AustLit

'This study aims to foreground key literary works in Persian and Australian culture that deal with the representation of exile and dislocation. Through cultural and literary analysis, Dislocation, Writing, and Identity in Australian and Persian Literature investigates the influence of dislocation on self-perception and the remaking of connections both through the act of writing and the attempt to transcend social conventions. Examining writing and identity in David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978), Iranian Diaspora Literature, and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men (1989/ Eng.1998), Hasti Abbasi provides a literary analysis of dislocation, with its social and psychological manifestations. Abbasi reveals how the exploration of exile/dislocation, as a narrative that needs to be investigated through imagination and meditation, provides a mechanism for creative writing practice.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'According to Said, exile is a condition of terminal loss, "an unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home," which involves "the crippling sorrow of estrangement" (173). According to Homi Bhabha, "colonial mimicry is, among other things, the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). [...]Ovid needs to integrate himself with the other to experience a meaningful life and sense of belonging. According to Robert Massey and Khawla Abu-Baker, "The I of each person actively coordinates the me into a self-image based on past and present experiences and future anticipations of self with others" (14).' (Publication abstract)

'This paper will investigate creative dislocation and the idea of the writer as exiled self through reflections on the traction and slippages between ideas of place, dislocation and writing. For a writer, producing creative work through the experience of dislocation, whether voluntary or enforced, can be isolating and difficult, but it can also bring new perspectives and opportunities for creative capacity and expression. The creative resonances of writing in exile will be explored here with reference to David Malouf’s celebrated novella An Imaginary Life (1978) in which he depicts exile as a necessary journey of becoming, a ‘dynamic marginality’ as Braidotti observes (2002: 129), which offers creative possibility rather than closure and loss. For the writer Ovid, dislocation is phenomenological prerequisite for selftransformation. His discovery is that the writer must always be at the edge of things, noticing differently, available to possibility, able to embody and to channel being as metamorphoses through creative expression.' (Publication abstract)

'Out on the balcony, Sara lifts her arms and rests them on the railing, feeling the air touch her underarms. 'There should be something more to life,' she whispers, feeling light-headed. Exhausted, she remembers the day she walked into the kitchen to be confronted by her mother's dead body lying across the floor. Her bloodshot eyes half open, her mouth agape. Shocked and unable to mae a noise, Sara had remained the for a long still moment, until her father came into the kitchen, the cherries and peaches falling from his hands. The tiniest details of the scene pass through her mind: the dusty brown sheen of her father's hair, the upward quirk of her mother's left eyebrow, the red scar below her right eye, and th epink lipstick smeared around her lips.' (Introduction)