Dorothee Klein: Poetics and Politics of Relationality in Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Fiction

Abstract

Dorothee Klein’s recent study of novels by Australian Aboriginal 1 authors focuses on form and how “a detailed analysis of formal elements enhances our understanding of these narratives as decidedly literary interventions into current debates” (3). As such, it offers in-depth narratological analyses of seven novels by Australian Aboriginal writers published between 1999 and 2017. At the heart of Klein’s study is the idea that “contemporary fiction by Australian Aborigi nal writers is one medium that raises awareness of the importance and impli-cations of being part of such networks of relations that span the human and non-human realm” (2). It is indeed this emphasis on the connections between the human and the non-human which guides Klein’s analysis throughout the book and which is the focus of her understanding of relationality. She identifies “ ‘a poetics of relationality’ ” (4), i.e., a particular way of storytelling that originates in Country, which is constitutive for Aboriginal narratives and can, according to Klein, best be understood by looking at form and narrative techniques. Due to her focus on form and narrative strategies, Klein uses the ideas of “New Formal-ism and contextualised narratologies” (7) as her point of departure but develops an innovative approach to relationality by combining and bringing into dialogue the ideas of Edouard Glissant and Jean-Luc Nancy with Aboriginal texts and onto-epistemologies (11). For her, “relationality [...] connotes the interconnected-ness of all elements of the universe. It is decidedly multidimensional and not lim-ited to human relations” (19). In the context of Aboriginal narratives, the relation to land and place necessarily looms