AustLit

'This book provides a unique insiders account of the work of Big hART, one of Australia’s leading participatory arts organisations. Founded on the values of social justice, creativity and transformation Big hART seeks to mobilise a range of community resources including young people, elders, artists, and community activists to produce high quality public performances of merit and social worth. Located in diverse geographic, social and cultural settings across Australia’s vast landscape, these creative works generate intergenerational understandings of the cultural processes of individual and collective transformation strengthening capabilities, identity, and connected belonging. This book documents a series of powerful stories that illuminate the ideological, artistic and cultural pathways and learnings gifted by the generosity of participants themselves.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In Reading Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan combines theoretical explication, textual comparison, and close reading to argue that corporeality is central to Patrick White's fiction, shaping the characterization, style, narrative trajectories, and implicit philosophy of his novels and short stories. Critics have often identified a radical disgust at play in White's writing, claiming that it arises from a defining dualism that posits the 'purity' of the disembodied 'spirit' in relation to the 'pollution' of the material world. Grogan argues convincingly, however, that White's fiction is far more complex in its approach to the body. Modeling ways in which Kristevan theory may be applied to modern fiction, her close attention to White's recurring interest in physicality and abjection draws attention to his complex questioning of metaphysics and subjectivity, thereby providing a fresh and compelling reading of this important world author.'

'In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau’ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These ‘makers’ include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. ' (Publication summary)

Emotions : History, Culture, Society (EHCS) is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal published by Brill on behalf of the Society for the History of Emotions. It releases issues biannually.

'The English-speaking world today is so diverse that readers need a gateway to its many postcolonial narratives and art forms. This collection of essays examines this diversity and what brings so many different cultures together. Whether Indian, Canadian, Australasian or Zimbabwean, the stories discussed focus on how artists render experiences of separation, belonging, and loss. The histories and transformations postcolonial countries have gone through have given rise to a wide range of myths that retrace their birth, evolution, and decline. Myths have enabled ethnic communities to live together; the first section of this collection dwells on stories, which can be both inclusive and exclusive, under the aegis of ‘nation’. 
'While certain essays revisit and retell the crucial role women have played in mythical texts like the Mahābhārata, others discuss how settler colonies return to and re-appro¬priate a past in order to define themselves in the present. Crises, clashes, and conflicts, which are at the heart of the second section of this book, entail myths of historical and cultural dislocation. They appear as breaks in time that call for reconstruction and redefinition, a chief instance being the trauma of slavery, with its deep geographical and cultural dislocations. However, the crises that have deprived entire communities of their homeland and their identity are followed by moments of remembrance, reconciliation, and rebuilding. As the term ‘postcolonial’ suggests, the formerly colonized people seek to revisit and re-investigate the impact of colonization before committing it to collective memory. In a more specifically literary section, texts are read as mythopoeia, foregrounding the aesthetic and poetic issues in colonial and postcolonial poems and novels. The texts explored here study in different ways the process of mythologization through images of location and dislocation. The editors of this collection hope that readers worldwide will enjoy reading about the myths that have shaped and continue to shape postcolonial communities and nations. '  (Publication summary)

'In Australian Theatre after the New Wave, Julian Meyrick charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94). In the years following the controversial dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1975, these 'alternative' theatres struggled to survive in an increasingly adverse economic environment. Drawing on interviews and archival sources, including Australia Council files and correspondence, the book examines the funding structures in which the companies operated, and the impact of the cultural policies of the period. It analyses the changing relationship between the artist and the State, the rise of a managerial ethos of `accountability', and the growing dominance of government in the fate of the nation's theatre. In doing so, it shows the historical roots of many of the problems facing Australian theatre today.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Metaphors are ubiquitously used in the humanities to bring the tangibility of the concrete world to the elaboration of abstract thought. Drawing on this cognitive function of metaphors, this collection of essays focuses on the evocative figures of the `gateway' and the `wall' to reflect on the state of postcolonial studies. Some chapters - on such topics as maze-making in Canada and the Berlin Wall in the writings of New Zealand authors - foreground the modes of articulation between literal borders and emotional (dis)connections, while others examine how artefacts ranging from personal letters to clothes may be conceptualized as metaphorical `gateways' and `walls' that lead or, conversely, regulate access, to specific forms of cultural expression and knowledge. Following this line of metaphorical thought, postcolonial studies itself may be said to function as either barrier or pathway to further modes of enquiry. This much is suggested by two complementary sets of contributions: on the one hand, those that contend that the canonical centre-periphery paradigm and the related `writing back' model have prevented scholars from recognizing the depth and magnitude of cross-cultural influences between civilizations; on the other, those that argue that the scope of traditional postcolonial models may be fruitfully widened to include territories such as post-imperial Turkey, a geographical and cultural gateway between East and West that features in several of the essays included in this collection. Ultimately, all of the contributions testify to the fact that postcolonial studies is a field whose borders must be constantly redrawn, and whose paradigms need to be continually reshaped and rebuilt to remain relevant in the contemporary world - in other words, the collection's varied approaches suggest that the discipline itself is permanently `under construction'. Readers are, therefore, invited to perform a critical inspection of the postcolonial construction site.'   (Publication summary)

'This volume contains a selection of the Australian poet Michael Sharkey’s uncollected essays and occasional writings on poetics and poets, chiefly Australian and New Zealand. Reviews and conversations with other poets highlight Sharkey’s concern with preserving and interrogating cultural memory and his engagement with the practice and championing of poetry. Poets discussed range from Lord Byron to colonial-era and early twentieth-century poets (Francis Adams, David McKee Wright, and Zora Cross), underrepresented Australian women poets of World War I, traditionalists and experimentalists, including several ‘New Australian Poetry’ activists of the 1970s, and contemporary Australian and New Zealand poets. Writings on poetics address form and tradition, the teaching and reception of poetry, and canon-formation. The collection is culled from commissioned and occasional contributions to anthologies of practical poetics, journals devoted to literary and cultural history and book reviewing, as well as newspaper and small-magazine features from the 1980s to the present. The writing reflects Sharkey’s poetic practice and pedagogy relating to the teaching of literature, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and writing in universities'.

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This collection addresses broad questions of ethics and aesthetics in the framework of vernacular cosmopolitanism. With a common anthropological focus, the essays map literary and artistic practices involving cross-cultural transactions shaped by social forces, institutions, and the multiple mediations of the imagination. Some essays are based on community-based fieldwork, while all encompass an affective immersion in the places we inhabit, and the claims these make on the body’s intelligibility.

'The authors consider the role of artists, writers, and literary scholars as cultural actors in a variety of settings, grassroots, regional, trans-regional, and global. Topics include: the role of social and cultural activism; the problematic dimensions of national belonging; the plurality of knowledge-systems and inter-language environ-mental learning in South Africa; the vernacular imagination in Papua New Guinea Anglophone fiction; pulp fiction and chick lit in India; transformative artistic motifs of Australia’s nomadic Tiwi community; life writing as a reconfiguring of postcolonial or cosmopolitan paradigms; southern African supernatural belief-systems and the malign magic of the global economy; Canadian First Nations literature read against the struggle for self-determination by India’s castes and scheduled tribes; feral animals in relation to the indigenous exotic; and the imbrication of the vernacular, national, colonial, and cosmopolitan in perceptions of homecoming in the eastern Mediterranean. The collection as a whole thus provides manifestations of poesis in relation to theory and praxis and articulates perspectives that expand, challenge, strengthen, and renew the potential for growth in contemporary world literature and culture.'

Source: Abstract.

'Cultural memory involves a community shared memories, the selection of which is based on current political and social needs. A past that is significant to a national group is re-imagined by generating new meanings that replace earlier certainties and fixed symbols or myths. This creates literary syncretisms with moments of undecidability. The analysis in this book draws on Renate Lachmann theory of intertextuality to show how novels that blur boundaries without standing in for history are prone to intervene in cultural memory. A brief overview of Aboriginal politics between the 1920s and the 1990s in relation to several novels provides historical and political background to the links between, and problems associated with, cultural memory, testimony, trauma, and Stolen Generations narratives, which are discussed in relation to Sally Morgan My Place and Doris Pilkington Rabbit-Proof Fence. There follows an analysis of novels that respond to the history of contact between Aboriginal and settler Australians, including Kate Grenville historical novels The Secret River, The Lieutenant, and Sarah Thornhill as examples of a traditional approach. David Malouf Remembering Babylon charts how language and naming defined our early national narrative that excluded Aboriginal people. Intertextuality is explored via the relation between Thea Astley The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, Chloe Hooper The Tall Man, and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Kim Scott Benang: from the heart and That Deadman Dance and Alexis Wright Carpentaria reflect a number of Lachmann concepts, syncretism, dialogism, polyphony, Menippean satire, and the carnivalesque.' (Publication summary)