'Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora.
'Australianama (The Book of Australia) composes a history of Muslims in Australia through Sufi poetry, Urdu travel tales, Persian dream texts and Arabic concepts, as well as Wangkangurru song-poetry, Arabunna women's stories and Kuyani histories, leading readers through the rich worlds of non-white peoples that are missing from historical records. Khatun challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world- that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonised. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonised geographies, Australianama shows that stories in colonised tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.' (Introduction)
Epigraph:
Wild Flowers
Mallets pound fence posts
in tune with the rifles
to mask massacre sites
Cattle will graze
sheep hooves will scatter
children's bones
Wildflowers will not grow
where the bone powder
lies
-Ali Cobby Eckermann
Kami, 2010
'Although primarily ‘a history of South Asian diaspora in Australia’ (p 4), a significant part of the scholarly innovation promised by Samia Khatun’s Australianama relies on what the author suggests she does with Aboriginal histories. Namely, Khatun claims to develop ‘techniques for writing histories of migration that refuse to participate in the ongoing discursive erasure of Aboriginal peoples’ (p 19). To achieve this, she connects the experiences of South Asian migrants and Aboriginal peoples as subjects whose epistemologies as ‘colonised peoples’ (p 8) are systematically devalued by European Enlightenment modes of thinking. Treating those subjugated knowledges seriously, Khatun suggests, offers radical possibilities for responding to our ‘contemporary moment of escalating racism’ (p 23) by ‘render[ing] visible alternative axes along which we might glimpse new beginnings’ (p 24). This is a text, in other words, that not only recapitulates the now very familiar critique of Enlightenment epistemes, but actively attempts to suggest and model another way to write history.' (Introduction)
'This is a compelling book, not only because of its lucid prose and deep research, but because of the intensely personal story threaded through its pages.' (Introduction)
'Bangladeshi Australian author Samia Khatun’s Australianama is a book of books, a survey of divergent modes of historical storytelling, and a search for truth in the face of cultural erasure. It opens with Khatun visiting her mother, Eshrat, in a mental health ward in Sydney’s suburbs. Plagued with terrifying visions in Bengali, Eshrat is locked each night in a shared room with a uniformed Australian soldier – recently returned from Afghanistan – who she believes will murder her in her sleep. With the hospital refusing to relocate her mother, Khatun comprehends an irresolvable dissonance: “Western states cannot bomb, exploit, drone, invade and kill South Asians andhave us as part of their citizenry at the same time.” She laments, “The migrant story I had inhabited for much of my life buckled, and eventually collapsed.” This acts as the catalyst for Khatun’s expansive history of the South Asian diaspora in colonial Australia.' (Introduction)
'Bangladeshi Australian author Samia Khatun’s Australianama is a book of books, a survey of divergent modes of historical storytelling, and a search for truth in the face of cultural erasure. It opens with Khatun visiting her mother, Eshrat, in a mental health ward in Sydney’s suburbs. Plagued with terrifying visions in Bengali, Eshrat is locked each night in a shared room with a uniformed Australian soldier – recently returned from Afghanistan – who she believes will murder her in her sleep. With the hospital refusing to relocate her mother, Khatun comprehends an irresolvable dissonance: “Western states cannot bomb, exploit, drone, invade and kill South Asians andhave us as part of their citizenry at the same time.” She laments, “The migrant story I had inhabited for much of my life buckled, and eventually collapsed.” This acts as the catalyst for Khatun’s expansive history of the South Asian diaspora in colonial Australia.' (Introduction)
'This is a compelling book, not only because of its lucid prose and deep research, but because of the intensely personal story threaded through its pages.' (Introduction)
'Although primarily ‘a history of South Asian diaspora in Australia’ (p 4), a significant part of the scholarly innovation promised by Samia Khatun’s Australianama relies on what the author suggests she does with Aboriginal histories. Namely, Khatun claims to develop ‘techniques for writing histories of migration that refuse to participate in the ongoing discursive erasure of Aboriginal peoples’ (p 19). To achieve this, she connects the experiences of South Asian migrants and Aboriginal peoples as subjects whose epistemologies as ‘colonised peoples’ (p 8) are systematically devalued by European Enlightenment modes of thinking. Treating those subjugated knowledges seriously, Khatun suggests, offers radical possibilities for responding to our ‘contemporary moment of escalating racism’ (p 23) by ‘render[ing] visible alternative axes along which we might glimpse new beginnings’ (p 24). This is a text, in other words, that not only recapitulates the now very familiar critique of Enlightenment epistemes, but actively attempts to suggest and model another way to write history.' (Introduction)
