Cirrus@Austlit

'In this essay, I seek to explore the ways in which personal observations and experiences of Indigenous Australians throughout my life as a Singaporean Eurasian migrant in Western Australia, from the mid-1960s to the present, informed and complicated both my sense of belonging and my writing of novels and short stories. As such, this is a mostly anecdotal and autobiographical account. It includes reflections on my encounters with Indigenous Australians as a child and as an adult, the latter during my employment as a teacher and photographer of Aboriginal people, and during my friendship with an Aboriginal family. As a Eurasian Australian writer, I explore afresh aspects of some ‘stories’ I have made and the history that has made me, to raise questions about how to rethink difference and belonging.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Over the past two decades, facing the intensification of the migrant crisis, the Australian government has carried out seemingly neo-colonial policies, by arbitrarily confining and detaining asylum seekers on the Pacific Islands of Manus and Nauru. In order to oppose these suppressive and exclusionary practices, subaltern subjects have engaged in virtual spaces to re-appropriate and reconceptualise their identity representation. These digital platforms have hereupon provided empowering epistemic resources, which have been mobilized to decolonise the imaginary that discriminatory discourses have imposed on oppressed individuals. The purpose of this article is to analyse, from a linguistic and semantic perspective, how the asylum seeker identity is discursively constructed within the Twittersphere, particularly by the Iranian- Kurdish journalist and writer Behrouz Boochani. The research draws on an epistemic subaltern perspective and relies on a triangulated methodology that combines: Corpus Linguistics, to elicit and analyse quantitative data from the research opportunistic Twitter Corpus; qualitative approaches of Political Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis, to single out thematic patterns that emerge within the counter narrative formulated by the refugee under analysis. The study has the scope of emancipating an Alter/Native standpoint and offer a different perspective through which approach the Australian refugee crisis.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This article investigates imaginings of Europe in contemporary Australian fiction in order to explore whether (traveling to) Europe provides alternative points of reference to discourses on nation, belonging, and identity beyond the (settler) postcolonial. The article sets out to compare recent works by Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas and Gail Jones who narrate Europe against a wide range of backgrounds, covering diverse diasporic, migratory and expatriate experiences, in order to explore the role of Europe as an alternative space, and of European modernities in particular, in the Australian literary imagination. Concentrating on Jack Maggs (1997), Dead Europe (2005) and A Guide to Berlin (2015), the article has a threefold focus: Firstly, it analyses the representation of European spaces and explores how the three novels draw attention to multiple modernities within and beyond Europe. Secondly, it demonstrates how all three novels, in their own way, reveal European modernities to be haunted by its other, i.e. death, superstition, ghosts, or the occult. Thirdly, these previous findings will be synthesized in order to determine how the three novels relate Europe to Australia. Do they challenge or perpetuate the protagonists’ desire for Europe as an ‘imaginary homeland’? Do references to Europe support the construction of national identity in the works under review, or do these references rather point to the emergence of multiple or transnational identities?'

Source: Abstract.