Cirrus@Austlit

'The refugee novel is a problematic classificiation, especially when one adds a national label to it. This chapter examines the writing of Behrouz Boochani, Michelle de Kretser, and Felicity Castagna in the context Australia’s treatment of refugees. It argues that refugee fiction can play a vital epistemological and ethical role in the Australian context, while also emphasizing the dangers of commodification that dog the category of “refugee writing.”' (Publication abstract)

'Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist recounts Peter Carey's literary career from his emergence in the Australian literary scene as a contributor to local literary magazines to when he published his fiction exclusively with large conglomerate publishers. As Australia's most decorated author for a period nearing half a century, Carey's career gives unparalleled insights into the global contemporary publishing and the making of global literary prestige from the periphery, and significant cultural currency for Australian literature and culture worldwide. Carey's fiction is not only a product of the global dynamic in literary publishing of the last quarter of the twentieth century, but also it holds something of its productive tension for Australian writing and writers. Allahyari retraces the fraught synthesis of an individual literary proclivity with a growing commercial cultural appetite: the coincidence of Carey's career with the conglomeration of global publishing pushed further towards anti-elitist, popular aesthetics.'  (Publication summary)

'The mediagenic publicity of the multiple prize-winning Kurdish Iranian author Behrouz Boochani has elevated him to an emblematic status for the struggles of refugees, and his 2018 book, No Friend but the Mountains, into a mega-text. These promotional strategies are marked by the mutation of humanitarian awards into convertible cultural capital in the Australian literary field. This article argues that the dissemination of Boochani’s image is qualified with a surplus of affect – in both registers of affectation and of feeling – in the public domain. What I term the “Boochani effect” mobilizes a large number of actors in the cultural sphere to engage with the burgeoning interest in refugee writing, while emphasizing Boochani’s position as simultaneously an “Australian” and a “refugee”. Boochani’s work and author-persona thus generate a “disciplinary trouble”, a problem of taxonomy that both refracts and resists the limits of the mechanisms of identity-making for the refugee writer.' (Publication abstract)

'In July 2021, the American billionaire Jeff Bezos completed the first private flight to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and back in a spacecraft unapologetically resembling a giant penis. New Shepard, as it was called, carried Amazon’s owner, his brother Mark (Jeff’s spitting image), an 82-year-old ex-pilot, and a young Dutchman whose enthusiasm for the 8-minute space trip cost him $28 million. In the press conference after the landing, a grinning Bezos thanked all the Amazon customers around the world, saying, ‘you guys paid for this’. The audience indulged the good humour of one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Haha! None taken!'  (Introduction)

'Merciless Gods (2014) is Christos Tsiolkas’s only collection of short stories and arguably his least discussed work to date. Comprising stories that Tsiolkas published in various literary magazines and anthologies as early as 1995, Merciless Gods is persistent in its fixation on the relationship between queer desire, identity, and disgust. Throughout the collection, characters are frequently exposed to the bodily discharges that most of us tend to dissociate from, cringe at, and conceal from one another: sweat, semen, odor, and excrement. Characters also blurt out vile homophobic and racist bigotry in impulsive overflows of speech that bring about release and disgust at the same time. In this article, we read the spasmic (in all its forms) as a liminal space of joy and repulsion that constitutes what we call Tsiolkas’s politics of disgust. We argue that disgust is crucial to Tsiolkas’s deeply humanist and densely historical project, best exemplified in Merciless Gods in the ways that form—short fiction and the collection—arouses distinct feelings in readers that they cannot escape and that Tsiolkas’s work refuses to gloss over. In this way, Merciless Gods testifies to Tsiolkas’s compulsive return to fundamental questions of justice and distribution of misery and well-being.' (Publication abstract)

 (Introduction)

'I could follow Justin Clemens’ pointed question in his ‘Manifesto for an International University’ with a rhetorical ‘or both?’ It seems to me that to pick either debasement or disposability would bypass the combined insult and injury of working as a casual teacher in a state of offense to the University; I mean you—if you are a casual teacher—carry an unwelcome status as simultaneously the University’s disobedient citizen, near-superfluous to its educational structure and its legal liability. The problem of casual teaching remains a postscript to the bulking literature of cri de coeur about the ‘crisis’ of the corporate University (for example see Connell). This crisis has launched hordes of ‘defences’ for literary studies on the grounds of its shifting relevance to labour-capital relations, characterised by the erosion of institutional guarantee, and the perpetuation of precarity. It is hardly a head-scratcher that it remains within the domain of the hypothetical ‘rare tenured critic’ to strive for ‘different answers’ to questions about what constitutes the program, and how the classroom can keep it alive (Kornbluh). As for answers, think of a whole book of lamentations for the loss of the discipline’s cultural repertoire, appeals to its economic contribution to the ‘creative industries’, and counsel on how to repurpose the transmission of literary knowledge—often all at the same time. In one recent example, Rita Felski has called for new ‘justifications for the costs of the humanities’ by focusing on the alliterative sequence of ‘curating, conveying, criticising, composing’ (Felski).' (Introduction)

'In A Body of Water (1990), Beverley Farmer chronicles her thoughts on how to reshape her work in favour of a more personal expression. Her early writing now feels foreign to her: ‘Assuming that I want to go on writing the conventional sort of fiction that I have been. Why do I assume that?’ By that stage, she had written three collections of short stories – Snake (1982), Milk (1983), and Home Time (1985) – none ‘conventional’ in any strict sense of the word – and a novella, Alone, which she completed in the late 1960s and was published in 1980.' (Introduction)

'There is a case to be made about the relationship between accelerative capitalism and its eager embrace of Eastern mysticism’s notion of unlimited human potential. Both discourses use, for one thing, the lexicon of liberation – sex, good, superego, bad. And there is no way to stop the cosmic forces of either human consciousness or capital because apparently that is where the intelligent evolution of all existence is taking us. The controversial love-guru, Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho), once grunted that criticisms of his wealth, which included the world’s largest collection of Rolls-Royces, reeked of communist inclinations. Speaking at Woodstock, Swami Satchidananda urged American youth to aid the world spiritually now that they were leading it economically. Some of the greatest publicity for these globalised yogis were their celebrity devotees; Maharishi Mahesh, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, had the Beatles; Steve Jobs – whose Apple logo was, by one account, inspired by his reverence for the Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba – had reportedly only one book on his iPad when he died, Paramahansa Yogananda’s The Autobiography of A Yogi.' (Introduction)

Semi-autobiographical: includes the author's account of his life in Australia and his sense of being understood via people's memories of reading accounts of the Middle East.

'The American writer bell hooks had characterised the 1990s as a period of ‘collusion’ between well-educated white women and the capitalist patriarchy (Where We Stand: Class matters, 2000). The new workplace gave these women greater economic power but curbed their agency in altering the structures of the ruling system. All the while, division of labour at home remained more or less unchanged, with women as the primary contributors. This made them feel, hooks recalls, ‘betrayed both by the conventional sexism … and by the feminism, which insisted work was liberating’ without addressing the dearth of job opportunities for women of less privileged classes.' (Introduction)

'When the author Richard Flanagan described Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker currently held on Manus Island, as “a great Australian writer”, he turned tired cliché into a pointed question: what makes an “Australian” writer?'  (Introduction)