Identity Recreation In Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Literature

Identity issue is an important topic in the decolonization process of the postcolonial world. During the colonization, the identity of Australian Aborigines is distorted and stigmatized. Under the background of multiculturalism, the identity recreation becomes one of the most urgent and essential tasks for the contemporary Australian Aboriginal writers.This dissertation mainly deals with the religious identity, gender identity and political identity recreation of the Aborigines in three key texts of contemporary Aboriginal writers in three different development periods. The hybrid theory of postcolonialism proposed by famous theorist Homi Bhabha is the main theoretical framework of the paper. It points out the in-betweenness or third space between the cultural borders.The religious identity in Mudrooroo's Wild Cat Falling is the hybridized representation of Aboriginal Dreaming, existentialist and Buddhist thoughts in author's semi-autobiographical narrative. Dreaming is the epistemological basis of Aboriginal people. Dreaming philosophy is the solid foundation to identify and recreate the long-marginalized Aboriginal identity.The transformation of the protagonist Wildcat goes through a juvenile bodgie, to a juvenile delinquent, to a post-convict, to a university art critic, to a milk-bar gang, to an enlightened Wildcat, to an attempted murderer, and finally to a jail bird. The protagonist's cyclical metamorphosis indicates that the Dreaming creation is shaping the many different images of the unnamed protagonist. This is the"adopt"phase of Aboriginal literature development. Aboriginal writers at this phase adopt the white discourse forms such as novel or poetry to write the black contents as a tentative effort to construct religious identity.Since the 1970s, the emergence of autobiographical narrative or life story of Aboriginal people started the journey to recreate the gender identity of contemporary Australian Aboriginal literature. The Aboriginal women bio-writers focus their narrative on the true life experience of their own or of such women characters as their mother, aunt and grandmother. The memory of"stolen generation"is the counter-memory to white documentations which justify their holocaust and cruelty as"civilizing mission and breeding out the black blood."The sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women as"Black Velvet"was never mentioned in white discourses such as history or literature. But to set back the"true history"of dark side in colonizing mission, the Aboriginal women writers such as Sally Morgan, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Glenyse Ward try to fight against the white myth and deconstruct the distorted and stigmatized images of gender identity of contemporary Aboriginal women.The root seeking literature of Aboriginal women writers with Sally Morgan's My Place as one of the key texts is the pilgrimage back to their ancestor's tribal countries to reeducate the long lost traditional Dreaming knowledge and reestablish the spiritual connection with the cultural root. Resistance literature uses the language and genres of the colonizers to get rid of its dominant ideologies. In other words, the colonized people are"writing back,"speaking either of the oppression and racism of the colonizers or the inherent cultural better-ness of the indigenous people. Counter-memory is writing back to the empire, or the metropolitan centre. It is a kind of counter-discourse which has the power to situate, to relativize the authority and stability of a dominant system of utterances which even cannot countenance their existence.This second phase is the"adapt phase"during which the Aboriginal writers adapt the biography and autobiography into the bio-writing of their own or their mother, aunt and grandmother.The third phase is the"adept phase"during which the contemporary Aboriginal writers are adept at employing the white discourse forms such as magic realism and fantasy as their literary genres to shape their Aboriginal discourse in hybridity with their Dreaming mythological narrative. The political struggle and legal struggle such as lawsuits and vote replaced the street struggle such as demonstrations and slogans during this phase, especially after the Mabo decision and the Wik decision encouraged the Aboriginal people to fight for their land rights as the core value of their struggle. iii Alexis Wright's Carpentaria is one of the representative texts of this phase. The book employs the magic realism and dreaming mythology to destroy and renew the white mining town Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The Native Title is the focus of this novel. This chapter is involved with land as the identity symbol and Native Title from discourse struggle to political struggle. The Native Title in this book is achieved through the elemental forces such as wind ( cyclone), water( storm rain and flood), and fire (conflagration over the mine), helped by the ever-resting ancestral totemic Rainbow Serpent, because the pristine and quiet clay pan and ancestral land were disturbed and scarred by the greedy mining developers and white settlers. The ontological and epistemological relationship between land and Aboriginal people is different from the dichotomous self-other and possession relationship between the white people and land. The debris island after the destruction of cyclone and flood is the symbolical success of Native Title struggle of the Aboriginal people. This period of struggle moves to political struggle under the inspiration of the Mabo decision and the Wik decision. And the claim for the compensation for the long occupied land is also strong from some Aboriginal community and political groups.This dissertation consists of five parts: the Introduction deals with literature review of the past research on the identity issue of contemporary Australian Aboriginal literature. Chapter one discusses the religious identity in Mudrooroo's Wild Cat Falling. The Dreaming is the identity construction and resistance for the young protagonist. Chapter two focuses upon the gender identity in bio-writing. It involves with Aboriginal women writer's biographical and autobiographical narrative about their root seeking journey to find their long lost identity. Chapter three handles the political identity in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria with the Native Title as the political focus. The Aboriginal people destroyed and renewed the white settlement and mining premises with the elemental forces from the ancestral Rainbow Serpent. The Conclusion summarizes the hybridized identity in contemporary Australian Aborigines. It points out the originality of the paper: the in-between nature of identity determines the hybridized identity of contemporary Australian Aborigines either in genre or in philosophical basis. Under the background of multiculturalism, the formation of Aboriginal identity is helpful to the reconciliation process in Australia.