Submerging the imperial eye
Affective narration as environmentalist intervention in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002291 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Laura A White (Middle Tennessee State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 265-279 |
| Publication date | 2012-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989412440432 |
| OpenAlex | W1983595272 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 21 |
In Richard Flanagan’s novel, Death of a River Guide, the narrator, river guide Aljaz Cosini, occupies an unusual position; throughout the novel, he remains underwater, drowning in Tasmania’s Franklin River. Bringing postcolonial analyses of the novel form into conversation with ecofeminist critiques of rationalist constructions of the human, I contend that Flanagan uses the position of his narrator to deliver a critique of the imperial eye and the rationalist construction of the human that it manifests, revealing their complicity in reinforcing an illusion of human separation from non-human nature that has destructive environmental consequences. Affect scholarship provides a framework for studying the alternative model that Flanagan provides as he narrates Aljaz’s “visions” in ways that force a rethinking of the human in non-reductive, non-binary terms that preserve the relationality between mind and body, human and non-human nature. Attending to Flanagan’s narrative strategies in the context of Tasmanian environmental history and Flanagan’s environmental activism, I contend that his novel constitutes an environmentalist intervention that demands increased attention to the role that constructions of the human play in our relationships with non-human nature and to the role that novels can play in perpetuating or challenging destructive understandings of the human
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Conversation · Ecocriticism · Environmental ethics · Intervention (counseling · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Vision · Anthropology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology
Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises
Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures
Feeling in Theory
Imperial Eyes
The Practice of Everyday Life
Ordinary Affects
Decolonizing nature—strategies for conservation in a post-colonial era
Nationalism, Reconciliation, and the Cultural Genealogy of Magic in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide
Postcolonial Ecologies
Postcolonial Environments
Nature, Self, and Gender
Touching Feeling
Affect
Green Postcolonialism
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2025 (12) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |