Excavating Planetary Memory: Species Extinction in Kim Scott’s That Deadman’s Dance

Abstract

Australian Indigenous literature is a reservoir of age-old narratives: on the one hand, such narratives manifest the symbiotic interconnection between human and non-human agents and on the other hand, excavates the ongoing ecodisaster since the colonial invasion with their anthropogenic agenda in the name of Enlightenment and Liberal humanism. This proposed article intends to analyse this environmental catastrophe in the novel That Deadman’s Dance written by Australian Aboriginal writer Kim Scott, two times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Drawing the concept of Planetary memory, a new phenomenon of reading Anthropocene in relation to memory inscribed on geology based on the object-oriented ontology and deterritorialization of the anthropocentric binary between nature- culture, body- mind and local- global. In the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, it is aptly identified as “species history”. According to Rob Nixon, it is “socioenvironmental memory”, something unrepresentable as to him Anthropocene is a “violence” but slow and beyond the circumference of immediate human sensory perception. The novel That Deadman’s Dance, a historical account of early contact between Aboriginal and early settlers in south coast of Western Australia, records cultural hybridization, identity crisis, dislocation and the violent extinction of whales, a significant container of Noongar community’s cultural memory. This paper argues how the coastal bioregion in the novel works as a site of planetary memory by archiving local species extinction on a planetary scale.