July 17, 2007
Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology by Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984) 2 is a combination of landscape paintings by Moroccan born West Australian artist Krim Benterrak, stories by 73 year old Aboriginal Paddy Roe and the above-mentioned fragments by Muecke, an Australian academic. It is a combination around the theme of 'reading' (looking at, understanding, feeling) a particular piece of Australian country, the Roebuck Plains near Broome in Western Australia.
Garry Wickham says that this text is built around recorded stories told by a senior Aboriginal man from northern Western Australia, Paddy Roe. This is where Muecke installed his Deleuzean view of Aboriginal ways of being in the world: as nomads set against the State, and as storytellers who live out a 'rhizomatic' connection to country and community.
Muecke's intervention into this aspect of normal academic style is to restrict himself to the consideration of concepts. His fragments (and 'fragments' is a good term to signal his intervention) cover a large range of topics in not many pages: the nomadic nature of writing and the possibility of 'strategic nomadology'; the problematic nature of history writing, especially its celebration of origins and its celebration of individuals; the uses and abuses of the concept of literacy; the importance of silences in some Aboriginal discourse; the production of meanings for colours; the problematic nature of economics and counting; the reception of works of art; improvising versus engineering as cultural practices; the nature and function of texts. Along the way he considers many concepts, especially concepts circulating in a lot of recent French theoretical work, like bricolage (circulating around the names Levi-Strauss and Derrida), rhizome and nomadology (both circulating around the names Deleuze and Guattari).
Nomadism is not the glimpses of a romantic tourist extending his knowledge on educational tours with sudden sadnesses for home-sweet-home.
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Nomadism is not the glimpses of a romantic tourist extending his knowledge on educational tours with sudden sadnesses for home-sweet-home.
Instead, it's godawful, jargon-ridden impenetrable postmodernist academic deconstruction of everything resembling an authentic experience.