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Transitional justice and national inquiries may be the most established means for coming to terms with traumatic legacies, but it is in the more subtle social and cultural processes of “memory work” that the pitfalls and promises of reconciliation are laid bare. This book analyzes, within the realms of literature and film, recent Australian and Canadian attempts to reconcile with Indigenous populations in the wake of forced child removal. As Hanna Teichler demonstrates, their systematic emphasis on the subjectivity of the victim is problematic, reproducing simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization. Such fictions of reconciliation venture beyond simplistic narratives and identities defined by victimization, offering new opportunities for confronting painful histories.
“Carnivalizing Reconciliation is an ambitious, detailed book with a compelling underlying theoretical premise: namely that reconciliation, thought through the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, is laid bare in all its pitfalls and promise.” • Michael Griffiths, University of Wollongong
Hanna Teichler is a research associate in the department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Goethe University, Frankfurt. With Rebekah Vince, she is co-editor of Brill’s Mobilizing Memories series and their Handbook Series in Memory Studies. She is also a member of the Memory Studies Association Executive Committee and Astrid Erll’s Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform.
Introduction: Carnivalizing Reconciliation
Chapter 1. Justice through Storytelling? Australian and Canadian Reconciliation and the Victim Paradigm
Chapter 2. Carnivalizing Reconciliation: Beyond the Victim Paradigm
Chapter 3. Beyond the Partisan Divide: Transcultural Recalibrations of National Myths in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road and Gail Jones’s Sorry
Chapter 4. “Double Visions”: Intimate Enemies and Magic Figures in Kim Scott’s Benang and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
Chapter 5. From Victimology to Empowerment? Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia
Conclusion: Fictions of Reconciliation
Bibliography