Cirrus@Austlit

'In late 2020, Daniella and Michel interviewed Sneja Gunew, founder of The Australian Multicultural Literature Collection (AMLC), to get an overview of the archive: how it started, what the collection methodology was, and why it was, and continues to be, crucial for critically studying and theorizing Australian multiculturalism, ethnicity and race, and migrant life and writing in neo-colonial Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'In this paper, I utilize autographics as an autoethnographic methodology to illustrate the subjective experience of being a precariously employed migrant academic in Australia. The auto-graphic narrative, as well as the traditional text, are in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s work on migration and estrangement, in order to explore migration both as a physical movement between countries, but also as a metaphorical movement between different forms of writing – scholarly texts and comics – and the communities associated with them – Academia and the Zine scene. Ahmed explores critical theory’s celebration of migration as a metaphor for transgression, a symbolic act of abandoning the familiar, the traditional and safe patterns of thinking to embark on adventures across borders and boundaries. My own presumptions regarding a literal migration in physical space were conflated with this metaphorical meaning, as I saw it as a liberatory move to reflect on – and re- invent – myself, breaking away from a national identity which I found stifling. My actual experience of migration turned out to be one of dislocation and isolation. In order to escape feelings of anxiety, I sought refuge in another metaphor: academia, and later the zine scene as an alternative ‘homeland,' (Publication abstract) 

'This autoethnographic text details the author’s reflections on his own positionality and process in researching and publishing a zine in the emerging and contested field of queer rebetology. By using the archive as a means for scholarly and creative interventions in the Greek urban music genre of rebetika, the author draws attention to the process of erasure that has occurred in discourses surrounding the genre’s queer exponents, sites of performance and subcultures. The author’s position as a second-generation Greek-Australian in exploring these histories is framed as a “queering back” to the dominant discourses produced in Greece by local researchers and writers. It is argued that this distance to Greece “proper” allows the author the privilege and vantage point from which to explore the queer elements of a music genre that has now become entangled in the normative, nationalist and homophobic discourses of the modern Greek nation-state.'

 (Publication abstract)