AustLit

'In an increasingly global world literary and cultural critics are constantly searching for ways in which to analyse and debate texts and artefacts. Postcolonial theories and studies have provided useful tools for analyzing, among others, New Literatures in English and other languages, as well as throwing new light on an understanding of older texts. But today, with the increase in diaspora studies in literature and cultural studies, new ways of looking at texts are paramount, given the complexity of contemporary literature. There is, as Bill Ashcroft writes, a 'strange contrapuntal relationship between identity, history, and nation that needs to be unravelled.' With references to Australian literature, this article will present some reflections on transculturation and modernities, the themes of the Nordic Network of Transcultural Literary Studies, which considers transculturation not as a theory but, 'a matrix through which a set of critical tools and vocabularies can be refined for the study of texts from a localized world, but institutionalised globally' and where , ' the engagement of multiple sites and their routes with the progression of "one modernity" in some way or other inform the aesthetics of transcultural literature.' (Author's introduction)