Writing Belonging at the Millennium

In “Writing Belonging at the Millennium”, Emily Potter critically considers the long-standing settler-colonial pursuit of belonging manifested through an obsession with firm and stable ground. This pursuit continues across the field of the postcolonial nation today, the recognition of colonization's destructive impacts on humans and environments troublingly generates a renewed desire to secure non-indigenous belonging. Focusing on the crucial role that Australia's contemporary literature plays in shaping ideas of place and its inhabitation, Potter tracks non-indigenous belonging claims through a range of fiction and non-fiction texts to examine how settler-colonial anxieties about belonging intersect with intensifying environmental challenges. Significantly, she proposes that new understandings of unsettled and uncertain non-indigenous belonging may actually be fruitful context for decolonizing relations with place — something that is imperative in a time of heightened global environmental crisis.