Racial Ambiguity and Whiteness in Brian Castro’s Drift |
Racial Ambiguity and Whiteness in Brian Castro’s Drift
Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 2, Number 2, 2009
pages 113-126
ISSN 2013-6897
Marilyne Brun, Lecturer in Postcolonia Studies
Université Nancy 2
This article focuses on Drift, the fifth novel of contemporary Australian writer, Brian Castro, and concentrates on the ambiguous racial inscriptions of some of its characters. While white experimental British writer B.S. Johnson progressively becomes darker in the novel, his desire to escape his whiteness is complicated by another extreme, the albinism of Tasmanian Aboriginal Thomas McGann. This article discusses one essential aspect of these surprising fictional representations: the critique of whiteness that they articulate. The racial ambiguity of the two main characters offers a subtle reflection on Tasmania’s colonial legacy. Yet beyond Castro’s exploration of the contingencies of the Tasmanian context, the characters‟ racial ambivalence destabilises conventional representations of whiteness. The novel both exposes the metonymic nature of whiteness and critiques the specific modes of reading the body that are involved in preoccupations with whiteness.
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Tags: Australia, Brian Castro, Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia, Marilyne Brun, Tasmania