Towards a Literary Jurisprudence of Harm: Rewriting the Aboriginal Child in Law’s Imaginary of Violence

• Published in: Canadian journal of women and the law 2015-12, Vol.27 (2), p.311-335
• Main Author: van Rijswijk, Honni
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Child abuse & neglect; Law; Narratives; Native North Americans; Violence
• ISSN: 0832-8781; 1911-0235
• DOI: 10.3138/cjwl.27.2.311

The figure of the “abused Aboriginal child” haunts the Australian legal imaginary in ways that are both poignant and dangerous. This article examines the role this figure has played in assertions of Australian law's violent jurisdictions, in the past and in the present. I examine the narratives that support law's claims to authority and jurisdiction over Aboriginal communities, arguing that practices of representation—narrative, figuration, and what we might more widely think of as “law's imaginary”—need to be interrogated and challenged as an important means of intervening in law's violent jurisdictions. We need to engage in what I term here a literary jurisprudence to intervene in law's claims to authority and jurisdiction that are based on narratives of purported harm to the Aboriginal child. “Haunting” is used to think through the significance of the legal imagination in two ways: first, the ways in which narratives in legal and state archives affect culture and politics and, second, the ways in which law's imaginary—its figures and narratives—affect judicial outcomes, perhaps in ways that function beyond logic. To say that law is haunted by the figure of the abused Aboriginal child is to point to the affective, political, legal, and imaginative afterlife of narratives and figurations that are part of law and that are not ended with each case or legislative regime but that, unresolved, are always living on. I provide a reading of harm in the novels of Alexis Wright, a leading Australian novelist. I argue that Wright's novels can be read together as an exemplary text that counters state law's representational practices and claims. What is needed to resist the use of the child figure as the occasion for further violence, I argue, and what this reading provides, can be described as a “counter-imaginary” to the law. This counter-imaginary rewrites law's narratives and figures, connects that which law has separated, and makes visible that which law has occluded. In particular, each of Wright's three novels Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006), and The Swan Book (2013) is concerned with the relation of harm to questions of Aboriginal authority. Together, all three of Wright's novels provide a developed counter-imaginary to law's continuing assertions of authority over Aboriginal people from the early twentieth century to the present, which are based on the figure of the “abused Aboriginal child.”