| Colin Johnson's Dr. Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World offers a subaltern, or Aboriginally-centered, reading of Australian colonial history whose simultaneous and often dialogic renderings of European and Aboriginal consciousness serve alternately iconoclastic and community-building functions. First, accounts of the effect on Aboriginal culture of colonial genocidal practice destabilize the dogmatic history of the colonizer, producing a loss of history analogous to that experienced by indigenous peoples under colonialism. Then, with cultural disenfranchisement and loss of history established as a universal problematic. The traditional oral methods of consensus problem-solving represented in Johnson's novel provide a viable alternative to the dialectical model of cultural interaction that is seen informing the initial colonial encounter.;Narratives located either wholly prior to or wholly after the moment of colonial contact can also serve to destabilize myths of national founding and thereby initiate a healing dialogue between Native and non-Native peoples. Equally marked by a disjunction between cultural past and alienated present, for example, is the solipsistic modernism of James Welch's Winter in the Blood (Gros Ventre/Blackfeet) and the pre-contact purism of Markoosie's Harpoon of the Hunter (Inuit). The apparent unwillingness of such novels to engage in causal readings of the colonial experience virtually necessitates an intertextual and allegorical method of reading; the end product of such reading is the engagement of Native and non-Native reader alike in the fashioning of a more broadly inclusive post-colonial national identity.;Keri Hulme's The Bone People (Maori) and Leslie Silko's Storyteller (Laguna Pueblo) are "neo-oral" texts that document the process by which the modern-day restorationist or culture hero is voluntarily reabsorbed back into the "non-narratable" time of community life. As heroic individualism comes to be displaced by a metaphysics of pan-consciousness and a sociopolitics of interdependence and cooperation, a shift in narrative mode occurs, with individual protagonists decentered in favor of broader renderings of community life. Such collectively-voiced community autobiographies typically resurrect matriarchal forms of social organization, and thus serve as models or blueprints for the refeminization of both Native and national cultures. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)... |
