No Longer Malleable Stuff single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 No Longer Malleable Stuff
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'Within the white imagination there is an invisible charter of rights that I hear frequently quoted, touted, lauded: It is my right to imagine whatever I want! My imagination is free! So encoded is this invisible charter of rights that insists that the white imagination has no limits that all peoples and places deemed as 'other' become carte blanche - a blank white page for their imaginations to write.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Overland no. 241 Summer 2020 21720250 2020 periodical issue

    'The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid and perhaps contradictory: a matter of constantly sham; definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January - at the US Capitol building was, among other things. a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens. Scenes of white police officers calmly allowing Trump supporters to infiltrate the senate floor and some of the reported remarks: 'This is not America ... they're supposed to shoot BLM' nakedly displayed the inequity of some of these definitions. A number of the essays in this edition engage with our previous edition's focus on global Indigenous activism. others explore the complexity of inter-subjective space in other contexts. Writing and publishing are their own kinds of public space, structured by the conflicting definitions of race, class, and gender. In 'White Mythology* Derrida argued that western metaphysics. in attempting to erase its own historical specificity, misrepresents itself as abstract, universal, and infinitely plastic. In Australian writing the myth is more precise. William Stanner described Australian history as a window carefully placed to allow only one view of the landscape, and Australian literature is still marked by this myopia. Michael R Griffiths writes that the expression of settler nationalism is built upon a pathology of melancholia: a colonial logic of elimination which fetishises that which it destroys. This logic is palpable in much canonical Australian writing, from Lawson and Patterson, to Patrick White and Eleanor Dark, to the Jindyworobaks and Les Murray. To articulate an effective ethics of reading, writing, and publishing in this continent we must properly frame Aboriginality as an agentic subject, rather than a nationalist prop. Jeanine Leane's essay in this edition is a singular step towards better definitions. 

    Solidarity. ' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Editorial)

    2020
    pg. 11-17

Works about this Work

“Not a Dream, but a Harrowing” : Writing a Colonial Fairy Tale." Nike Sulway , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Marvels & Tales , vol. 36 no. 1 2023; (p. 40-48.)
Translating the World Prithvi Varatharajan , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , September / Spring vol. 80 no. 3 2021; (p. 61-71)
'In the summer of 2019–20 I worked in the customer service department of an Australian zoo. I was used to cycling to work, gliding past traffic and cutting through parklands in my khaki uniform. But I found myself driving much more than usual. Cycling resulted in weariness and respiratory irritation, as I breathed in toxic particulate matter. Bushfire smoke smothered the city, forcing us indoors. With the smoke settling for days at a time, I relied more on my exhaust-spewing vehicle to get to work. The dark irony was hard to miss.' (Introduction)
Translating the World Prithvi Varatharajan , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , September / Spring vol. 80 no. 3 2021; (p. 61-71)
'In the summer of 2019–20 I worked in the customer service department of an Australian zoo. I was used to cycling to work, gliding past traffic and cutting through parklands in my khaki uniform. But I found myself driving much more than usual. Cycling resulted in weariness and respiratory irritation, as I breathed in toxic particulate matter. Bushfire smoke smothered the city, forcing us indoors. With the smoke settling for days at a time, I relied more on my exhaust-spewing vehicle to get to work. The dark irony was hard to miss.' (Introduction)
“Not a Dream, but a Harrowing” : Writing a Colonial Fairy Tale." Nike Sulway , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: Marvels & Tales , vol. 36 no. 1 2023; (p. 40-48.)
Last amended 5 May 2021 12:19:09
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