Cirrus@Austlit

'A biographical outline of the life, work and achievements of Dr Serge Liberman (1942–2017), noted author, editor, scholar and medical practitioner based in Melbourne, Australia.'  (Publication abstract)

'It is argued that the emergence of ‘multiculturalism’ in Australia during the Nineteen-eighties was almost entirely determined by political considerations. An application of the concept to literary culture was not anticipated. Nor was there a discourse of migrant or ethnic literature before post-war immigration.

'As part of the Australia Council’s decision to sponsor a literary culture of ‘New Australians’ it encouraged the creation of a journal for multicultural literature, Outrider. This article is an attempt to characterise a group of perceived ‚multicultural writers’ by raising doubt about their real or assumed status. It is true they employ highly individual creative imagination and variations of literary style by questioning the nature of migration (often without being migrants themselves). However, such writing is hardly unique to inherent characteristics of   ‚multicultural aesthetics’. Formally and thematically these authors’ language frequently employs a wide range of elective affinities, alienation techniques or correlative analogies. They can hardly be considered ‚minority writers’ of limited literary genius. In truth they are creators of sophisticated poetry and prose by overcoming (or ‘integrating’) foreign language restriction.  To them migration is not merely a subject or theme: it is a consciousness manifesting itself in literary form and style. The best ‘migrant writing’ invokes dimensions of alienation shared by a readership whose cultural dislocation is not confined to refugees, asylum-seekers or social outcasts. In the contemporary global end game, migration has become a shared state of mind.

'A brilliant and complex linguistic approach to ‘multicultural writing’ has been argued by Australian sociolinguist Paul Carter. He rejects the negative view of immigration as a form of displacement. Applying his well-balanced analysis of “migrant aesthetic” dialogue promises not only “a new kind of history”. In the end it means refining a new, distinctively migrant poetics.' (Publication abstract)

'Serge Liberman, who died in December 2017, was an important and highly distinctive Australian ethnic writer. His short stories, including the posthumously published The Storyteller, conduct what is in effect a conversation between two worlds: that of post-Enlightenment rationality, on the one hand, and that of the magical, the folkloric, the Hassidic, imagination of the shtetl, on the other. Liberman’s profound tragic sense does not preclude the possibility of human redemption through empathy, compassion and imaginative inspiration.'  (Publication abstract)

'By “The Other Literature of Australia” I mean the writing by and about migrants in Australia as distinct from that which is more generally thought of as distinctively Australian, and that we have in recent years come to call multicultural. To put the subject in context, I will begin by giving you some idea of the changes in Australia’s population and attitudes to migrants since the country’s settlement just over 200 years ago; I will go on to deal with the efforts of the country’s early writers to develop a distinctive Australian literature and the effects of this on migrant writing; I will refer to the recent more visible emergence of migrant writers; and I will elaborate a little on the theme of the migrant being in a sense an exile in Australia, a theme which I will illustrate by quoting from my own writing.'  (Publication abstract)