Black Seed Dreaming: A Material Analysis of Bruce Pascoe’s “Dark Emu”

Abstract

Indigenous Australians are outstanding for the way their ontologies and practices do not rely on a Western dichotomy that opposes material and spiritual realms. Their multiple totemic visions of the Dreaming space-time always state a material actualisation in landscape and the reproduction of all forms of life based on the pluriversal agency of animals, plants, minerals, rain, wind, fire and stars. Such cosmovisions resonate with current debates in the fields of critical posthumanism and new materialism through an Animist materialism. Indeed, Indigenous Australian’s complex social practices offer ways of thinking and being for the whole planet in this time of climate crisis. This is particularly crucial for the tropical world which is so strongly impacted by climate change. Indigenous Australian cosmovisions offer to tropical studies a way of thinking politically about climate and the materiality of life. Thus, Tropical Materialisms are enhanced by the vast body of Indigenous experiences and creative productions in and beyond the tropics. The material analysis of the Aboriginal author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, demonstrates how the book dared to challenge the Western written history, and to show a new relationality of being of humans with the more-than-human world.