'Welcome to the December issue of Transnational Literature. The opportunity to take the reins of such a wide-ranging journal from outgoing General Editor Gillian Dooley has been a great privilege. With the help of the journal’s excellent editorial team, I’ve enjoyed the challenge of bringing together the diverse writing of 45 authors from around the world, from Australia, Chile, Germany, India, Iran, Pakistan, Republic of Yemen, Singapore, Sweden, Syria, the US and the UK. From its original premise of ‘New Literatures in English’ in Syd Harrex’s CRNLE Reviews Journal, the journal has grown to consider literature from a ‘transnational’ framework. These days, Transnational Literature welcomes creative writing in translation, and the languages sit side by side, in intercultural conversation. Migrancy and diaspora, intergenerational identities, questions of belonging, border crossings, statelessness and territorialisation, the socio-political condition of people within and outside national borders: all are subjects examined in the journal as it reaches far and wide.' (Alison Flett, Letter from the Acting General Editor : Introduction)
Only literary material by Australian authors individually indexed. Other material in this issue includes:
Ghayath Almadhoun An Introduction to Syrian Poetry Four Poems: 'How I became ...'; 'We'; 'I Can't Attend'; 'Ode to Sadness'
Golan Haji Two Poems: 'Cliffs'; 'Spring Skies'
Rasha Omran The Woman who Dwelt in the House Before
Raed Wahesh Absence
Pooja Nansi Poem for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan ending in a beginning and Tell me the Story
Faber-Castell Classic Colour Pencils' by Aeen Norouzi, translated from Persian by Yasaman Rahmani
'Bitter Secrets' by Claudine Jacques, translated from French by Patricia Worth
Mushtaq Bilal The Girl with the Book
Nicholas Birns Between the Lindens
'This is a piece of creative non-fiction merging art commentary, literary analysis, and a personal account of the writer’s research. Changes across time in the writer’s understanding of an Australian painting – Breakfast Piece (1936) by Herbert Badham – are examined, with the writer’s slowness to comprehend the painting’s overt allusion to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) highlighted. The writer’s discovery that Breakfast Piece was reproduced on the covers of a 1985 edition of Eleanor Dark’s 1945 novel The Little Company and a 1991 edition of Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watch Tower provokes an analysis of these authors’ treatment of international geopolitical affairs and local gender relations.' (Publication abstract)
'Bill Ashcroft is a renowned critic and theorist, a founding exponent of postcolonial theory and co-author of The Empire Writes Back (1989), the first text to examine systematically a field that is now referred to as ‘postcolonial studies’. He is author and co-author of 16 books and over 160 chapters and papers including Edward Said (2001), Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2002), Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures (2008), Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures (2016). He is on the editorial boards for various journals, such as Textual Practice, New Literatures Review, JASAL, Postcolonial Text, to name just a few. The interviewer met Professor Ashcroft at the 16th International Conference of Australian Studies in China (21-23 June 2018, Beijing) and they had a preliminary discussion on the issues concerned in this paper; they agreed to complete a formal dialogue via e-mail. In this interview, Bill Ashcroft clarifies his area of study in postcolonial literatures; he relates world literature with postcolonial literatures and analyses the problem in the interdisciplinary study of world literature; finally, he discusses why and how to include China in postcolonial literary studies.' (Introduction)
