AustLit

'This book is about some of the ways we remember the dead through performance. It examines the dramaturgical techniques and strategies that enable artists to respond to the imperative: ‘Remember Me’ – the command King Hamlet’s ghost gives to his son in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, Hamlet. The book develops the concept of hauntological dramaturgy by engaging with a series of performances that commemorate, celebrate, investigate, and sometimes seek justice for the dead.

'It draws on three interrelated discourses on haunting: Derrida’s hauntology with its ethical exhortation to be with ghosts and listen to ghosts; Abraham and Torok’s psychoanalytic account of the role spectres play in the transmission of intergenerational trauma; and, finally, Mark Fisher's and Simon Reynolds’ development of Derrida’s ideas within the field of popular culture. Taken together, these writers, in different ways, suggest strategies for reading and creating performances concerned with questions of commemoration. Case studies focus on a set of known and unknown figures, including Ian Charleson, Spalding Gray and David Bowie.

'This study will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working within theatre and performance studies as well as philosophy and cultural studies.'  (Publication summary)

'There is often a significant gap between the rhetoric used to promote cultural diversity and the harsh reality of living as a visibly different or culturally different Australian. Institutions, such as schools, universities, government departments and corporations often engage in a form of official 'virtue signalling' that creates the impression of embracing egalitarian values - it is now common for academics, for example, to use email signatures that announce politically correct alliances with marginalised groups.' (Publication abstract)

Migrants are mobile by definition. They literally uproot themselves and move to sometimes-distant lands for a variety of reasons. Some move away from real or imagined threats to theirs very existence. Others seek a better quality of life. And Some adventurous souls are inhabited by a restless wunderlust - a desire to roll the dice and see what happens. Such mobility requires fortitude and faith. Migrants move through space and, if they have an aspirational disposition, they attempt to accumulate symbolic capital to move up those social and economic hierarchies that bestow status and prestige within their adopted homes.

The migrant journey to Australia often ends with the realisation that one as to make and remake one's identity, and perform a series of adjustments - adjustments in terms of comportment, dress, accent and disposition. this article is a critcal reflection on a multi media presentation that tells a story about the author's father, A. J. D'Cruz. It draws on historical archives and the material remnants of A. J. D' Cruz's relatively short life( letters, photographs, sound recordings, 8mm films). It also provided a singular account of the performance practices involved in becoming a 'New Australian" Combining personal anecdotes and philosophical ruminations on history, technology, and cultural identity, the article interrogates and performs a series of migrant mobilities.

(Abstract)

This book conducts a close-reading of several well-known texts containing Anglo-Indian characters (such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children) whilst also focusing on the lesser-known work of contemporary Anglo-Indian writers including Australian Anglo-Indian writer Christopher Cyrill.