Changing perspectives: Formulations of identity in contemporary Australian literature

Questions of identity occupy a central place in the history of the development of Australian literature and its critical construction and reception. The notions of identity appealed to in the various stages of this development have been closely imbricated with prevailing cultural and critical assumptions and practices.

The model of identity that was appealed to in earlier periods of Australian literature and its academic criticism was understandably circumscribed by the Anglo-centric prescriptions of the Colonial Convict period, embellished but not significantly changed by the influence of the Bush Pioneers and a growing Nationalist sentiment enhanced by the spirit of the first world war Anzacs. While, as with all identity models, this one suffered its own ambiguities and slippages, it did successfully exercise a hegemony, reinforced by the then dominant academic practices, that largely excluded the identity experiences of Indigenous people, non-white immigrants, women and those whose sexual orientations lay outside of the parameters of heteronormativity.

The Identities that have subsequently been articulated by such previously excluded groups and taken up by those within the academy influenced by developments in postcolonial, feminist, poststructural and postmodern (including Queer) theory have effectively functioned to dismantle the hegemony exerted by earlier unitary and reductive notions of Australian identity.

Previously neglected areas of Australian writing such as Indigenous, multicultural and youth literature, as representations of minority identities have articulated often oppositional conceptions of identity to those formulated within the former orthodoxy. Such texts, most particularly those more recent ones which engage with radical rearticulations of sexual identity, have increasingly moved towards fluid conceptions of identity which ultimately serve to pose the question of the usefulness of the unqualified notion The Australian Identity as a meaningful category of analysis for the literature now being produced within Australia.