Benang: from the heart: \u27I found myself among paper\u27 (original) (raw)

Diaspora as a Repercussion of Colonization in Kim Scott’s ‘Benang’

SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH

Colonization created upheavals around the world. The worlds of Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals which were unaware of the other world that existed were shattered and scattered by the colonial rule. The indigenous people were subjected to cruel treatment at the hands of colonizers. In the Americas the mass killings of the natives took place by intentional spreading of the epidemics. Same incidents took place in Australia. The colonial rule always invented novel ways to destroy the native people, culture and their society. For instance, the policy of Doctrine of lapse which was introduced in India destroyed the local rulers and the princely states. Due to this many princely states in India came under the rule of British. In Australia to eliminate aboriginals the white government came up with the idea of assimilation policy. Assimilation policy was a policy of absorbing aboriginal people onto white society through the process of removing children from their aboriginal families...

America is in the Heart as a Colonial-Immigrant Novel Engaging the Bildungsroman

Kritika Kultura, 2007

Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart, the first Filipino American novel, has held a special place as one of the first of Asian American literary writing, but its craft has also been questioned because of the plainness of its language and its repetitious, tortuous plot. Through an evaluation and analysis of the novel as a Bildungsroman, this paper argues that the seeming failure of the plot to provide a coherent narrative of development is in itself the literary manifestation of the frustrating socioeconomic realities in which the first Filipinos in America lived. Bulosan's novel is therefore not so much a failed Bildungsroman but a twentieth-century Filipino American engagement of a nineteenth-century form in which the encounter not only uncovers the myth of universality of the form but also asserts the self-representation of the heretofore unrepresented. As such, America is in the Heart needs to be read not only as a record of but as an involvement in the Filipino American struggle in the mid-twentieth century.

Disgrace, Benang, and the search for Benvolence

Journal of Australian Studies, 2005

The concept of reconciliation as realised in South Africa and Australia in the late twentieth century depends on a benevolent willingness on the part of the patriarchal nation-state to provide narrative space for, and sincerely listen to, personal stories of suffering and atrocity. Perpetrators of wrongdoing, in turn, are brought into a reconciliation narrative of apology and redemption, in which an admission of guilt or display of repentance or understanding is central: some attempt to perform a captatio benevolentiae-an act through which one captures the goodwill of the audience-is required. This article juxtaposes two representative figures of white male obstinacy in the face of such expectations in two literary novels, Disgrace, by the South African writer J M Coetzee, and Benang, by Indigenous Australian writer Kim Scott. This article begins by reading J M Coetzee's complex 'ethical' characterisation of David Lurie in Disgrace as a sympathetic endorsement of white resistance to the South African process of reconciliation. Coetzee mobilises a range of issues that have featured in academic discussions, including the impossibility of speaking for Others, and the problems with finite and statist resolutions to the seemingly irreconcilable atrocities of apartheid. However, through a seemingly ethical gesture, the novel foregrounds white authority/centrality and re-conceptualises the female body (and particularly, the raped female body) as the ground upon which white masculine agency and self-reflective identity are refigured. In his inability to be reconciled to the mores of the 'new' South Africa, Coetzee's Lurie is constructed as somewhat complex: guilty and not guilty; glibly self-conscious, and worthy of some type of understanding in his potential to suffer. However, I am reading Lurie's inability to perform the witnessing function required of him-in terms of benevolently 'listening' or repenting-as an appropriation of the narrative of reconciliation in the service of an examination of his own suffering. Indigenous author Kim Scott's Benang: From the Heart also offers a case study of a white patriarch ostensibly made irrelevant by reconciliation-era politics. Scott's Em Scat, however, is a figure to which sympathy, understanding and complexity are not applicable. In its representation of a white subjectivity corroded by a combination of racism, violence and desire, Scott's text, narrated by one of Scat's many Indigenous descendants, Harley, counters the potentially sympathetic reading of whiteness and white masculinity represented in Coetzee's Disgrace. Benang is a harrowing family history that details the effect of a malevolent white patriarch, Benevolence Ern Scat, on the Nyoongar people he attempts to control through the interracial breeding 'encouraged' by the policy of assimilation. The focus of Scott's text is not Ern Scat, but the products of his deliberate miscegenation: Harley, and others who are seeking to both rediscover their own identities and to ascertain their relationship to whiteness. Scat is forced to witness this rediscovery of Aboriginal identity that comes despite-and because of-his attempt to produce 'the first white man bom', a bid to achieve a form of 'ethnic cleansing' encouraged by legislative definitions of (non)Aboriginality. Scat, for whom we cannot possibly have sympathy, and whose suffering is his alone, is progressively elided as a textual concern, and superceded by the focus on the need for Indigenous cultural renewal and reconciliation. In reading Benang alongside Disgrace, I suggest that these two key characters' refusal of particular acts of witnessing amounts to a rejection of a discursive mechanism that is, conceptually at least, emasculating insofar as it demands from the white masculine subject an openness to feeling and emotion, as well as a positioning of the self as submissive, repentant and confessional. David Lurie, for instance, reflects a stubborn adhesion to stoic masculine codes of control and agency in the face of what is characterised as a puritanical and politically correct, female-dominated and non-white university committee. The reluctance to accede to a feminised discourse is matched, by both Lurie and Scat, by their rejection, silencing and violation of the bodies of women, and their contrapuntal justification, affirmation and vocalisation of the rights-in physical and legal terms-of white men. This article will address the representative nature of David Lurie and will determine the extent to which he can be seen as a figure of post-apartheid recalcitrance whose Australian counterpart can be identified in the eventually silent character of Em Scat, agent and symbol of white Australia. The unwillingness or inability of these men to accept social change keeps them outside the witnessing dynamic of reconciliation: David Lurie must deal with the overturning of the apartheid order and the arrival of economic rationalism, and Em Scat finds himself no longer 'in control' of racial programming. These men can be seen as examples of 'the personal site of the body becom[ing] a sign of the political fortunes of the collective culture': 1 in resisting racial and political change, the characters of David Lurie and Em Scat are metaphors for a powerful, lasting force within their respective societies, that is, a refusal to engage with the reconciliation process. This article's reading of Lurie and Scat as metaphorical embodiments of a refusal to witness requires some explanation: reading Disgrace allegorically as a novel that captures the decline of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa must be done cautiously. Disgrace takes place in the late twentieth century, and a 'typical' post-apartheid event-black violence against white farmers-structures Coetzee's

33. Benang: Establishing, Maintaining and Subverting Power

TOPOS: Journal of Space and Humanities vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 115-122., 2012

The paper discusses how Kim Scott's novel Benang constructs the sexuality of the grandfather figure obsessed with his two passions: building and eugenics. Perceiving eugenics as a project in which he can combine his passions, he plans to emasculate his son and grandson systematically. Finally, however, the protagonist recognizes his strategies, which leads to his own assumption of power and identity.

Violent Traces.Writing Cambodia

CONSEQUENCE magazine, 2017

Brief highlights of social realism in Cambodia's modern literature and art during the modern period until 2017.

Journal of Literature and Art Studies Issue 1 Vol.13 2023 January

David Publishing Company, 2023

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of 1.5 generation Vietnamese-American writers who were raised and educated in America have emerged. Their writings have explored the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on immigrants, offering American literature an alternative angle on the conflict. Lan Cao, a Vietnamese-American, is the author of The Lotus and the Storm which set in war-torn Vietnam. The novel's main characters go through the excruciating anguish of losing families and displacement. Meanwhile, they suffered from everlasting trauma although they immigrated to the United States. This essay examines the novel's ongoing war trauma and postwar memories, illustrates the post-traumatic syndrome brought on by the Vietnam War in the Vietnamese people as a whole, and investigates how practitioners heal the trauma.