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This paper examines Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) as examples of indigenous literary sovereignty that challenge Western epistemological frameworks. While critics have often situated indigenous writing within the category of magic realism—a Latin American literary movement rooted in Western modernist aesthetics—this comparative analysis argues that such categorization constitutes a form of epistemological violence. Instead, these novels should be understood as practicing indigenous realism, where rivers possess healing powers, ancestral beings intervene in contemporary lives, and land exercises agency not as metaphor but as lived reality within Naga and Aboriginal cosmologies. Through close textual analysis, this paper explores how both writers reimagine the novel form to accommodate indigenous ways of knowing.
Dr. Tirna Sadhu, and Binoy Dangar. “Decolonizing Narrative Forms: Indigenous Cosmology in When the River Sleeps and Carpentaria.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 403–415. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.24.
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