary Aboriginal poetry through an analysis of the writings of three significant literary-activists: Jack Davis (1917-2000), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993), and Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). Davis, Noonuccal, and Fogarty strive poetically to draw critical attention to the particular impacts of late modernist technologies on Aboriginal people and country. In developing a critique of invasive technologies that adversely affect the environment and culture, their poetry also invokes the Aboriginal technologies that sustained (and, in places, still sustain) people in reciprocal relation to country.
Details
- Title
- "No More Boomerang": Environment and Technology in Contemporary Aboriginal Poetry
- Creators
- John C Ryan (Author) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Contributors
- Karen L Thornber (Editor)Tom Havens (Editor)
- Publication Details
- Global Indigeneities and the Environment, pp.222-244
- Publisher
- MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute; Basel, Switzerland
- Number of pages
- 1 electronic resource (XII, 244 p.)
- Identifiers
- 991013063113002368
- Copyright
- © 2016 MDPI; under CC BY-NC-ND license
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English; Turkish
- Resource Type
- Book chapter