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

situated forms of modernization. Modernity is not so much adopted as adapted and re-created, and increasingly, modernities may adapt other, alternative modernities.

I want to explore, therefore, the somewhat outrageous idea of Australia as an alternative modernity. Australia is a westernized, developed nation, so how could it be alternative? The habit has been to think of alternative modernities as alternative to the West. Yet we might ask, “What is the West in this global age?” or more exactly, “Where is the boundary between the West and non-West?” If there is a boundary, isn’t it more than geographical, more even than cultural, cutting through class, race, and gender? A better word than “alternative” might be “multiple.” Literature is a strategic discourse in this because the appropriations and transformations of imperial language and literature by post-colonial writers provide a precise model of the process by which alternative modernities come into being. Therefore, the idea of Australia as one of a multiplicity of modernities can be examined through its literature and other cultural production and in particular the ways in which it has been creatively adapted—ways that are similar to other post-colonial societies.

The problem with perceptions of settler colony post-coloniality really stems from a common misapprehension that the term “post-colonial” refers either to an ontology or a chronology, which leads to the spurious question, “Who is truly post-colonial?” Colonization does not create different beings, but subjects them to a wide range of cultural and political relationships, ones in which colonized and formerly colonized people engage various forms of discursive and material power. Post-colonialism is a way of reading those engagements, of reading a dialogue that begins from the moment of colonization itself. Settler colonies must cope with the common perception of their filiative relationship to Empire, but they develop strategies of resistance and transformation that are similar in function to those of other colonized societies while being very different in content. The struggle between filiation and affiliation, the struggle to represent self and thus obtain cultural agency, the inheritance of forms of subject formation such as nationalism and ethnicity, the ambivalent and contested representation of place: all these experiences outline spaces