TY - JOUR
T1 - Kim Scott’s Taboo and the Extimacy of Massacre
AU - Hughes-d’Aeth, Tony
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.
AB - Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.
KW - Australian literature
KW - frontier
KW - Indigenous literature
KW - massacre
KW - psychology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85104778406&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/14443058.2021.1912141
DO - 10.1080/14443058.2021.1912141
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85104778406
SN - 1444-3058
VL - 45
SP - 165
EP - 180
JO - Journal of Australian Studies
JF - Journal of Australian Studies
IS - 2
ER -