AustLit

'In this chapter, I approach contemporary Australian multiperspectival novels, i.e. texts in which the reader accesses the storyworld through different focalisers, from the perspective of narrative empathy. I argue that narrative empathy as a result of a text’s multiperspectivity can arise primarily if the narrative foregrounds conflict between focalisers. To illustrate this, I offer readings of Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008) and Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011). Narrative empathy features differently in the two novels. While The Slap indeed invites readers to feel empathy on the basis of the multiperspectival structure of the text, this is not the case in Five Bells, since the narrative does not exacerbate conflict in the same way as Tsiolkas’s narrative does. At the same time, I suggest that it fulfils similar functions in both texts in that its main aim is to foster greater understanding for those whose subjectivities are marginalised within society.'

Source: Abstract.

'Based on a reading of Kim Scott's Taboo (2017), this article argues that only through a sincere acknowledgement of material and mental Indigenous sovereignty can postcolonial nations eventually attempt to move beyond embedded colonialist structures. Sovereignty, as the novel emphasises, relates not only to questions of physical displacement but also, importantly, to the issue of representation. This article contends that a dual approach informed by both postcolonial and Indigenous studies can be useful in challenging existing colonising elements in the construction of Indigeneity and offering alternatives. Employing Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra's notion of "Aboriginalism," this article shows how postcolonial theory offers vital tools to identify, describe, and criticise ubiquitous colonialist images of Indigeneity and is hence able to raise an awareness of these structures and make change possible. With its insistence on the diversity and mutability of Indigenous identities, critical Indigenous theory, such as James Clifford's formulation of an "articulated Indigeneity," on the other hand, emphasises that recognising the complexity of Indigeneity represents an important step towards Indigenous sovereignty, as Taboo rightly identifies.' (Publication abstract)

'From at least the early 1990s, when the Hawke Labor Government introduced reconciliation legislation into the Australian parliament, the concept of reconciliation has attracted criticism from both the political left and right. While some have complained of it as a predominantly white undertaking, others have seen it as a threat to the unity of the Australian nation-state. Following the election of John Howard in 1996, reconciliation met fierce resistance from the Federal Government itself, with Howard rejecting the recommendations of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report and refusing to apologise to Indigenous Australians for their ongoing sufferings at the hands of British colonialism. This is the political climate that provides the backdrop for the five novels, all written between 2002 and 2007, which Liliana Zavaglia examines in White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation (2016). In her book, Zavaglia deliberately chooses to focus exclusively on works by Anglo-Australian writers to examine how whiteness operates in contemporary Australia. Though she conceives of her primary texts as characteristic of a liberal whiteness that ‘worked to counter [the] political attempts [by the Liberal government] to silence the Indigenous rights and reconciliation movements’ (1), she argues that they, at the same time, articulate the ‘double movement of apology and apologia’ (3) typical of whiteness in Australia. Etymologically, ‘apology’ and ‘apologia’ are cognates of the Greek and Latin apologia, respectively. Despite their common roots, however, they differ significantly in terms of meaning, for while the first implies remorse, the latter, a later borrowing of the Latin form, indicates defence and justification. By identifying moments of both apology and apologia, Zavaglia suggests, the novels she discusses reveal the ‘discourse of liberal postcolonial whiteness [to be] a riven and conflicted site, driven in a hopeful quest to heal its relations with the other, even as its normative traces continue in the legacy bequeathed to it by its colonial foundations’ (21). What then follows is an elaborate investigation of this divided and disrupted nature of Australian whiteness, as it manifests itself in contemporary Anglo-Australian fiction.' (Publication abstract)

'Without a doubt, the High Court Mabo decision of 1992 represents one of the defining moments in recent Australian history, since it has re-evaluated the relationship between Indigenous and settler-Australians. Yet, despite its significance for the nation as a whole, its consequences for Australia’s literary production, in contrast to its effects on the country’s cultural production more generally (a fully-fledged study on the effects of the Mabo decision on Australian film already appeared in 2004), have only been studied in patches. With his recent study The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (2018), which is based on his PhD project conducted at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, Geoff Rodoreda attends to this neglect and offers a highly readable account of the ways in which Australian literature has responded to the changed political, cultural and emotional landscapes after Mabo.' (Introduction)