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Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Australia
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The increasing contestation around “Australianness” has been dramatically highlighted by the reception of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writings from Manus Prison, with one reviewer writing that “It may well stand as one of the most important books published in Australia in two decades, the period of time during which our refugee policies have hardened into shape – and hardened our hearts in the process” (“CG”, SP1 4 Aug.). After his Australia-bound boat was intercepted in 2013 as part of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”, he was eventually transferred to a detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Boochani, a Kurdish journalist who writes for the Guardian and often breaks news on Twitter, remains on Manus Island along with other “detainees” still there after the detention centre’s closure in 2017. The Australian media has not been allowed to access Manus, so writers working from detention are key to our understanding of this part of the Australian story. Boochani smuggled his memoir out of Manus in encrypted messages sent from a contraband phone, writing in Farsi which was then translated by Omid Tofighian.' (Introduction)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 54 no. 4 December 2019 18431302 2019 periodical issue

    'This year I am delighted to announce the extension of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s bibliographic coverage to cultural production from and about Bangladesh and to welcome the co-authors of the country’s entry in our listings – Mafruha Mohua of Queen Mary, University of London, and Mahruba T. Mowtushi of the University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. In their inaugural Introduction, Mohua and Mowtushi map out the literary contours of Bangladesh, its historical trajectories of migration and displacement and the attempts at reparation and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the war of 1971, with attention to the positioning of women and linguistic minorities in relation to national narratives. They offer insightful readings of the silences surrounding Partition in Bangladeshi fiction’s symbolic deferrals and subplots and trace the development of Bangladeshi literature from elements of its Perso-Arabic heritage to its contemporary local and diasporic trajectories. The bibliographic listings reflect this scope, including works dating from the beginning of the 20th century that engage with this heritage to works published in the year under review. As Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan write in their editorial to Asiatic’s 2018 special issue on Bangladeshi writing in English, “this distinct literary tradition has not yet received the critical attention it deserves”, lagging “behind its Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan counterparts in the region, which have thus far claimed precedence in literary history books” (1). Mohua and Motushi’s contribution to JCL’s bibliographic record offers important, timely work towards rectifying this imbalance.' (Vassilena Parashkevova Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2018, Editorial introduction)

    2019
    pg. 513-532
Last amended 12 Dec 2019 09:16:06
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