Abstract
The ‘nonhuman’ encompasses such a vast variety of different agents that it seems difficult to collect them all under the same term. However, insisting on a strict division between them may still be rooted firmly in a Western-centric need to classify and categorise. Based partly on the Aboriginal concept of ‘country,’ Ambelin Kwaymullina’s young adult (YA) The Tribe trilogy endeavours to make varied nonhuman voices audible by representing multiple nonhuman agents, which, on the surface, seem vastly different from one another but are similar in their value and dignity. This chapter explores Kwaymullina’s strategies for making the nonhuman heard as a collective without denying the individuality of each nonhuman agent. It also strives to explain how Kwaymullina uses the genre of YA speculative fiction to reach a wider audience without denying the reality of the beliefs Kwaymullina holds and represents. The concept of a sentient nonhuman world is thus not weakened because of its framing within speculative fiction; instead, it is reconfirmed as a futuristic but very much possible human-nonhuman dynamic, which requires not magic but merely human awareness to come into being.
Kwaymullina, Ambelin 2016. The Disappearance of Ember Crow, 412.
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Notes
- 1.
Referred to as AW, EC, and GS in this chapter from here on respectively.
- 2.
Window and mirror text are designations employed in the study of children and young adult literature. They refer to texts “where readers see into a different perspective or experience than their own” (Herb et al. 2017, 112), and texts “where readers may see characters and stories reflective of their own lives” (112).
- 3.
For further discussion of the ability of YA dystopias to positively influence their readership as well as of the predominance of young female heroines in societies following ecological catastrophes, refer to Basu, Broad, and Hintz (2014); Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz (2014); James (2016); and Weik von Mossner (2017).
- 4.
A story contrasting a complete lack of respect for ones’ natural environment with the holistic view of ‘country’ as an interconnected web of being is, of course, especially poignant in an Australian context since some of the consequences of that conflict have already been played out on the continent, as has been shown convincingly by Sheila Collingwood-Whittick among others.
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Burger, B. (2021). “All Life Matters, or None Does”: Connecting Human and Nonhuman Worlds in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Tribe Series. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_15
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