Reading Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance: Book Clubs and Postcolonial Literary Theory
Keywords:
Kim Scott, Indigenous Australian Literature, book clubs, reading, identificationAbstract
This paper explores different readings of Kim Scott’s Miles Franklin award-winning novel That Deadman Dance, which offers a complex portrayal of cross-cultural contact on the so-called ‘Friendly Frontier’ of the southern coast of Western Australia in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This article contrasts academic responses to the novel with those of one of the most significant contemporary literary networks: book club readers. It draws upon Derek Attridge’s distinction between literal and allegorical readings, and Diana Fuss’s work on identification, to explore the extent to which different readers respond to the novel as an unfamiliar literary work in the context of literary sociability. I suggest that book club readings, in their tentative and open-ended uncertainty, pose a challenge to the orthodoxies of academic literary studies.
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