Reshaping Spaces of Home: Reading Post-colonial Literary Adaptations as Affective Pedagogies

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing, potentially, to processes of decolonisation. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, in their book Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, argue that Australian texts which seek to disturb readers by pursuing modes of post-colonial ‘unsettlement’ can activate new discourses and, thereby, inspire social change (1998). Focussing upon undergraduate student responses to two works of Aboriginal Australian literary adaptation, Melissa Lukashenko's short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013) and Leah Purcell's stage play, The Drover's Wife (2016), this chapter draws upon ideas pertaining to ‘affect’ to reveal how, through the subversive reimagining of tropes and structures commonly associated with Western dwelling, works of Indigenous literary adaptation elicit emotional responses in non-Indigenous readers and, in so doing, open up new spaces for listening within existing frameworks of white possession.

Citation

Hall, D. (2022), "Reshaping Spaces of Home: Reading Post-colonial Literary Adaptations as Affective Pedagogies", Boonstra, B., Cutler-Broyles, T. and Rozzoni, S. (Ed.) Moving Spaces and Places (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 27-42. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-226-320221003