AustLit

'Welcome to the world of snackable content.

'Listen closely: like an ambient soundscape, its soft tides wash over you and you devour it quickly. Sometimes, it repeats an opinion you’ve already developed, affirming previously held beliefs. From afar this tone appears poetic but zoom in closer and you will see that they are generated to trigger particular affective feeling – what Sianne Ngai describes as ‘the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom’. Did SEO create this monster? Or was it the inner workings of the thing we now call capitalist realism? The answers lie inside your personal algorithm, an enigmatic void that soothes your soul with its mirrors.'  (Introduction)

'S.L. spoke to Cher about desire, finding solidarity across difference, and their ambivalence towards the notion of ‘clout’.' 

'A “non-place”, as Marc Augé describes in his 1995 essay-turned-book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, is a venue whose uniformity of design makes it indistinguishable from another, regardless of where you are in the world. One can think of shopping centres, supermarkets and airports as non-places, although more recently we can also include cafes, Airbnbs and social media profiles. In Augé’s view, a non-place is a “supermodernism” that has emerged out of globalisation, resulting in “places of memory” that are unbroken chains. These places become so familiar they eventually become socially estranging.' (Introduction)

'In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility. With a stylistic panache and an erudite wit, Gunaydin goes on to ask, towards the end of the essay, ‘… if displacement did not begin five years ago but two hundred and thirty years ago, what use is there in attempting to freeze its current class and racial composition in amber?’ This mode of writing is something I’ve observed amongst writers on the so-called ‘margins’ in the last few years: as writers move away from the giddy nascence of a minoritised literature that is nevertheless situated inside an anglophone canon, narratives become less concerned with a centre and more interested in interrogating the complexities that arise from marginal conditions. Struggle is considered alongside joy, privileges alongside oppressions.' (Introduction)

'When Jasbir K. Puar coined the term ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), she was referring to a liberally-sanctioned queerness that had gained credibility in a post-9/11 world. It was, according to her, a biopolitics that pits a ‘sexual exceptionalism’ of the ‘global gay left’ against ‘perverse, improperly hetero- and homo- Muslim sexualities’. Within homonationalism, there lay the ‘convivial relations’ between queerness and neoliberal tendencies – such as privatisation, militarism, surveillance, deportation and empire – that lean on a nationalistic ‘imagined community’ while hawking an illusory feeling of freedom. Not dissimilar to carceral feminism, homonationalism espouses a quasi-progressive rhetoric that justifies racist, xenophobic and aporophobic positions.' (Introduction)

'Vidya Rajan is a writer for TV and theatre, a comedian and performer, an occasional good time, and a reluctant brand experience.

'Vidya spoke to Cher about the necessity of nurturing care in the arts, the ongoing push/pull between IRL and URL, and what it means to be an artist within capitalism.' (Introduction)

'In a white-dominated literary world, writing “the other” becomes a political act. This is, to put it lightly, unfortunate. Regardless, decades of omission have led to a reckoning in which writers of colour have carved out new spaces – those that encourage portrayals of long-ignored experiences, debunk the fallacy that writing should be “universal”, and shun the white gaze.' (Introduction)

'ASMR. Personal brand. Hope this email finds you well. Selfie. Drop a pin on it. Livestreaming. Co-working space. I’m baby. Haul gals. Mukbang. Shall we take it to Zoom? Foodstagram. Scrolling through the feed. Geotagging. Doctor influencer. The cloud. Let me Google that for you. Finsta. I don’t have the bandwidth to do this. 10,000 followers. Chaotic energy. Airspace. Tag yourself. Is this idea futureproof? Legacy contact. #GIRLBOSS. You’re cancelled!' (Introduction)

'The plot unfurls slowly in Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain, which opens in the Palmer River goldfields in early colonial Australia. Disguised as a man for her physical safety, Ying toils with her brother Lai Yue in the hope of procuring enough of a fortune to take back to China, but life on the fields is relentless. They soon realise that gold-digging is untenable, and head to nearby Maytown in search of more stable work. There, second-generation British settler Meriem has been banished from her home town after an unwanted pregnancy. Now a housekeeper for sex worker Sophie, she is shunned by the townsfolk. After Lai Yue leaves for an overland expedition and Ying begins working as a shopkeeper for local Chinese man Jimmy, Meriem’s and Ying’s paths converge. They embark on a friendship coloured by caution and curiosity, an archetypal interracial tale of differences as both protagonists awkwardly feel their way around each other.' (Introduction)

'After his gripping yet slow-burning debut, Call Me Evie, J. P. Pomare is back with another compelling thriller – and it’s just as dread-filled. Told through dual perspectives, In the Clearing follows Freya, a wealthy single mother who leads a routine life in a small town, and Amy, a teenage girl born and raised in The Clearing, a secret community with many parallels to the notorious 1960s Victorian cult The Family. The two narratives gradually intertwine to reveal something much bigger – nefarious connections that span decades and leave a shadow hanging over the town.' (Introduction)

'Within moments of joining Swedish thinktank Piratbyran, anakata had formed a clear vision for the group. BitTorrent, a communication protocol, had been designed in the United States two years prior, and interest in its peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution capabilities was rising. Unlike more rudimentary P2P services, it had the ability to transmit large files. As a result, when he floated the idea of building a BitTorrent tracker, some of the more vocal members expressed their enthusiasm; the group was already hosting humour sites, image-hosting portals... why not another website? !is was especially crucial following the rise of copyright lobby group Antipiratbyran, whose activities were rooted in spreading anti-piracy propaganda: that "intellectual property" was a good, that jobs were being stolen, that piracy was killing creativity. But as ever, Piratbyran's primary purpose was to promote the sharing of information.' (Publication abstract)

'A man tends to his shop alone as he clings to the desperate hope that his sons will one day show interest and take over his business. A divorcee shrugs off advice from her family, who tell her to find another man or stay out of the sun to protect her once-pale skin. A woman worries that the life that she and her family have built in a new country will be for naught.'  (Introduction)

'Gemma came to Australia with her family in 1987. Prior to that, she lived in England and the Philippines. She is reviews editor for the Melbourne Spoken Word website.

'Gemma spoke to Cher about craft beer poetics, navigating mental illness as a person of colour and the interplay between classical music and poetry.' (Introduction)