World Travellers: Colonial Loyalties, Border Crossing and Cosmopolitanism in Recent Postcolonial First World War Novels

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of the representation of travelling men and women in The Sojourn (2003) by Canadian writer Alan Cumyn, The Daughters of Mars (2012) by Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally and Blue Ravens: Historical Novel (2014) by North American indigenous author Gerald Vizenor. These three novels explore the cliché of colonial loyalties, illustrating the diverse motivations that led individuals from North America and Australia to volunteer for the war. Cumyn, Kenneally and Vizenor undermine the stereotypical location of the colonial traveller in an uncultured space; in their fiction the war provides a pretext to expose imperial ideologies, to redefine collective identities, as well as to rethink the relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan. As a result, the First World War is reconfigured in terms of border crossing, contact and/or transcultural exchange, which result in radical shifts in consciousness, a critique of imperialism, as well as aspirations for cultural/political autonomy.