Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive
In this chapter I hope to draw out the tangle of memory, history, and affect that accrues in settler colonial places, turning to the Mid West region of Western Australia as a case study. In this place, my personal historyand that of my family’s migration to Australia intersect with a larger narrativ...
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| Format: | Book Chapter |
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Rowman & Littlefield International
2016
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| Online Access: | http://www.rowmaninternational.com/ http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51160 |
| _version_ | 1848758630421102592 |
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| author | Costantino, Thea |
| author_facet | Costantino, Thea |
| author_sort | Costantino, Thea |
| building | Curtin Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | In this chapter I hope to draw out the tangle of memory, history, and affect that accrues in settler colonial places, turning to the Mid West region of Western Australia as a case study. In this place, my personal historyand that of my family’s migration to Australia intersect with a larger narrative of clearing the landscape for European settlement, and a body of cultural production that attempts, uneasily, to make sense of the settler’s relationship to such places. I contend that the experience of occupying rural places in Australia is generative of a particular sensibility towards settler colonial space that is rooted in ambivalence. This anxious relationship to place is characteristic of the non-Indigenous, white settler colonial subject; it is an experience beset by contradictory impulses of nostalgia and anxiety, a struggle between the cultural memory of colonial perpetration and the imperative to forget or disavow this past by displacing it defensively onto the landscape. As a range of scholars have discussed, this fraught relationship of the settler to the ‘second world’ space of Australia has a history of, and continues to be envisaged through, Gothic motifs of ruin, enclosure, transgression, and cursed inheritance (McLean 1993; Ng 2007; Scott and Biron 2010; Turcotte 1998). |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T09:47:03Z |
| format | Book Chapter |
| id | curtin-20.500.11937-51160 |
| institution | Curtin University Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T09:47:03Z |
| publishDate | 2016 |
| publisher | Rowman & Littlefield International |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | curtin-20.500.11937-511602017-03-17T08:29:48Z Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive Costantino, Thea In this chapter I hope to draw out the tangle of memory, history, and affect that accrues in settler colonial places, turning to the Mid West region of Western Australia as a case study. In this place, my personal historyand that of my family’s migration to Australia intersect with a larger narrative of clearing the landscape for European settlement, and a body of cultural production that attempts, uneasily, to make sense of the settler’s relationship to such places. I contend that the experience of occupying rural places in Australia is generative of a particular sensibility towards settler colonial space that is rooted in ambivalence. This anxious relationship to place is characteristic of the non-Indigenous, white settler colonial subject; it is an experience beset by contradictory impulses of nostalgia and anxiety, a struggle between the cultural memory of colonial perpetration and the imperative to forget or disavow this past by displacing it defensively onto the landscape. As a range of scholars have discussed, this fraught relationship of the settler to the ‘second world’ space of Australia has a history of, and continues to be envisaged through, Gothic motifs of ruin, enclosure, transgression, and cursed inheritance (McLean 1993; Ng 2007; Scott and Biron 2010; Turcotte 1998). 2016 Book Chapter http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51160 http://www.rowmaninternational.com/ Rowman & Littlefield International restricted |
| spellingShingle | Costantino, Thea Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title | Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title_full | Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title_fullStr | Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title_full_unstemmed | Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title_short | Ruination and Recollection: Plumbing the Colonial Archive |
| title_sort | ruination and recollection: plumbing the colonial archive |
| url | http://www.rowmaninternational.com/ http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/51160 |