AustLit

'Scholarship on literary renderings of the urban has focussed primarily on poverty and thus contributed to a somewhat one-sided perception of social inequalities. For the sake of a more comprehensive perception of the social asymmetries shaping today's cities, this essay focuses on urban wealth and explores its centrality to three neoliberal city-novels written in the first decade of this century: Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist (2006), and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008). To explore how these three otherwise quite dissimilar texts represent the perceived "fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and affluence" (Baudrillard 25) in modern cities, the essay considers voices in urban studies critiquing the once optimistic understanding of cities as "wealth machines" (Molotch) and draws on Andrea Brighenti's theoretical deconstruction of the popular equation of visibility with power and invisibility with powerlessness. Conspicuousness, it submits, is only one side of urban wealth; another is, as the three novels under study show, the typical intangibility of capital power, enforced by an intricate interplay of exposure and concealment of urban wealth and itself enforcing social divides in cities.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay proposes a new way of thinking about asylum and refugees by bringing the contemporary discourse of forced displacement into conversation with that of the transnational mobility of today’s financial elites. It does so with respect to the Australian context and the affective registers of xenophobia and antiracism routinely exploited in public debates not only on boat people and asylum, but also on immigration to Australia at large. Thus, the essay responds to calls in the fields of migration studies, critical theory, and economic geography for a closer examination of the socioeconomic inequalities produced by a neoliberalism fast transforming national economies and compelling, or enticing, people all over the world to leave their homelands. Since such inequalities are currently receiving keenest attention in the popular media, it is to these that this essay turns first, with the aim to cast light on the argumentative impasses and ethical dilemmas which the task of chronicling the extravagant lifestyles of super-rich migrants poses. For ways to resolve these, it then moves to literary fiction, notably the novels Birds of Passage (1983) by Brian Castro and The Ancestor Game (1992) by Alex Miller, exploring how they displace the popular narrative of Asian invasion by situating contemporary immigration from Asia to Australia in a wider historical context and returning to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to tell the stories of wealthy Chinese families forcing their dependants to emigrate to Australia. The final section of the essay relates Miller and Castro’s appraisals of the grim legacy of these first engineers of forced migration from Asia to Australia to more recent literary protests by Geraldine Brooks, Raimond Gaita, Stephanie Johnson, Tom Keneally, and Kim Scott against the Australian nation-state’s denial of its obligation to grant asylum to refugees.' (Publication abstract)

'Paradise is commonly imagined as a place of departure or arrival, beginning and closure, permanent inhabitation of which, however much desired, is illusory. This makes it the dream of the traveller, the explorer, the migrant, hence - a trope recurrent in postcolonial writing, which is so centrally concerned with questions of displacement and belonging. Projections of Paradise documents this concern and demonstrates the indebtedness of writers as diverse as Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, Cyril Dabydeen, Bernardine Evaristo, Amitav Ghosh, James Goonewardene, Romesh Gunesekera, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Janette Turner Hospital, Penelope Lively, Fatima Mernissi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, M.G. Vassanji, and Rudy Wiebe to strikingly similar myths of fulfilment. In writing, directly or indirectly, about the experience of migration, all project paradises as places of origin or destination, as homes left or not yet found, as objects of nostalgic recollection or hopeful anticipation. Yet in locating such places, quite specifically, in Egypt, Zanzibar, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Sundarbans, Canada, the Caribbean, Queensland, Morocco, Tuscany, Russia, the Arctic, the USA, and England, they also subvert received fantasies of paradise as a pleasurable land rich with natural beauty.

Projections of Paradise explores what happens to these fantasies and what remains of them as postcolonial writings call them into question and expose the often hellish realities from which popular dreams of ideal elsewheres are commonly meant to provide an escape.' Source: www.rodopi.nl/ (Sighted 25/07/2011).

'Though obvious, the productiveness of combining the three concepts of childhood, otherness and the postcolonial has not inspired much academic inquiry so far. The essays assembled in this book make up for this omission and address aspects of growing up in Australia and New Zealand from various angles. They base their argument on the premise that, whether in settler, migrant or indigenous communities, children tend to be ascribed a space of their own, mostly outside but never independent of that of adults. How adults configure this space both practically and imaginatively, for instance in the arts, in adult and children's literature, in film and photography, or in historical documents, is one of the questions answered in the process. How these configurations have developed with time and under the influence of specific historical circumstances is another. Thus, the individual papers are more than a contribution to a current (re-)discovery of the theme of childhood in European cultures in that Antipodean Childhoods remains centrally concerned with the cultural specificity of childhoods lived in Australia and New Zealand and with the theoretical implications of this specificity to postcolonial literary, cultural and historical studies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.