Unsettling whiteness: Hulme, Ondaatje, Malouf and Carey (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Keri Hulme, Michael Ondaatje, David Malouf, Peter Carey) [microform]
- Bib ID:
- 3284240
- Format:
- Book and Microform
- Author:
- Rauwerda, Antje Marlene
- Description:
- 250 p.
- ISBN:
- 0612634469
- Summary:
-
Recent representations make whiteness liminal. White male characters in fiction from former settler colonies like Australia, Canada and New Zealand embody the legacy of colonialism as well as the class and cultural privileges associated with whiteness. Injured whiteness implies a critique of outmoded stereotypes and suggests how contemporary whiteness can rupture the boundaries of its own privilege. Chapter One uses the mute and abused Simon in Keri Hulme's The Bone People to examine how colonial whiteness can be the object of critique in a postcolonial allegory. Chapter Two focuses on the burnt Hungarian "English" patient in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient to demonstrate how (and with what effect) colonial whiteness is constructed. Chapter Three considers the "black white" Gemmy in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon to show how anomalous forms of whiteness hidden within the stereotype of the British colonist are exposed.
Chapter Four focuses on Tristan in Peter Carey's The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith to argue that stereotypes of colonial whiteness converge with those of class and cultural privilege so that Tristan's deformity represents racial, cultural and economic marginalisation. This project uses American and British whiteness theory alongside postcolonial theory to reveal both the persistently Manichean vocabulary of postcolonialism and the relevance of different vocabularies and categories of analysis. My dissertation examines the as yet unstudied influence of colonial discourse on constructions of postcolonial whiteness and shows that whiteness in former settler colonies is a product of the conjunction of contemporary privilege and colonial marginalisation.
- Notes:
-
- (UnM)AAINQ63446
- Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-10, Section: A, page: 3405.
- Adviser: Ware Varadharajar.
- Thesis (Ph.D.)--Queen's University at Kingston (Canada), 2001.
- Reproduction:
- Microfiche. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International.
- Subject:
- Literature, English
- Other authors/contributors:
- Queen's University (Kingston, Ont.)
- Copyright:
-
In Copyright
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Copyright status was determined using the following information:
- Material type:
- Literary Dramatic Musical
- Published status:
- Unpublished
- Creation date:
- 2001
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