Transnational Impulses as Simulation in Colin Johnson's (Mudrooroo's) Fiction.

• Main Author: Clare Archer-Lean
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bath Spa University 2013-05-01
• Series: Transnational Literature
• Subjects: Transnational Literature; Articles; Mudrooroo; Colin Johnson; Australian literature
• Online Access: http://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/2328/26706/1/bitstream

Works of Australian Literature have frequently been situated within national literary frameworks. But there is much recent scholarship that contests such ideas and explores transnational engagement in literary production. An author that has been seen as embodying the spectral nature of the Australian literary paradigm is Colin Johnson, pseudonym Mudrooroo. While, the complexities around Mudrooroo's identity as black Australian author are infamous: these biographical complexities are not the focus of this paper. Instead, Mudrooroo's Master of the Ghost Dreaming Series is explored as an evocation of place that encompasses a series of ever widening spheres: the local, the regional, the national, the transnational, the trans-human and the cosmic.