Cirrus@Austlit

'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)