Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature By Nathanael O'Reil ...

Chapter 1

Reading
Post-Colonial Australia

Bill Ashcroft

There is possibly no more vexed question in post-colonial studies than the status of the settler colonies. This is due firstly to a considerable misunderstanding about what “post-colonial” means and also to confusion caused by the deep ambivalence of settler colonial relations to imperial power. Settler colonies, in their appropriations of language, their reinvention of the discourse of place, and their various transformations of colonial discourse, reveal the complexity and rhizomic nature of imperial power. They demonstrate in clearer form what is true of all post-colonial societies: that the colonized can be the colonizers, that imperial power circulates and produces rather than simply confines. Much Australian literature is a critique of Australia's own colonial past, but to read Australian culture as post-colonial does much more than confirm the complexity of its colonial relations; it provides a strategy to understand the adaptations and transformations by which global modernities have come into being.