Construction Of Aboriginality In Sally Morgan's My Place

The beginning of the Aboriginal occupancy of Australia is often dated back to more than forty thousand years ago. But since the white invasion in 1788, the indigenous culture has been badly distorted, despised and neglected, which makes the Aborigines suffer from a severe identity crisis. Their racial and cultural subjugation lasted until the arrival of the worldwide wave of decolonization after the Second World War, together with the abolition of the White Australia Policy in Australia. As a new school of rapidly developing literature in Australia, Aboriginal writing resurfaced in 1960s with an aim to awaken the Aboriginal consciousness on a larger scale and articulate their own concerns. Sally Morgan's book My Place is motivated in the same way and is also part of the response to the Aboriginal political situation in Australia.My Place is a powerful autobiography of three Aboriginal generations, with a deeply moving account of a search for truth of the family history, during which they were confronted with their own oppressed history and fundamental questions about their identities. It is one of the best sellers in Australian literary history, with a record of more than 500,000 copies. In order to reclaim a place for Aboriginal people and their culture in Australia, Sally Morgan delves into the past, retelling the history by weaving the stories of her mother, her grandmother and her great-uncle. This worldwide acclaimed novel manages to disclose a period of the shameful history concealed in Australia, committing to explain Aboriginality to a pre-dominantly white readership. My Place is one of the first Aboriginal writings to introduce many white readers as well as young Aboriginal people, who grow up without any knowledge of the dark history of colonial Australia, for the first time to the actualities of Aboriginal experience, their exploitation by white settlers, and forcible separation of children from their families.This paper consists of six chapters, intending to analyze the text from the point of Aboriginal identity by means of a postcolonial approach. After Introduction, the topic of Aboriginality in the novel is introduced in Chapter Two and its developmental definitions as well as its particular concept are fully examined in the third chapter. In Chapter Four, the paper gives the historical background of the Stolen Generation to explain the breakage of Sally's Aboriginality. Her construction of Aboriginality, which consists of four stages: Pre-encountering Aboriginality, Encountering Aboriginality. Immersion and Emersion of Aboriginality and Internalization of Aboriginality. is further explored in detail in Chapter Five. The autobiographic novel My Place will be...