AustLit

'Some months earlier, John Kinsella had sent me the manuscript of his new book of villanelles. There, I had found a couple of lines that kept going through my mind in that turbulent week of world politics, lines that enjoined one “to feel the shift of media politics to one based / in re-tunings and refrains, escaping anthropocene prolapse” (“Frolic Villanelle (+),” in Kinsella, Brimstone 69). It was certainly a week of “media politics,” and we got more than our fair share of “anthropocene prolapse” (relapse? proleptic collapse?) as well.' (Publication summary)

'Temporariness is a scandal in our culture of monumentalism and its persistent search for permanence. Temporariness, the time of the ephemeral and the performative, the time of speech, the time of nature and its constant changes these times have little cultural purchase. In this volume two practitioners and theoreticians of time, space and the word embrace the notion of temporariness seeing in it a site for a renewal of ways of thinking about ourselves, our language, our society and our environment. This collage of fragmentary genres approaches the notion of mitigated presence to build an atlas of intersections attentive to our own temporariness as the site of aesthetic and ethical responsibility. This book is a scintillating meditation on the temporality of human lives and the contemporary possibilities of humanistic writing. John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov explore the conjunctions of memoir, theory, poetry, anecdotes, journal entries and other fragmentary forms in their conversations about the political realities of the world and the imperatives of human survival.' (Publication summary)

'In defending themselves against the ever-more aggressive encroachments of utilitarian, market-oriented, skills-based demands for cost-effective education and research, the humanities often fall back upon a claim for the intrinsic worth of some scholarly pursuits: forms of academic inquiry that are per se valuable and need no justification beyond themselves. The close reading of a poem, the detailed annotation of an ancient manuscript, the philosophical parsing of a concept, are said to be valuable per se, in and for themselves.' (Publication abstract)

In Capital Volume 1. Marx (1976: 925-6) proclaims that -'[[i]f money...'comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek.' capital comes (Into tne world] dripping from head to toe. from every pore, with blood and dirt." This dictum comes at the end of a long section on "primitive accumulation." a term Marx coins to describe the primordial foundations of modern industrial capitalism. One of the sites of "enmity° accumulation" that Marx identifies, alongside the European transition from the feudal order and serfdom via seventeenth- and eighteenth century enclosures with the concomitant creation of a proletariat awaiting the industrial revolution, is the seizure of the wealth of the New World in the Americas. India and Africa (Marx 1976: 915). It is interesting to set alongside Marx's glimpses of colonial forms of "primitive accumulation" Joseph Conrad's more pointed equivalent of the same process in Heart of Darkness (2010: 47): "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." In this chapter, I take Marx's "dirt" and Conrad's -"earth" at face value, reading them over-literally as Freudian dream-language might do: dirt not only as moral stiltedness, the earth not only as the globe, but both as that which is dug out of the ground in what is perhaps the most primeval of colonial forms of exploitation since the arrival of the Spanish in the Americas (Galeano 1997). Colonialism in its primordial and least developed form begins with the extraction of precious minerals and the co-optation of natives to do the "dirty" work of mining. "Primitive accumulation." says Marx, begins. In its most primitive phases. with the discovery of gold and silver in America, (and] the extirpation. enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent" (Marx 1976: 915). In a dual and complementary movement. resources are extracted from the ground by enslaved natives laborers who take the place - Iiterally, spatially - of the minerals they have excavated. In a metaphoric process of exchange. the laborers become dirt, the waste products of mineral extraction. "entombed" in the very heaths left behind by the ore that has been transported to Europe. But the process of "entombing" also involves "encryptment" in the sense of Abraham and Torok (1994). where something is both buried and rendered indecipherable. remaining present however as an Irreducible influence despite its putative consignment to I he past at the moment of its always imminent excavation and extraction, it reasserts its uncanny contemporaneity in the present.'  (Introduction)

'The 'Global South' has largely supplanted the 'Third World' in discussions of development studies, postcolonial studies, world literature and comparative literature respectively. The concept registers a new set of relationships between nations of the once colonized world as their connections to nations of the North diminish in significance. Such relationships register particularly clearly in contemporary cultural theory and literary production. The Global South and Literature explores the historical, cultural and literary applications of the term for twenty-first-century flows of transnational cultural influence, tracing their manifestations across the Global Southern traditions of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This collection of interdisciplinary contributions examines the origins, development and applications of this emergent term, employed at the nexus of the critical social sciences and developments in literary humanities and cultural studies. This book will be a key resource for students, graduates and researchers working in the field of postcolonial studies and world literature.'(Publication summary)

‘A fire hydrant on a street corner in Carlton, in inner-city Melbourne, carries an ephemeral stencilled graffito : ‘terror nullius.’ The graffito is a pun on the legal doctrine of terra nullius, Latin for ‘nobody’s land,’ which dictated that any territory found by a colonizing power could be occupied and claimed if it was deemed not to be inhabited by prior occupants. Typically it was deployed by the British, for example, in a number of rulings in the mid- to late – nineteenth century, (Reynolds, 'Frontier History' 4) to legitimize their colonial conquests around the so-called New World, in particular in Australia. Its hegemony as a legal fiction was ended by the Australian High Court’s historic Mabo ruling of 1992, which deemed that so-called native title, that is, Indigenous possession of Australia, had existed before and after British occupation and the declaration of sovereignty in 1788 (Butt, Eagleson, and Lane).’ (Introduction)

'Temporalities presents a concise critical introduction to the treatment of time throughout literature. Time and its passage represent one of the oldest and most complex philosophical subjects in art of all forms, and Russell West-Pavlov explains and interrogates the most important theories of temporality across a range of disciplines.

'The author explores temporality's relationship with a diverse range of related concepts, including:

• historiography
• psychology
• gender
• economics
• postmodernism
• postcolonialism

'Russell West-Pavlov examines time as a crucial part of the critical theories of Newton, Freud, Ricoeur, Benjamin, and explores the treatment of time in a broad range of texts, ranging from the writings of St. Augustine and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

'This comprehensive and accessible guide establishes temporality as an essential theme within literary and cultural studies today.' (Publication summary)

'Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates as a means of coercion (89-94, 99-102). Elsewhere in the novel, Scott leaves us in no doubt about the force of these associations: "' They had some good ideas, those Nazis," Earn said, "but they went a bit far"' (Benang 154). The analogy between twentieth-century government control of the lives of Australian Indigenous people and biopolitics of Nazism has not gone unnoticed in other quarters. Elizabeth Povinelli describes the equation, made by the Royal Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1994, of a century of child removal practices with cultural genocide, as 'an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s'. The impact of that equation was that 'Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity?' (38).' (Author's introduction, p. 1)