AustLit

'The YWrite project investigates the role of creative writing in prisons through a state-of-the-art prison education program designed specifically for incarcerated women and children in the Northern Territory. The workshops teach incarcerated students how to express themselves through creative writing in various forms of prison prose, graffiti art, and storytelling. Graffiti constitutes a special genre of writing that has been deployed by prisoners to reflect on their circumstance, to protest their penal incarceration, or even to transform their understanding. Because "graffiti" remains unconstrained by traditional writing conventions (of spelling, grammar, and punctuation), such writing provides a space for resistant writers or those of lower literacy levels to write intuitively. A writer of graffiti can articulate messages with a sense of urgency, uninhibited by conventional expectations of normative writing. The aims of the project are to foster motivation and self-efficacy through creativity, which in turn can lead to improved self-image and reduced emotional stress, an increase in literacy, and more postrelease opportunities. A major outcome of the program will allow detainees to share their "stories" through the publication or exhibition of their work, which will in turn contribute insights for society's understanding of effective prison arts programs and the effects of writing to transform.' (Introduction)

'Reading and writing must be more than passive processes of mimetic display; rather, they should offer a platform for psychological transformations across race and gender. Thus literary sovereignty vis-a-vis ownership of creative expression and representations of self can be reclaimed.This essay offers close analysis of contemporary Australian Indigenous literature to explore the sovereignty of feminist psychologies. Does creative writing reflect a strengthening of female Indigenous psychologies, and how might this implicate race relations and the decolonization of textual worlds? These questions are inspired by Alexis Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book where she writes about “the quest to regain sovereignty over [her] own brain.” This article will explore the term craziness in a metaphorical sense: looking at whether rejecting dominant white culture equates to psychological sovereignty, improved mental well-being, and better race relations in imaginary realms. Indigenous characters in Wright’s The Swan Book and Marie Munkara’s Every Secret Thing may appear “crazy” for living in a state of indifference, but paradoxically, it is this state of “craziness” or indifference that empowers them to find psycho-logical peace and resist assimilation. Seeking psychological sovereignty means assuming a position so averse to patriarchy and colonization that it renders transformation in imaginary worlds,and urges transformation in the psyches of white readers too.'  (Publication abstract)

‘Philosophy's great projects mantle hope for revolution and possibilities for cultural survival and transformation The spirit of philosophical inquiry is to ex-pose societal wrongs and model hope for the future—as found in Marx's account of human alienation, Hegel's exploration of the master-slave relationship, or Levinas's writing of ethics and human relatedness It was Ernest Bloch however, who was concerned with "hope" and the political and social potential for utopian society. In his concept of concrete utopia, he argues that "active hope" and "active belief" are materialized through "conscious human work on it" and that "realism without such hope and without the dominating mode of being of the good possibility is not real-ism There is nothing real without a place for revolution and a better future" Yet such discursive constructions of "hope" can be slippery when applied to political worldviews, and as Australia has experienced, creating frameworks for "hope of a better future" has left the most vulnerable subject; "hopelessly" marginalized and oppressed Early colonial society, for example, was hoped for—it was created through language of writers such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson who affirmed a national identity from a dominant white perspective As a result, a hopeful society was created (for these subjects) but one that did not consider the "hopes" of Indigenous subjects. On the contrary, the modern Australian author Alexis Wright challenges mainstream philosophical paradigms of hope and recreates the "future" from an antiutopian Indigenous view In her recent novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), she critiques humanities' projects, reconciliation, and "closing the gap" for having little utopian potential because these discourses operate on a nexus of "hope" that serves hegemonic national interests of assimilation, appropriation, solidarity, and interventsionist politics.  (Introduction)

This article explores the possibility of intercultural catharsis through literature, metaphorical connections and representations of place in Tony Birch’s Ghost River (2015). Water, rain and essentially the river, symbolise the building of a nation and the repair of Indigenous and non-Indigenous race relations. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is deconstructed and built upon using Indigenous philosophies and intercultural dialogue to explore ideas about relationship building as a spiritual journey connected to the textual directions of the landscape.

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