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'The burning of boats, that classic figure for the impossibility of return, was, for over a decade a practice routinely staged by the Australian state as a form of ‘deterrence’ against other unwanted entrants – even as it served, for those just landed, to confirm the finality of their arrival. More recently, this official “torching rite” of no return meets its counterpart in the bizarre logic of the “orange lifeboat,” where asylum seekers are forcibly turned back to an uncertain fate aboard unsinkable, air-conditioned capsules.
'This paper considers questions of arrival, departure and refugee and diasporic subjectivities in the context of Australian refugee policy. Some readers may notice in my subtitle an allusion to V.S. Naipaul’s memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, but more immediate to my concerns is Amitav Ghosh’s articulation of a distinction between exodus and dispersal narratives. Whereas narratives of exodus fix their gaze on the shore of arrival, Ghosh suggests, dispersal compels a return to the pain of rupture and the movement of departure: the sting of smoke evermore in our eyes from our burning possessions; before us, the steady flaming of our boats.
'Marking Stuart Hall’s indispensable theorizing of diasporic subjectivities in the wake of his passing earlier this year, I ask how refugee and disapora bodies and subjects are made and unmade in the context of the Australian borderscape, understood as a set of makeshift, protean geographies of making live and letting die.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Epigraph: ‘At the unstable point where the 'unspeakable' stories of subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture . . .’ – Stuart Hall (1932-2014)
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Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Afterword
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015; 'At the water’s edge, the ship’s flank is seared open. Wielding acetylene torches, the labourers carve up a ship’s carcass. Rivets pop as the steel melts and yields to the focused flame that tears at its seams. In this graveyard at the water’s edge of Colombo harbour, the ebb and flow of tides bear witness to these processes of systematic dismemberment. This is the scene that opens Suvendrini Perera’s uncompromising analysis of the practices of violence that inscribe the end-journeys of refugees desperately seeking sanctuary as they flee the various hells that make life in their countries of origin unlivable. This scene graphically captures the elemental polarities that bookend Perera’s profoundly moving essay on refugees, diasporic dispersals, urgent flights and failed arrivals: fire and water, life and death. ' (Author's introduction)
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Afterword
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015; 'At the water’s edge, the ship’s flank is seared open. Wielding acetylene torches, the labourers carve up a ship’s carcass. Rivets pop as the steel melts and yields to the focused flame that tears at its seams. In this graveyard at the water’s edge of Colombo harbour, the ebb and flow of tides bear witness to these processes of systematic dismemberment. This is the scene that opens Suvendrini Perera’s uncompromising analysis of the practices of violence that inscribe the end-journeys of refugees desperately seeking sanctuary as they flee the various hells that make life in their countries of origin unlivable. This scene graphically captures the elemental polarities that bookend Perera’s profoundly moving essay on refugees, diasporic dispersals, urgent flights and failed arrivals: fire and water, life and death. ' (Author's introduction)
- The Undesirables : Inside Nauru 2014 single work autobiography
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cNauru,cSouth Pacific, Pacific Region,