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Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Second City : Essays from Western Sydney
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Second City is a showcase of the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s Western Suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

'Beginning with Prime Minister’s Award-winning author Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting to Frances An’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ attack on the repressive clichés of ‘women of colour’, Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, and May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta that has been lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja writes in a comic vein on the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Martin Reyes on the overlay of experiences as a hike in the Dharawal National Park recalls an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Phillipines. Finally, Yumna Kassab’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind.

'The cultural backgrounds represented here include Cambodian, Pakistani, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Filipino, South American, Iraqi and Turkish.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Contents

* Contents derived from the Artarmon, North Sydney - Lane Cove area, Sydney Northern Suburbs, Sydney, New South Wales,:Giramondo Publishing , 2021 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
On Agon in the Area, Luke Carman , single work essay
Hopefully the Future Is Dark, Felicity Castagna , single work essay

'Some people say ‘West’ like it is something wrong, like ice-cream that fell in a gutter. I think West is like my brother’s music, too much bass so you end up dancing like your body parts don’t fit together and laughing all at the same time. That’s what West is: shiny cars and loud things, people coming, people going – movement. Those who don’t know any better, they come into the neighbourhood and lock their windows and drive on through, never stopping before they get somewhere else.

'These are the first few lines of my second book The Incredible Here and Now. I can’t say that I like them very much. I don’t think they work. The rhythm is great, some of the images too, but really what blows the whole thing is that it’s too restrictive, too reductive an image of what western Sydney is to be that useful.' (Introduction)

Raise Your Needles : In Defenceof Public Knitting, Aleesha Paz , single work essay
An Elite Education, Sheila Ngoc Pham , single work essay
Second City, Eda Gunaydin , single work essay
Borges and the Tiger, Yumna Kassab , single work essay
A History of Reading : Alan Marshall and Helen Keller, Amanda Tink , single work essay

'On 9 May 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action against books of ‘un-German spirit’, Helen Keller wrote an open letter to them, which was published on the front page of the New York Times. ’You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe,’ she said, ‘but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.’ Today, if Helen Keller is thought of at all, it’s as the blind and deaf girl who, through the efforts of her teacher, learned to communicate. There’s scant acknowledgement that she was even capable of having ideas, and she’s often reduced to nothing more than testament to the ideas of others. However, Keller not only spoke, but read and wrote four languages, and was a prolific poet and essayist. The ideas that led to the Nazis burning her book Out of the Dark were contained in the essay ‘Why I Became a Socialist’.' (Introduction)

Uprooted, George Haddad , single work essay
(Feminist) Sages, Frances An , single work essay
Of Mosques and Men, Zohra Aly , single work essay
An Introvert’s Guide To Surviving An Arab Family of Extroverts, Rawah Arja , single work essay

'I lie on the lush cold grass. It’s familiar and safe, a sensation I have found difficult to retrieve in my adult years. The afternoon rays of light break through the grove of trees as the sound of birds sipping softly on hanging fruit creates a soothing hum. The grass is long enough for me to fade away to watch my own private slideshow of morphing clouds. I feel the damp earth beneath me, breathe in the fresh air that flows freely into my lungs. Nostalgia for a simpler time of making up storylines, of dancing bears and fire-breathing dragons high up in the sky. What I yearn for is a place of uninterrupted peace. Somehow this is more than memory, it is home.' (Introduction)

Muhammad, Raaza Jamshed , single work essay
Shopping Night, May Ngo , single work essay
Excuse Me, Tabi Tabi Po, Martyn Reyes , single work essay

'Mum tried to find her footing in the loose rocks on a narrow path sandwiched between golden wattle and mountain devil shrub.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Small-press Gems Leah Jing McIntosh , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 18 December - 7 January 2021;

— Review of Homework Snack Syndicate , 2021 selected work essay ; Second City : Essays from Western Sydney 2021 anthology essay ; Still Alive : Notes from Australia's Immigration Detention System Safdar Ahmed , 2021 single work graphic novel ; The Open Lucy Van , 2021 selected work poetry ; Theory of Colours Bella Li , 2021 selected work poetry art work ; Dropbear Evelyn Araluen , 2021 selected work poetry essay
Cher Tan Reviews Second City Ed. Catriona Menzies-Pike & Luke Carman Cher Tan , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 26 2020-2021;

— Review of Second City : Essays from Western Sydney 2021 anthology essay

'In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility. With a stylistic panache and an erudite wit, Gunaydin goes on to ask, towards the end of the essay, ‘… if displacement did not begin five years ago but two hundred and thirty years ago, what use is there in attempting to freeze its current class and racial composition in amber?’ This mode of writing is something I’ve observed amongst writers on the so-called ‘margins’ in the last few years: as writers move away from the giddy nascence of a minoritised literature that is nevertheless situated inside an anglophone canon, narratives become less concerned with a centre and more interested in interrogating the complexities that arise from marginal conditions. Struggle is considered alongside joy, privileges alongside oppressions.' (Introduction)

Cher Tan Reviews Second City Ed. Catriona Menzies-Pike & Luke Carman Cher Tan , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 26 2020-2021;

— Review of Second City : Essays from Western Sydney 2021 anthology essay

'In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility. With a stylistic panache and an erudite wit, Gunaydin goes on to ask, towards the end of the essay, ‘… if displacement did not begin five years ago but two hundred and thirty years ago, what use is there in attempting to freeze its current class and racial composition in amber?’ This mode of writing is something I’ve observed amongst writers on the so-called ‘margins’ in the last few years: as writers move away from the giddy nascence of a minoritised literature that is nevertheless situated inside an anglophone canon, narratives become less concerned with a centre and more interested in interrogating the complexities that arise from marginal conditions. Struggle is considered alongside joy, privileges alongside oppressions.' (Introduction)

Small-press Gems Leah Jing McIntosh , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 18 December - 7 January 2021;

— Review of Homework Snack Syndicate , 2021 selected work essay ; Second City : Essays from Western Sydney 2021 anthology essay ; Still Alive : Notes from Australia's Immigration Detention System Safdar Ahmed , 2021 single work graphic novel ; The Open Lucy Van , 2021 selected work poetry ; Theory of Colours Bella Li , 2021 selected work poetry art work ; Dropbear Evelyn Araluen , 2021 selected work poetry essay
Last amended 20 Dec 2023 11:23:06
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