Shadowlands, or Somewhere in the Australian Odyssey

Abstract

In this essay, Cahill argues that race has been an organizing principle in Australian literary culture and white settler nationalism. There have been gaps in Australian poetry’s representation of South Asians, those who are not white-passing, those who are unclassifiable, or viewed as recalcitrant. Border thinking has historically informed the spatial road map of citizenship, of who belongs and who does not. Cahill shows how this extends ideologically to the very spaces of discourse and scholarship from where institutional readings of poetry and structural racism operate. Dedicated analysis of how colonial dynamics construct non-white settlers in Australian poetics has been profoundly lacking. This essay acknowledges the physical and psychological impacts of exhaustion, trauma, intimidation, and shame assigned to CaLD poets, and those marginalized. Using the tropes of visibility and a mode of auto-ethnography Cahill gives an account of her creative and critical work as an Australian poet. Cahill describes communications and rhetorical tools that address the opacities in representation. Cahill argues that these discursive activities have the potential to restore textual erasures, and to expand subjectivity. This textual, layered essay unpacks the biopolitics, the historical, legal and institutional frameworks that enable the capacity for power or, the regulation of poetry’s constituents.