AustLit

'This special issue of JEASA represents the manner in which literature carries life with it, the manner in which literature upends, or explicates the “entangled significance” (van Dooren 7) of our days. It is aimed at exploring how poetry is experienced, revised, lived, analysed, enunciated, performed and measured in our everyday life. The issue is a collation of commissioned and happenstance interventions. In sending the call for submissions out to various friends for scholarship, the details provided were vague; I asked them that they submit something which demonstrated their excitement, to write on something that compelled them in their reading and in their scholarship. The responses received demonstrate a flourishing engagement with Australian writing at the very heart of our intellectual community, and attest to the possibilities of Australian scholarship and the communities of thought developed here. This work evidences the various ways we attend to the complex and ethical significance of poetry, of writing that makes meaning in the world, and the scholarship we are publishing today generates distinctive encounters with the material of language.'

Source: Introduction.

'Perhaps the most iconic figure that has come to epitomise the earliest interactions between colonial Australia and South Asia is that of the male "Afghan" cameleer. However, the catch-all term "Afghan" (or "Ghan") is a partial misnomer since the cameleers who started making their way to Australia from the mid-1860s onwards were, in addition to Afghan, from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, including Punjabi, Balochi, Kashmiri and Sindhi. Many of these men came from areas that straddle present-day north India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and, therefore, at least some of them were "from British India and were British subjects, originating from east of the Durant line that separated British India from Afghanistan" (Ganter 487). Designating this diverse group of camel-drivers collectively as "Afghans," rather than recognizing their status as British subjects where applicable, was not merely a case of sloppy record-keeping, but was also politically expedient since, as Regina Ganter points out, it "served the purpose of classifying them as Alien or ‘Asiatics' under various restrictive laws curtailing their rights to own property, land, or engage in independent business" (487). This variety of immigration reached its height in the 1880s and the political climate during the 1890s became increasingly hostile towards immigrants from Asia. Though the Chinese "bore the brunt" (Jones 11) of the growing anti-Asian sentiment which culminated in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (or the White Australia policy), the cameleers too were inevitably affected by it and, of course, by "the invention of the modern engine" which diminished their "utility" significantly (Abdalla 39).'  (Introduction)

'In her article "Matriduxy?: Tracing Colonial Adumbration in Australian Womanhood via a Psychoanalytical Reading of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children," Theresa Holtby investigates the notion of matriduxy (the alleged dominance of women in Australian families), including its mixed reception by Australian feminist critics, in relation to expressions of imperialist masochistic ideology in fiction, namely in Stead's novel. She argues that there are striking parallels between the role of the dominatrix in Deleuze's theory of masochism and the alleged phenomenon of matriduxy, concluding that the concept of masochism offers a means to reconcile the ostensibly incompatible readings of Australian society through the lens of matriduxy or, on the other hand, misogyny.' (Martina Horakova : Editorial introduction)

'The new issue of JEASA partly thematizes the 2015 EASA conference organized by the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. The theme of the conference, "Australia as Topos: The Transformation of Australian Studies," is reflected in several articles in this issue, particularly in those centered on mediating Australia for European audience and/or on "European" and transnational readings of contemporary Australian literature. ' (Martina Horakova Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA), Vol.7 No.2, 2016.)