Inter-Colonial Illusions

Abstract

Abstract If Australia and the Caribbean are discussed in the same conversation, it is likely that the two regions will be framed as Commonwealth bookends: the ‘First and Last of the New Worlds’. The bookend metaphor belies inter-colonial immigration and exchange between the two regions, as captured in numerous historical studies (McMahon 2016). This chapter extrapolates these studies of immigrant reinvention to analyse how this aesthetic of reinvention informs the travel of literary theories and texts from the Caribbean to Australia (and vice versa). It demonstrates that Aboriginal and Caribbean writers appropriate this discursive network of association and stereotype in order to establish new terms of relation and articulate new understandings of what it means to coexist, create community, work in solidarity, and negotiate a simulated image.