“Invisible Things in Nature”: A Reflexive Reading of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

Abstract

This chapter takes a journey through literature and into anthropology and back, which has transformed, and problematized, epistemological understandings of both traditional Dreaming narratives and Aboriginal-authored literary artifacts. It explores the ways in which literary critical work on Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, which mobilizes Dreaming narratives, has been enriched, and complicated, by trans-disciplinary conversations with anthropologists. The chapter endeavors to cast light on the vulnerabilities of the researcher working at the interface of these disciplines, and also transculturally. It raises points of contention between the disciplines of anthropology and literary studies, uncovering the fraught understandings of the role of postcolonialism, and the problems of gate-keeping in the academy and in the wider community in Australia.