AustLit

'On India’s west coast, as far as south as you can go, bordered on the east by mountains and on the west by the Arabian sea, there’s Kerala.

'It’s a beautiful place, which has been connected to the world for centuries. There are two simple reasons for that: because its soils, peoples and climate grow spices so abundantly and because so many people so many places like spicy foods. By the time (around 1500 BCE) that the Austronesians built the first ocean-going ships to establish the hemispheric trade routes, Kerala had already been trading spices northwards for over a millennium. That’s a significant slice of history' (Introduction)

'One tends to ignore the periodicity of periodicals, that their composition depends on the building up of various intensities to the point of release that is their publication every three or six months. How can rhythmanalysis help us conceive of the persistence of a collective project, like running a journal? When it comes to each writer attending to their individual contribution, surely they are thinking that their content is what matters, not the form or the rhythm? As the deadline approaches, content may well be what they worry about, but are they not attuned from the start to the proposed theme (like ‘Extinction,’ Cultural Studies Review 25:1 (2019)), a theme that has energised them enough to accept the invitation to begin to research and write? ‘Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm,’ writes Lefebvre, but hasn’t place disappeared in the era of the on-line publication? Place has become referential rather than literally regional, territorial (or even national).' (Introduction)