Cirrus@Austlit

'In “Why Waste Lines on Achille?”: Tracing the Critical Discourse on Postcolonial Poetry through Untimeliness to the Present, Lucy Van notes that the scholarship on postcolonial poetry has tended to be somewhat belated to postcolonial studies...' (Vickery and Alizadeh, p 7)

'What kind of appetite does poetry have for creating new discourses about the nation? This essay will ask if poetry can re-imagine and re-write what are often oppressive and exclusionary national discourses, asking how - historically and in contemporary work - poetry has been concerned with national forms of belonging and unbelonging. Further, the essay will ask whether Australian poetry is able to generate new and even hopeful language in which to think about the nation.' (Author's introduction)

'Postcolonialism may be defined as a theoretical framework for reading and appreciating cultural production between normative Western "forms of social explanation" and "more complex cultural and political boundaries" that demarcate responses to this normativity (Bhabha 248) As such, this framework has been extremely beneficial for, among other things, introducing and highlighting the work of writers from non-Western cultural backgrounds, particularly Indigenous and multicultural or diasporic writers whose works convey conceptual and aesthetic themes and values at once foreign and responsive to Western European literary modalities. Thanks to postcolonial theory and associated methodologies, a very diverse range of writers from a host of cultural origins and locations has been accepted by and incorporated into most, if not all, Western academic and literary milieus.' (Authors' introduction.)

'In his essay, Timothy Yu reflects on both the limitations ad possibilities of identifying poetry as 'Asian Australian.' (Vickery and Alizadeh, 11)

'In Breaching the Social Contract: The Migrant Poet and the Politics of Being Apolitical , Danijela Kambaskovic writes of the difficulties of returning to poetry in another language and the loaded presumptions surrounding the figure of the migrant poet.' (Vickery and Alizadeh, 14)

'What is cultural hybridity, and how do the poetics of hybridity inform notions of Australian-Australian, diasporic, or migrant poetries, and how these terms overlap with each other? Popular notions of hyridity include ideas of the post-modern collage and cultural accretion, like fusion food, or something like a festival of world music. Go shopping and you'll find contemporary clothing inspired by Southeast Asian hill tribes, geishas and Vietnamese ao dias. Current use of form in Anglo poetry reveals the popularity of the cento, the ghazal, pantun, haiku and haibun, forms which are, respectively, Latin-Roman, Malay-Arabic, Persian and Asian. Along with god and devil, there is a proliferation of other deities - Chinese, Hindu, Turkish, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Malay or Filipino - in our literature now. Accretive hybridity (this proliferation of diverse forms) can resist efforts to impose ownership on this available array of aesthetic techne, and the current on-going tendency for culture to flow globally (facilitated by the Internet and electronic translation tools) feeds this appetite for hybrid exchange and experimentation.' (Author's introduction)

This essay 'seeks to find new ways to address Australian poetry, through the example of Michael Dransfield, a controversially significant poet.' (139)

'In Archipelagos of Sense: Thinking About a Decolonised Australian Poetics, Peter Minter expands on Les Murray's line that 'the whole world is an archipelago', proffering an archipelagic sensibility where 'locations on the surface of the planet can be understood as earthly temporal and spatial archipelagos'...(Vickery and Alizadeh, 18)