AustLit

'Phyllis Fahrie Edelson, who died in July 2016, was the founding book review editor of Antipodes. In her tenure from 1987-1994, she pioneered the wide range of reviews in different genres and categories that the journal still features today. Under Phyllis's editorship, large and small presses, national and regional writer and poets, novelists, and essayists were all treated with equal care and discernment. She established relations with writers such as John Kinsella, Peter Carey, and David Malouf that we still value today.' (Introduction)

'This essay examines two very different Australian literary representations of the event and the site of Hiroshima Nam Les short story "Hiroshima" presents the time leading up to the American bombing of Hiroshima through the unknowing eyes of a child , who will witness the event in the final moments of the narrative. By contrast, Shirley Hazzard, in her fiction and her public writing, represents the period after the bombing through the eyes of Europeans—that is to say, Britons and Australian—visiting the ruined city, basing these observations on her oval experience of visiting the site in 1947. My interest in this essay is with the tensions between these two literary events, separated in time and cohering around a bleariest event that happens outside the frame of the narrative in both cases, and the ways they highlight some of the complications of national literary forms and representations. This point is compounded by the divergences between the two earth , both acclaimed in Australia and internationally. Nam Le arrived in Australia with his family as a child, a refugee, while Hazzard left at age sixteen and insists that she has no obvious or literal homeland. The work of both authors is characterised by global topographies and imaginings; however, Le tells us that the diverse locations of his fiction are based in research, while Hazzard's narratives are demonstrably based on her own experiences.' (Introduction)

'Carly and Tara and Kelly are sitting on the floor. Each has a brush in her hand, and they are all brushing their little daughters' hair. The children sit with heads bowed, very still, legs crossed, hands gripping their feet The feet are in pale pink ballet slippers. Legs covered with the powdery cloth of ballet tights. Silky black leotards, skimpy skin, crossover tops with long sleeves concealing skinny little arms. "Sometimes, I can't decide which is better, hairspray or mousse," Carly says. Her daughter Peyton shifts a fraction sideways on the carpet. ' (Introduction)
 

Ellen van Neerven, a member of the Yugambeh People from Southeast Queensland, is the prize-winning author of Heat and Light (2014) She completed her bachelor of arts at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) She currently works at the State library of Queensland as part of the black&white Indigenous writing aid editing project, and she is the editor of the digital collection Writing Black: New Indigenous Writing from Australia.' (Introduction)

'T'he grotesque holds a pivotal place in Australia's cultural history It is the purpose of this paper to showcase the significance and history of the Australian grotesque by exploring the intricate network of aesthetic and intellectual preconceptions that underpins it. The category of the Australian grotesque provides a specific instance of a larger argument I am at present developing about the role of utopian thought in the foundation of nonindigenous Australia, and it is in relation to this larger theoretical perspective that I argue that the Australian grotesque forms a quilting point at which two oppositional modes of representing Australia, the utopian and the dystopian, converge. The grotesque, in other words, has served contradictory aesthetic and intellectual ends throughout Australia's history, but has ultimately provided a form of coping mechanism for dealing with what was perceived to be the strangeness of Australia, that is, the incomprehensible elusiveness and ineffability of the Australian experience as felt by the European subject Due to the fact that the grotesque permeates Australian culture in a myriad of ways, my discussion of it is necessarily selective But since my focus Ices on the long nineteenth century, the period in which the aforementioned feeling of estrangement was arguably most acute, my discussion should spotlight what constitute the most prominent issues and principles of the grotesque in an Australian context By the same token, such probing into the aesthetic and philosophical roots that predate and inform the Australian grotesque inevitably brings to light how the transplantation of this European aesthetic into the Australian environment played a critical role in the ideology of settlement Thus, the representational processes by which the Australian grotesque supported and legitimized imperial ideology are also of particular concern ' (Introduction)

'A distinguishing aspect of David McMahon's novel Vegemite Vindialoo is that the narrative is all about immigration of the Anglo-Indian characters to Australia. Although their exodus to the white nations of Europe and America had started soon after Indian Independence in 1947, their immigration to Australia in large numbers started from the 1960s. The primary reason for their craze to settle clown in Australia was that the rigidities of the "White Australia Policy"- had started to wane since the late sixties and were officially replaced by the principles of multi-culturalism in 1973. By looking into the multicultural space of Australia through the experiences of Anglo-Indian immigrants, this paper seeks to examine the differences that lie between the theoretical delineations and the practical implications of multiculturalism in the diasporic space of an ethnic community Anglo-Indian immigrants' racial-cultural hybridity and small population (in comparison to the other groups) are the two important factors that are key contexts for studying their representation in the multicultural society inhabited by settlers not only from the white nations of Europe but also from several Asian countries. ‘ (Introduction)

‘Philosophy's great projects mantle hope for revolution and possibilities for cultural survival and transformation The spirit of philosophical inquiry is to ex-pose societal wrongs and model hope for the future—as found in Marx's account of human alienation, Hegel's exploration of the master-slave relationship, or Levinas's writing of ethics and human relatedness It was Ernest Bloch however, who was concerned with "hope" and the political and social potential for utopian society. In his concept of concrete utopia, he argues that "active hope" and "active belief" are materialized through "conscious human work on it" and that "realism without such hope and without the dominating mode of being of the good possibility is not real-ism There is nothing real without a place for revolution and a better future" Yet such discursive constructions of "hope" can be slippery when applied to political worldviews, and as Australia has experienced, creating frameworks for "hope of a better future" has left the most vulnerable subject; "hopelessly" marginalized and oppressed Early colonial society, for example, was hoped for—it was created through language of writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson who affirmed a national identity from a dominant white perspective As a result, a hopeful society was created (for these subjects) but one that did not consider the "hopes" of Indigenous subjects. On the contrary, the modern Australian author Alexis Wright challenges mainstream philosophical paradigms of hope and recreates the "future" from an antiutopian Indigenous view In her recent novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), she critiques humanities' projects, reconciliation, and "closing the gap" for having little utopian potential because these discourses operate on a nexus of "hope" that serves hegemonic national interests of assimilation, appropriation, solidarity, and interventsionist politics.  (Introduction)

'This essay makes a case for considering the depiction of the artist Adam Cullen in Erik Jensen's biography of him, Acute Misfortune, as good grounds for rethinking the political potential of Cullen's art. This is especially clear in Jensen's treatment of Cullen's own self-estimation of occupying a special, existentially free, political space in which he could use his art to show the less attractive side of neo-liberal and mundane middle-class life. Jensen shows, through a careful and literary retelling of significant events in the final years of Cullen's life, that the freedom he claimed to possess might more accurately be described as serving the agenda of neoliberalism, in which the works of the troubled artist were collected as decorative pieces. While not underestimating the force of Cullen's oeuvre, Jensen points to an interesting and unintended consequence of Cullen's art, noticeable at his funeral, that the extreme actions of the enfant terrible did more to create lasting human connections than it did to separate them. The biography thus speaks against the power of art to create new political spaces and yet simultaneously celebrate Cullen's art for showing us our own flawed psyches.’ (Introduction)

‘This paper explores the critical function of the paratext that inscribes literary legitimation and value production and analyzes a transformed vision of the paratextual space in Australian Indigenous children's books. The paratext refers to a set of heterogeneous devices of a book such as a preface, a dedication, author's profile / back/front cover blurbs, and so forth, which serve to frame the text into a book and to justify the value of the text. Gerard Genette, in his seminal work Seuils (1997), conceives the paratext as a threshold of the book, which is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction" (2). The paratext enables the trajectory of a text to be presented as a book, a self-promotional process that is invested with the power of literary legitimation to validate the desirability of the writer's work in the market. Though the paratext may be marginalized, neglected, or even disdained as gimmick making, the fringe of the book often accommodates a convergence of varying discourses and practices (Genette 2). The interlocking relations between different interest holders (such as writers, publishers, reviewers, implied readers, educational or awarding institutions) are reflected in the paratext, forming a network that enables a transformative process of what Pierre Bourdieu terms "social alchemy" in the production of cultural capital.’ (Introduction)