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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'As this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing goes to print, fear of the life-changing and life-taking SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads worldwide faster than the virus itself. The volume’s very gestation has coincided with the tightening grip of the current global pandemic, unprecedented in its deadly, unstoppable spread, from which it will take the world months, if not years, to emerge. Planetary precarity, environmental degradation or eco-precarity, and the precarious society or the “precariat”, already looming problems of the new millennium, and for long major areas of concern of researchers everywhere, have been overtaken by this invisible threat that has subjected the health of populations throughout the world to new levels of vulnerability and risk. The chimera of hope offered by a magic vaccination, elimination of the virus or its disappearance, is for many the only way to imagine a far off “new normal” as a new spike or second wave is anticipated, even as this issue of the journal is finalized. Among the perplexed – some even denying – and slow-moving governmental machineries, COVID-19 heightens new and unprecedented forms of precarity – in terms of the medical and human resources urgently needed to fight it and the anticipated economic recession which will follow, amplifying the already existing “great divide”, as Joseph Stiglitz (2015) puts it, between rich and poor, global south and global north, haves and have-nots.' (Introduction)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Gail Jones’s “The Ocean” (2013) and A Guide to Berlin (2015) : A Literary Challenge to Asylum Seekers’ Precarity,
single work
criticism
(p. 532-546)
'Gail Jones’s fiction has received major critical attention due to its engagement with trauma, memory, modernity, the visual arts, and the Australian process of Reconciliation. This article seeks to extend the focus of research on Jones’s work by looking at her little-discussed representation of forced migration. For this purpose, it examines how Jones’s 2013 short story “The Ocean” and 2015 novel A Guide to Berlin respectively tackle the 2001 refugee Tampa affair and the 2013 Lampedusa refugee tragedy. It first offers an overview of the precarity suffered by contemporary asylum seekers and refugees and how this has been explored and fictionalized by contemporary writers. It then analyses and discusses the main narrative and stylistic strategies that Jones uses in order to represent the ties that bind together refugees and non-refugees in mutually dependent relationships, which challenge Australian and European governments’ fostered xenophobia aimed at tightening border controls.' (Publication abstract)
