Speaking the Earth's Languages: A Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics (Cross/Cultures - Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English)

Speaking the Earth's Languages brings together for the first time critical dis-cussions of postcolonial poetics from Australia and Chile. The book crosses multiple languages, landscapes, and dis-ciplines, and draws on a wide range of both oral and written poetries, in order to make strong claims about the importance of 'a nomad poetics' - not only for under-standing Aboriginal or Mapuche writing practices but, more widely, for the prob-lems confronting contemporary literature and politics in colonized landscapes. The book begins by critiquing canon-ical examples of non-indigenous post-colonial poetics. Incisive re-readings of two icons of Australian and Chilean poetry, Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), provide rich insights into non-indigenous responses to colonization in the wake of modernity. The second half of the book establishes compositional links between Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, and between such oral and written poetics more generally. The book's final part develops an 'emerging synthesis' of contemporary Aboriginal and Mapuche poetics, with reference to the work of two of the most important avant-garde Aboriginal and Mapuche poets of recent times, Lionel Fogarty (1958-) and Paulo Huirimilla (1973-). Speaking the Earth's Languages uses these fascinating links between Abori-ginal and Mapuche poetics as the basis of a deliberately nomadic, open-ended theory for an Australian-Chilean post-colonial poetics. "The central argument of this book," the author writes, "is that a nomadic poetics is essential for a gen-uinely postcolonial form of habitation, or a habitation of colonized landscapes that doesn't continue to replicate colonialist ideologies involving indigenous dispos-session and environmental exploitation."