TY - JOUR
T1 - Spinning gold
T2 - nuggets, narratives and raw materials in the Victorian gold rush
AU - Buckland, Adelene
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023/5
Y1 - 2023/5
N2 - In this essay I take up Jane Bennett’s invitation to “think slowly” the idea of matter as “passive,” “inert,” and “raw” by focusing on a specific—and overlooked—material category: the “raw material.” Taking as a case study the gold mined in Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and beyond, I argue that the “raw material” is not an inevitable “fact” of nature, simply awaiting its inevitable transformation into capital. Instead, it is a narrative construction deliberately designed to suppress or erase (often violently) the sheer range of alternative meanings the same matter might hold. Gold is an especially useful material for exploring this idea, since it is a key example of Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” a resource extracted explicitly in order to construct a new settler colony. It is also a material with a long history of fabulation and fantasy. Reading Charles Reade’s settler-colonial novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) alongside the Indigenous writer Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999), I argue that the novel is a particularly adept form for registering the multiple, rich alternative stories we might tell (or that have long been told) about “raw materials” and their dissonant, recalcitrant meanings.
AB - In this essay I take up Jane Bennett’s invitation to “think slowly” the idea of matter as “passive,” “inert,” and “raw” by focusing on a specific—and overlooked—material category: the “raw material.” Taking as a case study the gold mined in Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and beyond, I argue that the “raw material” is not an inevitable “fact” of nature, simply awaiting its inevitable transformation into capital. Instead, it is a narrative construction deliberately designed to suppress or erase (often violently) the sheer range of alternative meanings the same matter might hold. Gold is an especially useful material for exploring this idea, since it is a key example of Marx’s “primitive accumulation,” a resource extracted explicitly in order to construct a new settler colony. It is also a material with a long history of fabulation and fantasy. Reading Charles Reade’s settler-colonial novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) alongside the Indigenous writer Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999), I argue that the novel is a particularly adept form for registering the multiple, rich alternative stories we might tell (or that have long been told) about “raw materials” and their dissonant, recalcitrant meanings.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85162664036&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/724555
DO - 10.1086/724555
M3 - Article
SN - 0026-8232
VL - 120
SP - 474
EP - 496
JO - MODERN PHILOLOGY
JF - MODERN PHILOLOGY
IS - 4
ER -