School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemThe postcolonial uncanny: on reconciliation, (dis)possesion and ghost stories(Melbourne University Publishing, 1998)It is time to introduce the concept of the ‘uncanny’ and to say something about its value in relation to postcolonial Australia. This concept comes into modern thinking through Sigmund Freud’s influential essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’, an essay published in 1919, four years after Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Freud’s primary concern is certainly with the psyche, but the essay is also about one’s sense of place in a modern, changing environment, and it attends to anxieties which are symptomatic of an ongoing process of realignment in the post-war modern world. In brief, Freud elaborates the ‘uncanny’ by way of two German words whose meanings, which at first seem diametrically opposed, in fact circulate through each other. These two words are: heimlich, which Freud glosses as ‘home’, a familiar or accessible place; and unheimlich, which is unfamiliar, strange, inaccessible, unhomely. An ‘uncanny’ experience may occur when one’s home is rendered, somehow and in some sense, unfamiliar; one has the experience, in other words, of being in place and ‘out of place’ simultaneously. This simultaneity is important to stress since, in Freud’s terms, it is not simply the unfamiliar in itself which generates the anxiety of the uncanny; it is specifically the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar—the way the one seems always to inhabit the other. In postcolonial Australia, and in particular after the Mabo decision in 1992, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ might well be applied directly to those emergent (that is, yet-to-be established) procedures for determining rights over land. In this moment of decolonisation, what is ‘ours’ is also potentially, or even always already, ‘theirs’: the one is becoming the other, the familiar is becoming strange.