Cirrus@Austlit

'For several reasons, not all related, the scholarly engagement of Australian studies within Australia and its disciplinary instrumentalities—biennial conferences, a journal, and so on—remains predominantly Eurocentric. Explanations for this Eurocentricity are deserving of a standalone article, but the following series of articles manifests one attempt to represent some of this extant diversity. Beyond the now scant formal institutional settings and apparatuses constituting Australian studies within Australia, a broad church continues to participate in this field. Outside of the International Australian Studies Association, much of this participation—including at the institutional level, locally and internationally—is conducted through various networks established and sustained by dedicated individuals, including some chancers. Student exchanges, visiting lectureships, collaborative research projects, guest speaking invitations, art exhibitions, theatrical productions, orchestral and other music performances, among many more informal and inchoate events, form part of this wider engagement of Australian studies overseas. Much of this engagement takes place throughout Asia, including Japan, India, Indonesia and China. The genesis for this themed section lies at least partly here: to bring scholarship—in this instance from mainland China—germane to the journal’s remit to its wide readership. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and its wide-reaching impacts for many scholars worldwide, this themed section is smaller than the special issue we originally envisaged; however, the contributions published here represent many of the continued commitments to, and the promising progress of, Australian studies in China.' (Introduction) 

'This article examines the scholarly analysis of Australian Indigenous literature in China from 1988 to 2018, a period that saw increasing academic interest in this genre among Chinese scholars. These analyses mostly (but not exclusively) draw on postcolonial theories. Postcolonial criticism in China first manifested through Third World theory but has recently been replaced by multicultural theory. The article will discuss how Third World theory and multicultural theory facilitate a positioning that aims to subvert western dominance and yet unwittingly inscribes uncontested binaries between east and west, black and white, colonized and colonizer. By focusing on the “postcolonial” readings of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Alexis Wright in the Chinese context, the article suggests the dichotomized paradigm, which emerges from applications of these theories, precludes a critical and nuanced analysis of Indigenous literature and the complex postcolonial or settler colonial exigencies confronting Indigenous people. It argues that a more critical, non-essentialist approach is needed.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the role of humour in three contemporary Aboriginal texts that document Aboriginal–Asian relationships. Humour in Aboriginal texts has mostly been studied with reference to the ostensible binaries between Aboriginal and European, Black and White, colonised and colonisers. Scant critical attention has been paid to the place of humour in revealing and concealing the dynamic interrelations between Aboriginal people and Asian immigrants living under a colonial regime. This article investigates humour as a textual device that transmits subversive ideas contesting stigma and stereotypes of Aboriginal and Asian peoples regarding their identities, bodies, and inter-racial intimacies. Through close readings of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise (1997), Tex and Nelly Camfoo’s autobiography Love against the Law (2000) and Anita Heiss’s historical romance Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), this article considers three specific modes of humour in Aboriginal texts: self-deprecation, puns/wit, and boasting. The article contends that these different forms of humour draw attention to a range of unsettling issues and power relations concerning oppression and resistance, stigmatisation and normalisation, institutional control and surveillance. Further in each of these texts humour works to deconstruct images of discrete and maligned racialised otherness.' (Publication abstract)

'The dynamic relationship between Aboriginal groups and ethnic immigrants in Australia remains theoretically unconstructed as it largely falls outside the binaries of race and ethnicity. Historically, Aboriginal people have developed longstanding contacts with Asian groups, traversing national, cultural, sexual and legislative boundaries. Although indigeneity and diaspora embody disparate and even opposite meanings, there are synergies between diasporic identities and Aboriginal people who suffer from dislocation due to the enduring impact of colonisation and migration. The postcolonial adaptation of liminality or threshold may provide an apt framework for theorising the literary representation of a convergence of border-crossing and diasporic experiences of Aboriginal and Asian Australians in the marginal, interstitial and in-between spaces. Due to a shared predicament and a sense of comradeship, Aboriginal–Asian encounters forge communitas, which does not suggest inherent subversiveness or unproblematic co-option. This paper considers Ubby’s Underdogs (2011, 2013) by Brenton E. McKenna and A Most Peculiar Act (2014) by Marie Munkara to explore Aboriginal–Asian relations under the White Australia policy. Through the recurrent theme of Japanese and imaginary Chinese invasions, these novels complicate the crossings in the porous and precarious borderlands, remap the intersecting power relations and reroute Aboriginal characters back to the centre.'  (Publication abstract)

'Children's literature enables young readers to acculturate to socially desirable forms of knowledge, values and ideologies. An increasing number of children's books with Aboriginal themes and motifs, written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers in the post-Mabo era, seek to rewrite Aboriginal history through realistic or imaginative modes of expression and, as a counter-discursive agency, they open a path to inculcate young minds with Aboriginal culture and knowledge in a postcolonial context. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Post-Mabo Australian Children's Literature explores how Aboriginal people's histories and cultures are deployed, represented, and transmitted as " Indigenous cultural capital " for young readers, with the purpose of illuminating the complex relations between Aboriginal agency and dominant forces in the postcolonial contact zone and identifying possible tactics of resistance within the domination. The notion of Indigenous cultural capital provides a fresh perspective in the postcolonial readings of Australian children's books.'  (Publication summary)

'This paper is interested in autobiographical narratives that document and re-present experiences of Indigenous child separation from their families. Reconstructing the memories of the Stolen Generations in the form of autobiography is inevitably subject to mechanisms of selection, verification, and commodification within the dominant discourse. However, it is necessary to recognise the agency of Aboriginal people who tactically unsettle the racial ideology and bring into consciousness what has been forgotten by Australian historiography. By examining how memories of child removal have been shaped in public discourse, and exploring Aboriginal authorial agency in recollecting an archive of separation stories, the paper argues that the multi-faceted memories of the stolen children open up a critical space to expose racial injustices and to articulate Indigenous visions of history, plights and rights.'

Source: Abstract.

"The ‘Ubby’s Underdogs’ books are the first graphic novels published by Magabala Books,representing an innovation which maintains the inventiveness characteristic of Magabala’s picture books. The trilogy’s treatment of the Underdogs’ exploits in multicultural Broome foregrounds the encounter between Aboriginal and Chinese cultural traditions. By drawing on a blend of cultural signifiers, the novels display the carnivalesque qualities described by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1984). In McKenna’s novels carnivalesque scenes, polyglot voices and intercultural dialogues give rise to a transformative vision of a community which resists monologic authoritarianism. Like graphic novels more generally, the Underdogs novels rely on visual, verbal and cultural stereotypes to enable rapid identification of characters of various ethnicities. They transform such stereotypical and exoticised figures through modes of representation and narrative which privilege the ‘culture of folk carnival humour’ (Bakhtin 1984, p. 4) to present negotiations between and across cultures in the setting of post-war Broome." (Introduction)

‘This paper explores the critical function of the paratext that inscribes literary legitimation and value production and analyzes a transformed vision of the paratextual space in Australian Indigenous children's books. The paratext refers to a set of heterogeneous devices of a book such as a preface, a dedication, author's profile / back/front cover blurbs, and so forth, which serve to frame the text into a book and to justify the value of the text. Gerard Genette, in his seminal work Seuils (1997), conceives the paratext as a threshold of the book, which is "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction" (2). The paratext enables the trajectory of a text to be presented as a book, a self-promotional process that is invested with the power of literary legitimation to validate the desirability of the writer's work in the market. Though the paratext may be marginalized, neglected, or even disdained as gimmick making, the fringe of the book often accommodates a convergence of varying discourses and practices (Genette 2). The interlocking relations between different interest holders (such as writers, publishers, reviewers, implied readers, educational or awarding institutions) are reflected in the paratext, forming a network that enables a transformative process of what Pierre Bourdieu terms "social alchemy" in the production of cultural capital.’ (Introduction)

'This paper draws on theories of the gift to address the ethics of representing Aboriginality in Australian children's literature, which is a contentious debate that centres on who is eligible to tell Aboriginal stories and how the stories can be told. Considering the historical indebtedness in Australian racial relations, the paper suggests that children's books that incorporate reference to Aboriginal cultural elements constitute a metaphorical 'gift' exchange between Aboriginal custodians as the givers and writers as the recipients who are expected to 'return' such an intellectual gift through their books in an appropriate manner. In this view, the paper specifies the ethical issues confronted by non-Aboriginal writers for children, including Patricia Wrightson, Phillip Gwynne and Kate Constable, and examines the way in which the gift relationship sheds light on the question of how to avoid infringement of Aboriginal protocols without submitting to self-censorship. A caring gesture, underlining the relationship between self and others in gift exchanges, is identified to negotiate the writer's interests in Aboriginal stories with cultural sensitivity against unauthorised appropriation. The paper therefore argues that the morality of gift exchanges, which demands a balanced consideration of disparate interests in obligatory reciprocation, offers a possible solution to the dilemma of non-Aboriginal writers in the treatment of Aboriginal subject matter.' (Publication abstract)