Affective Narratology, Cultural Memory, and Aboriginal Culture in Kim Scott’s Taboo

This essay focusses on Kim Scott’s Taboo, a text which gives physical space, and its emotional and collective implications, a central value. This value is preserved in the following pages of the novel where the physicality of places and the materiality of objects have intrinsic emotional value, articulat-ing a real narrative function, capable of catalyzing the forces at play in the text. The evocative vigour of the images endowed with this special ‘materiality’ becomes one of the significant features of the novel, and one of the bases for its poetic power in terms of empathy and healing.