Literature and Politics

This paper provides an analysis of the role of fiction in the contemporary politics of historical injuries across legal and cultural domains. In Australia, fictions have operated as an important device in the evaluation of claims for historical injustice in the law, the High Court using historical and legal fictions to re-narrate native title in Mabo v Queensland (No.2). Here, “fiction” became a key term through which to challenge the prevailing understanding of Australian law and its relationship to Aboriginal entitlement, Chief Justice Brennan stating: “The fiction by which the rights and interests of indigenous inhabitants in land were treated as non-existent was justified by a policy which has no place in the contemporary law of this country” (at 42).

Despite this important decision, contemporary legal, cultural and political domains have failed to reconcile the demands of history on the present; and the significance of past wrongs remains an open, painful and urgent question. In this paper I turn to Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria, to examine its re-imagination of the past, and its argument concerning the continuing effects of past injuries on the present. In its focus on issues of injury and justice, the novel shares concerns with claims made in political and legal domains; the novel also provides new ways of relating these concepts. This comparison opens up a number of questions concerning justice and the nature of interdisciplinary projects, including: how is literature political? what is the role of cultural projects in supplementing and critiquing law and politics? how might the practices of representation of cultural projects provide new structures of intelligibility for claims formed in legal and political domains? and how do legal and political projects in turn “speak back” to culture—what kinds of representations can they provide that are unavailable to literature and how do they create our cultural realities?

Honni van Rijswijk is a Fellow in the Society of Scholars at the Simpson Center for the Humanities. Her current research is concerned with the representation and adjudication of suffering across legal and cultural domains, focusing especially on contemporary understanding of past injuries/injustices.