AustLit

'This chapter critically analyzes the work of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century white settler colonial writers who represented Indigenous characters and stories. It will examines how certain tropes persisted, from Rolf Boldrewood’s late romanticism to Eleanor Darks reconstructive modernism. It explores how novels by these writers manifest a contradictory set of ideas towards race and landscape, which it takes as emblematic of wider white Australian culture.' (Publication abstract)

'A number of critics have deployed the generic category of magical realism in reading Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria. While accepting that the novel has something in common with this generic classification and a relation to texts and writers associated with it, this essay seeks to show the limitations inherent in reducing Carpentaria to this (or other) generic classifications. While Carpentaria enacts and explores elements of the representation of time and the sacred that are congruent to magical realism, it also refuses to be reduced to either magical realism or genre as such.'(Publication abstract)

'Non-Indigenous Australian writers face a dilemma. On the one hand, they can risk writing about Aboriginal people and culture and getting it wrong. On the other, they can avoid writing about Aboriginal culture and characters, but by doing so, erase Aboriginality from the story they tell.' (Introduction)

'Settler representations of Indigenous culture and identity weigh heavily on the way Indigenous people tell their stories in the present. These representations affect the way Indigenous writers themselves operate to represent themselves and their people. The rendering visible of Indigenous culture involves a fraught history riven with appropriation, misrepresentation and material and discursive forms of violence.

'The Distribution of Settlement tells a partial story about the effect of these histories within Australian literature and culture. Tracking such cases of appropriation and misrepresentation in white Australian writing from the middle of the twentieth century, the book also turns to the legacy of these acts on and in contemporary Aboriginal writers as diverse as Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Tony Birch and Tara June Winch.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'From Barthes to Foucault, declarations of the death of the author have been crucial in defetishizing the singular authority of a work’s originator as the guarantor of that text’s meaning. Writers from colonised backgrounds, however, have often worried about the erasure of identity and cultural specificity implicit in this nonetheless crucial caveat. Postcolonial theorists who have nuanced or challenged the claim of authorial death/absence include Edward Said in his Beginnings: Intention and Method and Édouard Glissant across multiple topoi within his oeuvre.i If the modernist author had to die to reopen the possibility of multiple interpretations, the Indigenous subject has often been absented in advance from any role in the interpretive paradigm surrounding their work. Aboriginal authors in Australia have been conscious of such limits of the ‘death of the author’ thesis for some time, but it seems that this past year heralded a new attention and reorientation in relation to this question. In her keynote, delivered at the opening of the 2015 ASAL Conference, held at UNSW Canberra, Melissa Lucashenko boldly stated: the ‘Aboriginal author is not dead.’ Non-Indigenous scholars of Aboriginal literature will, it seems, need to be increasingly self-conscious of the ethics of methodology today and it is into this situation that Anne Brewster’s new work inserts itself in a timely fashion.' (Introduction)

Sri Lankan Tamil Asylum Seeker on a Leaky boat finds his story interspersed with that of an Australian case worker in a wavering marriage, a ‘spoiled Emirati rich girl’ ridicules a Ukrainian sex worker online, a young Peruvian man cares for his girlfriend while concealing their relationship from her overbearing Gujarati mother. Which recent collection of short stories are these vignettes blurbing from? The answer is that each comes from a separate collection: the first from Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil, the second from Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions, the third from Daniel Alarcón’s War By Candlelight. Yet, in the context of these short stories and their paratexts, this list could ironically also be said to read as a cohesive blurb. Such global short stories of overlap and interconnectivity have become a staple of the transnational publishing world, with such Australian-based writers as Beneba Clarke, Alizadeh, and Nam Le winning multiple awards, making multiple bestseller lists, and joining a wider transnational phenomenon which includes such U. S. based writers as Alarcón and Jhumpa Lahiri. In this essay, I build on the work of Ken Gelder, Wenche Ommundsen, Nicholas Jose, Lachlan Brown and Marita Bullock to proximately examine the way Beneba Clark, Alizadeh and Le—the Australian writers on this list—engage with the transnational by calling attention to the ambivalent position of migrant and diasporic inscriptions of self-reference (Gelder).' (Introduction)

'Apart from a renewed interest in indigenous literature displayed across several volumes, topics this year ranged from an extensive survey of Christian mysticism to the life-writing of sons in relation to fathers...'

'First published in 1991, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is now presented in one of its several Penguin editions as a 'Modern Australian Classic'. Might this detail of the book' marketing reveal something about the novel's metatextual status? It might be seen to imply that Cloudstreet figures a certain Australian modernity. Indeed, this modernity would have to be commensurable with something classic, standard, which is also to say formative. And insofar as it is formative of the present, a classic is also implicitly, at least in part, of the past. Cloudstreet's metatextual status, then, implies that the novel figures Australia's modernity even as it relies on a classicism that is spectral: haunting the present in all its modernity. If the paradoxical canonical status claimed by the novel implies a certain spectrality, in this way then it is perhaps not surprising that in fleeting but essential moments the novel functions not only as a family epic, but also as a ghost story.' (Author's introduction, 75)

Aboriginal life writing... 'is a syncretic practice: bound to postcolonial structure of mourning and trauma which while also deeply engaged with tradition and its restoration.' In this essay, the author offers a brief and partial survey of the bounds of life writing, and frames his approach to life writing.

'My dissertation employed intellectual historian Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—which can be most broadly parsed as the political organization of life—to examine the way the lives of Aboriginal people were regulated and surveilled in relation to settler European norms. The study is a focused investigation into a topic with global ramifications: the governance of race and sexuality and the effect of such governance on the production of apparently inclusive cultural productions within the public spheres. I argue that the way in which subaltern peoples have been governed in the past and the way their cultures have been appropriated continue to be in the present is not extraneous to but rather formative of what is often misleadingly called “the” public sphere of dominant societies. In the second part, I analyze the legacies of this biopolitical moment and emphasize, particularly, the cultural politics of affect and trauma in relation to this (not quite) past. Authors addressed include: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen, Rex Ingamells, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and others. I also examine Australian Aboriginal policy texts throughout the twentieth century up to the "Bringing Them Home" Report (1997).' (Author's summary)