Karl Ricker

I am a third year PhD student at the University of Queensland investigating the narrative tropes settler colonial authors use in contemporary Australian fiction (2003-2020). My research examines two particular trajectories in new Australian writing. First, how self-reflective critiques of settler colonialism, previously considered the exclusive domain of ‘high’ literary fiction, travel across high and low literary distinctions and popular genres. Second, how dominant settler colonial codes of representation are, in turn, reimagined through this process and what relation they bear, if any, to contemporary cultural politics. I also keenly follow developments in settler colonial literary criticism, critical Indigenous scholarship, and feminist cultural criticism that provide useful tools for examining intersections between new literature and Australia’s evolving politics of representation.