'In 2017, India and Pakistan mark 70 years since Independence and Canada 150 since Confederation. Decolonisation was accompanied by exclusions from national imaginings, rooted in the economic, cultural and political imperatives of British colonialism, including its territorial claims, cartographic revisions, power hierarchies and divide-and-rule policies. These exclusions were evinced in the bloodshed of Partition’s communal rioting, with its now iconic images of refugees fleeing across the newly created Indo-Pakistani border, and the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples by European “settler” societies such as those of Canada. In his Introduction in this issue, Joel Deshaye comments on Canada’s residential school system’s assimilative practices towards Indigenous children in the nineteenth century as reflected in 2016 poetry and criticism, engaging, in part directly, with the findings of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (2015) and the traumas resulting from such “immersive forms of colonial pedagogy” (Hutchings, 2016: 301).' (Introduction)
'A defining moment in Australian literature in 2016 involved two unlikely protagonists — an American novelist and a Sudanese-Australian engineer. It happened at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in September when journalist and author Lionel Shriver gave the keynote address defending the right of writers to wear “different hats”, while wearing a Mexican sombrero, referencing a controversy at an American college over cultural appropriation. Fiction, Shriver said, will always involve writing about other cultures and identities, and she hit out at the way she felt identity politics made writers reluctant to do this. A number of audience members walked out of the talk and several of these wrote opinion pieces, including 25-year-old Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a mechanical engineer as well as a debut memoirist in 2016. Abdel-Magied labelled Shiver’s speech “a celebration of the unfettered exploitation of the experiences of others, under the guise of fiction” (Guardian 10 September 2016, emphasis original). The Guardian published her response and then, three days later, Shriver’s original speech (13 September 2016).' (Introduction)
