AustLit

'This article investigates the crucial role of Brechtian aesthetics in representing the voice of Aboriginal Australians. It examines the theatre of Wesley Enoch, an Aboriginal Australian director and playwright, and argues that Enoch’s 2013 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, performed at the Queensland Theatre Company, Brisbane, formed an instance of resistance against epistemic hegemony. The first part of the article examines the device of the heckler, central to the writings of Australian Aboriginals, by focusing on Kevin Gilbert’s The Cherry Pickers (1988) and shows how the device functions to articulate the peripheral voices of the Aboriginal Australians. The second part demonstrates how Enoch employed the heckler trope through his dramaturgy to protest against the Australian nation state. Broadly, it illustrates how Enoch’s production used Aboriginal aesthetics to voice Aborigines’ challenge to established norms, an act that remained independent of Brechtian theatre’s previous uses in the Australian context.' (Publication abstract)

'Antipodean China was born from a decade of cross-cultural literary exchange between the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and the Chinese Writers’ Association. It features writings from a wide spectrum of literary figures including writers, poets, translators, and critics, who positively engage with issues of difference in the cross-hemispherical other while envisioning connections between the two countries from a literary perspective. This is embodied in the multi-chapter dialogue between Alexis Wright and the Tibetan writer Alai, which re-imagines the parameters of nation and locality in literary writings.' (Introduction)