AustLit

'In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.' (Publication abstract)

'Among Chinese-Australian writers, Brian Castro is the most widely recognized pioneer of transnational writing. Birds of Passage and After China are Castro’s two earliest works, both of which describe Chinese migrants’ lives in Australia and reveal the struggle the protagonists experience in the process of transforming from a national identity to a transnational one. Studies of the transnational turn of literature have run parallel with the increasing application of interdisciplinary approaches to transnational literature since the end of the 20 th century. In this context, this article focuses on the relationship between changes of geographical space, disruption of mental space and identity transformation, using the theory of liminality, an analytical framework originally from anthropology, which examines the in-between state during identity transition, and the concept of sensory space—smellscape—from sociology, to explore why the smellscapes in these two works can be treated as liminality and what kind of transnational identity the liminal smellscapes envision with their transgressive power that can dismantle the rigid boundary between race and class, between fantasy and reality, as well as between the sexual and creative desires.' (Publication abstract)