Naslov
Rosa Praed’s My Australian Girlhood as an ‘Alter’ Space

Autori
Klepač Tihana

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
Alter/Native Spaces / - , 2019, 25-25

Skup
Alter/Native Spaces

Mjesto i datum
Toulon, Francuska, 18.09.2019. - 20.09.2019

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Nije recenziran

Ključne riječi
settler colonial society, warring society, Rosa Praed, My Australian Girlhood, Myall Creek murders

Sažetak
Ghassan Hage in his Alterpolitics defines settler colonial societies as warring societies wherein “war is no longer a transmitted state but a permanent feature of the social situation” and “the whole of society from its economy to its culture becomes part of the reproduction of this permanent state of war.” The term perfectly describes the late nineteenth-century Queensland frontier described in Rosa Praed’s My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impression of Bush Life. Though published in 1902, the book describes the events that date back a generation. It was the high tide of British imperialism, when most British people believed in the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and its “manifest destiny”. Preventing its fulfilment stood the indigenous population of the continent unwilling to give up their living space, their culture, their economic and social system. Thus when Praed describes a young girl’s view of the indigenous population, the Myall Creek murders, the Frazer massacre she is creating “the savage slot” (Hage), a description of radical cultural alterity, one that does not exist in our Western structures based on binary oppositions, one that is so different that it disorients us. Yet it is otherness that has something to say to us. Namely, Praed’s text attaches no easy blame to the brutalities committed by both blacks and whites on the frontier, which won Praed the attribute of an “unpopular radical.” Aware of the weakness of her (female) voice in patriarchal Victorian age, this progressive intellectual creates her “alter” space of existence, an other reality, in the, traditionally innocuous genre, the autobiography of childhood.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija, Povijest, Interdisciplinarne humanističke znanosti, Književnost

POVEZANOST RADA