(Download) "Memory Against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone (Critical Essay)" by English Studies in Canada " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Memory Against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone (Critical Essay)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 214 KB
Description
IN TASMANIAN WRITER RICHARD FLANAGAN'S Death of a River Guide (1996) there is fleeting mention of an Aboriginal woman named Lallah. Friend to the contemporary indigenous protagonist's ancestor, Black Pearl, Lallah rates no more than a sentence. In a novel so focused on Tasmania's brutal past, and the way that past continues to derail the present, the brevity of the reference to Truganini is striking, as is the obscuring of her identity. (1) Repeatedly constructed as "last of her race" in Australian settler-culture narratives ranging from Alpha Crucis's "Trucanini's Dirge" (1876) to Midnight Oil's popular song "Truganini" (1993), Death of a River Guide resituates the figure as one among many Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors. Such a move respects the campaign waged by the indigenous community since the 1970s against the persistent myth that Truganini's death in 1876 marked her people's extinction. Notwithstanding a chorus of critical disapproval, (2) literary renditions of a similar history of dispossession in another former British settler-invader colony still take a very different approach to Richard Flanagan's. Bernice Morgan's Cloud of Bone, on which this paper focuses, is one of the latest in a long succession of texts in a problematic vein. Like Truganini, Shanawdithit, who died in 1829 in St John's, became and, to a much greater extent, remains emblematic of the supposed disappearance of indigenous people from Newfoundland. The cultural weight given to Shanawdithit's death has historically proven a particular problem for the Mi'kmaq population on the island. (3) The obsession with her designation as "last" has also, arguably, caused a lack of interest in archaeological research suggesting the Beothuk may have been part of the Innu nation. (4) As Robin McGrath wryly notes "Should [Innu leader] Elizabeth Penashue turn out to be first-cousin to Shanawdithit, Newfoundlanders are going to have a hard time ignoring her vociferous protest against the Lower Churchill Development project" (90).