RESEARCH   PROFILE

Research Areas: Australian Studies, Patrick White, Continental Philosophy, Cultural Gerontology, Critical Theory, Posthumanism, Anthropocene Studies, Medical Humanities

Research Statement:

My doctoral research critically examines Patrick White’s deployment of exploration narratives (The Tree of Man, Voss, A Fringe of Leaves) to interrogate settler-colonial cultural identity formation in Australia. Through postcolonial and critical whiteness frameworks, I argue that White’s literary 're-writing of the nation'—while destabilizing Eurocentric epistemologies—simultaneously enacts a 'logic of elimination' (Wolfe) that erases Aboriginal sovereignty. His repackaging of tropes like exploration, captivity, and the 'Great Australian Emptiness' reinforces white ontological expansiveness, appropriates Indigenous agency, and perpetuates settler myths of reconciliation. This study exposes the ambivalent complicity of canonical Australian literature in sustaining settler supremacy, even amid critiques of colonial violence.

Key Elements Highlighted in the Thesis:

1. Core Focus:

   • Patrick White’s novels as instruments of settler identity construction.

   • Tension between White’s critique of imperialism and his perpetuation of settler-colonial erasure.

2. Theoretical Grounding:

   • Settler-colonial studies (Wolfe, Veracini), critical whiteness studies (Ahmed, Mills), and postcolonial theory.

   • Concepts: white ontological expansiveness, logic of elimination, meta-ignorance.

3. Original Contribution:

   • Reveals how White’s "reconciliation narratives" neutralize Indigenous political agency.

   • Demonstrates literary complicity in sustaining terra nullius ideologies.

4. Methodology:

   • Discourse analysis, archival research, close reading of White’s fiction/nonfiction.

5. Broader Significance:

   • Challenges apolitical readings of Australian canon.

   • Highlights literature’s role in decolonizing settler historical consciousness.

Cultural Gerontology & Literary Aging Studies

1. • Focus: Aging, memory, and identity in literary texts; decolonizing gerontological frameworks.

   • Key Contributions:

     • Investigated gerontological anxiety in literature (e.g., Paper on W.B. Yeats’s poems) and Shakespearean "ripeness" (ICSSR-funded conference, 2016).

     • Invited talks on aging narratives (e.g., ‘Myself must I remake’: Yeats and Aging, 2020).

Posthumanism & the Anthropocene

1. • Focus: Ethics of human-nonhuman entanglement; biopolitics in the Anthropocene.

   • Key Contributions:

     • Co-founded Centre for Research in Posthumanities (Bankura Univ.), spearheading conferences on New Age Critical Post-Humanities (2022).

     • Lectures on Anthropocene epistemologies (e.g., Refiguring the Anthropos, 2021; Thinking Planetary Crises, 2020).

Critical Whiteness & Settler Colonial Studies

1. • Focus: Unmasking whiteness as structural privilege in literary/cultural discourse.

   • Key Contributions:

     • Theorized settler "meta-ignorance" in Australian literature (PhD), linking White’s narratives to terra nullius ideologies.

     • Employed frameworks by Wolfe, Veracini, and Sara Ahmed to critique white hegemony in nation-building myths.

Supervision:

• Ph.D./M.Phil supervision: Not yet awarded or ongoing