AustLit

'For several reasons, not all related, the scholarly engagement of Australian studies within Australia and its disciplinary instrumentalities—biennial conferences, a journal, and so on—remains predominantly Eurocentric. Explanations for this Eurocentricity are deserving of a standalone article, but the following series of articles manifests one attempt to represent some of this extant diversity. Beyond the now scant formal institutional settings and apparatuses constituting Australian studies within Australia, a broad church continues to participate in this field. Outside of the International Australian Studies Association, much of this participation—including at the institutional level, locally and internationally—is conducted through various networks established and sustained by dedicated individuals, including some chancers. Student exchanges, visiting lectureships, collaborative research projects, guest speaking invitations, art exhibitions, theatrical productions, orchestral and other music performances, among many more informal and inchoate events, form part of this wider engagement of Australian studies overseas. Much of this engagement takes place throughout Asia, including Japan, India, Indonesia and China. The genesis for this themed section lies at least partly here: to bring scholarship—in this instance from mainland China—germane to the journal’s remit to its wide readership. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-reaching impacts for many scholars worldwide, this themed section is smaller than the special issue we originally envisaged; however, the contributions published here represent many of the continued commitments to, and the promising progress of, Australian studies in China.' (Introduction) 

'This article aims briefly to explain and evaluate Australian studies in China over the past 60 years. It will take up how Australian studies began and grew in influence, and a couple of the organisations that helped it do so. It discusses, in particular, four Australian Studies Centres (ASCs) with which I have had some involvement. Through the lens of these centres, the article probes the nature of Australian studies in China, arguing there is a close connection between international and domestic politics and Australian studies in China. Australian studies grew and flourished in a context, and because of, good political relations between Australia and China. This article also considers some implications behind establishing such an extensive network of ASCs and speculates on their future in a context of the current poor relations between the two countries.' (Introduction)

'John Kinsella is a prolific writer from Western Australia. This article takes a topopoetic approach to considering his poetry and poetics by connecting studies of Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia and the paradoxical views of Zhuangzi and Thoreau in illustrating some tensions between language and place, connection and disconnection, and placement and displacement in Kinsella’s writings. In particular, I discuss Kinsella’s affective ties to the land and his anti-pastoral stance by parodying the European settlement on Country traditionally owned by Indigenous peoples. His poetry presents a dystopian world that challenges the old European sense of a pastoral society. By making connections between a Chinese sense of the earth and Kinsella’s poetics, I argue that as paradoxical as Kinsella's poetics may be, his writings, imbued with influences from different sources, demonstrate an effort to save the worsening earth.' (Publication abstract)

'The female protagonist in The Garden Book is the site of both imaginary and symbolic fantasy, as well as the melancholic real. In this article, I explore how a Chinese-Australian woman comes to inhabit a melancholic position of racial and gendered difference, and how Brian Castro, through his portrayal, deconstructs identity markers such as race, gender and nation. Born and raised in Australia, Swan is a legitimate Australian citizen. However, her Asian appearance and gender identity compromise her legitimacy as a subject of the Australian nation-state. The Chinese-Australian woman as image and fantasy of Oriental femininity becomes a spectre, an “Other” haunting the history and memory of white Australia. Castro’s writing shows how racial and sexual difference constructs and deconstructs identity, individual as well as national. In Swan’s case, gendered racialisation derived from imperialism disrupts the coherence of national citizenship. Reading the character of Swan as presented through the eyes of the men in her life, this article provides an alternative site where what is excluded, disavowed and lost in white Australia becomes visible. Swan’s racial and gendered melancholia allows us to see imperial violence and colonial eroticism at the heart of cultural essentialism and nationalism.' (Introduction) 

'Influential Australian author Brian Castro has a mixed ethnic background that often identifies him as a multicultural writer. To Castro, however, this label imposes upon him a static identity he has long tried to break away from. His agenda is to unshackle himself from both the Australian and Chinese cultures he straddles. This effort is evidenced by his attempts to redefine Chinese masculinity in his novel After China. In Chinese masculinity studies, Chinese masculinity can be best understood in terms of the wen–wu paradigm—the wen ideal being conditioned by Confucianism. The male protagonist in After China, however, You Bok Mun, is influenced by Taoism and Western postmodernism in his expression of masculinity. Furthermore, while in traditional gender discourse masculinity is equated with sexual potency, in this novel, Castro eliminates sexual prowess from You Bok Mun's masculinity and replaces it with his ability to narrate stories. Although You Bok Mun experiences displacement and alienation in Australia, he does not intend to elevate his manhood for the purpose of being admitted into the Australian mainstream. Instead, he chooses to remain an outsider and uses this status to unsettle and challenge stereotypes of Chinese masculinity.' (Publication abstract)

'2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the opening up of relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China. When he became prime minister in 1972, Gough Whitlam sent the first ambassador to China (Dr Stephen Fitzgerald), and in his term of office established support for artists’ exchanges from the Australia Council. The Australian Ballet visited China in 1980, the first major ballet company to tour since the Cultural Revolution. The touring of China by Australian theatre, opera and dance companies has flourished since then, particularly over the last decade, and Australian spoken-word drama has featured in the relationship between the two countries since 1983. Since the 1980s, the work of the New Wave dramatists has captured the interest of Chinese audiences over a sustained period beyond the years of the New Wave itself. The theatre has, in some respects, provided a respite from the rigours of realpolitik and most importantly a means of genuine interaction between ordinary Australians and Chinese citizens who make up the audiences. This article documents the take-up of the New Wave drama in China, and the legacy of the relationships created in this formative period of Australian theatre in its international context.' (Publication abstract)

'Students entering Australian universities today have lived their entire lives in the War on Terror (WOT). Declared in September 2001, following attacks on the US mainland by militant Islamist terrorists that claimed over 3,000 lives, the WOT is defined by both its conceptual vagueness—as American commentator Michael Moore has asked, how can you wage war on an emotion?—and temporal fluidity. US Vise President Dick Cheney famously declared: “It [the WOT] is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.” If earlier conflicts had been total—mobilising a nation’s manpower and resources—the WOT would be forever.' (Introduction)

'As the world watches the horrifying spectacle of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine and confronts the possibility of a third world war, we find ourselves entangled in what Slavoj Žižek in his book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections has called “the fascinating lure of … directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent”. Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew’s book, Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing, is particularly timely because it directs our attention to the everyday, intimate violence that befalls women and children, as represented in Australian literature. Brewster and Kossew note “the linking of intersubjective and intimate violence with global violence” (229) in contemporary discussions of gendered violence. The searing accounts of such violence that they unearth in Australian women’s literature, particularly in the work of Indigenous and minoritised women writers, reveals something symptomatic of the machismo that fuels the violence of strongmen such as Putin.' (Introduction)

'In Dear Prime Minister: Letters to Robert Menzies 1949–1966, Martyn Lyons brings his considerable expertise on the history of writing, print and publishing to bear on an expansive body of letters written to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s. These letters, penned chiefly by older white men located in eastern Australia or in London, offer a powerful window into the “heart of Australia’s Liberal-voting middle-class”, replete with its imperial loyalties, racial anxieties, and anti-Communist fervour (223).' (Introduction)