AustLit

Editor's Introduction:...Carnivale has chosen, instead, another reading of what 'multiculturalism' might relevantly mean to our literature. Something more subtle, more complicated. No one of the writers included in this collection are presented to you as 'multicultural' or 'ethnic': as I say, these are categorisations that can owe more to a bureaucrat's elisions or a marketeer's sloganeering than to sincere discussion-platitudes which ignore the complex ways in which culture and race and nationalism can actually compete as claims. The individual stories here don't ignore the complex possibility. They often do speak of a tension of cultural influences, or of an unsatisfactorily monocultural or 'national' world, but they never speak from blinkered simplistic certainty...Why Harbour? For the same reasons as Homeland was chosen, because it is a word pregnant with literal and metaphorical meanings: departure point, destination, anchorage, accommodation, home, shelter or haven, outpost, reservation, asylum, place of concealment...It was offered to each of the invitees as a provocation and not as a prescription of any sort; the word might well mean different things, all of them compelling, to each writer. The intention was that the common title would be textured by the diverse array of responses....Harbour is also the first issue of DIALECT, a serial publication-to-be....(xi-xvii).

Preface by Renato Rispoli Carnivale.

Harbour is the second collection of writings commissioned by Carnivale Multicultural Arts Festival (1997-2004). The first collection Homeland was published in 1991.