Suvendrini Perera Suvendrini Perera i(A22044 works by) (a.k.a. Suvendi Perera)
Gender: Female
Heritage: Sri Lankan
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Works By

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1 Holding The Line : Against the Pornography of ‘Deterrence Suvendrini Perera , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , September 2022;

— Review of Still Alive : Notes from Australia's Immigration Detention System Safdar Ahmed , 2021 single work graphic novel

'In the week before the May 2022 general election, decks of playing cards depicting a boat in distress were distributed to children at the Cisarua refugee learning centre in West Java. The cards show the small boat lurching dangerously, as waves pile high above it. Tiny brown figures hang over the sides at risk of falling or jumping overboard. One clings to a shaky mast. A woman lies prone on the deck. The cards are stamped with the Australian coat of arms and a link to the government’s Zero Chance campaign. The visuals echo those of a previous scare campaign directed at asylum seekers, titled No Way: You will not make Australia home. No Way included a short film that culminated with a scene of a boat engulfed by the ocean, accompanied by the soundtrack of a desperate heartbeat fading into silence.' (Introduction)

1 1 Australianama : The South Asian Odyssey in Australia Suvendrini Perera , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 52 no. 1 2021; (p. 127-128)

— Review of Australianama : The South Asian Odyssey in Australia Samia Khatun , 2019 multi chapter work criticism poetry prose biography
'The autobiographical opening of Samia Khatun's book takes us back to the year 2008, to a psychiatric ward in outer Sydney, where the author's mother, Eshrat, a Muslim migrant from Bangladesh, is locked up in her room by night with a fellow inmate, a uniformed soldier from the Holdsworthy Barracks, newly returned from the front in Afghanistan. Eshrat, all too aware of the fate of thousands of fellow Muslims murdered by Australian forces in Afghanistan, begins to experience terrifying visions of her Quran melting before her eyes.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon Deathscapes : Mapping Race and Violence in Settler States Suvendrini Perera , Joseph Pugliese , Australia Canada : 2017- 17701960 2017 website

'With the ultimate aim of ending deaths in custody, the Deathscapes project maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres, working across the settler states of Australia,  the US and Canada, as well as the UK/EU as historical sites of origin for these settler colonial states.

'It presents new understandings of the practices and technologies, both global and domestic, that enable state violence against racialized groups in settler states. Within the violent frame of the settler colonial state, centred on Indigenous deaths as a  form of ongoing clearing of the land, the deaths of other racialized  bodies within the nation and at its borders–including Black, migrant and refugee deaths–reaffirm the assertion of settler sovereignty.

'To focus on Indigenous deaths and other racialized deaths is not to collapse the differences between racialized groups, or to ignore the presence of other racialized populations in these states, but to address some of the shared strategies, policies, practices and rationales of state violence deployed in the management of these separate categories.'

Source: Deathscapes.

1 1 Burning Our Boats Suvendrini Perera , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015;

'The burning of boats, that classic figure for the impossibility of return, was, for over a decade a practice routinely staged by the Australian state as a form of ‘deterrence’ against other unwanted entrants – even as it served, for those just landed, to confirm the finality of their arrival. More recently, this official “torching rite” of no return meets its counterpart in the bizarre logic of the “orange lifeboat,” where asylum seekers are forcibly turned back to an uncertain fate aboard unsinkable, air-conditioned capsules.

'This paper considers questions of arrival, departure and refugee and diasporic subjectivities in the context of Australian refugee policy. Some readers may notice in my subtitle an allusion to V.S. Naipaul’s memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, but more immediate to my concerns is Amitav Ghosh’s articulation of a distinction between exodus and dispersal narratives. Whereas narratives of exodus fix their gaze on the shore of arrival, Ghosh suggests, dispersal compels a return to the pain of rupture and the movement of departure: the sting of smoke evermore in our eyes from our burning possessions; before us, the steady flaming of our boats.

'Marking Stuart Hall’s indispensable theorizing of diasporic subjectivities in the wake of his passing earlier this year, I ask how refugee and disapora bodies and subjects are made and unmade in the context of the Australian borderscape, understood as a set of makeshift, protean geographies of making live and letting die.' (Publication summary)

1 Fatal Thresholds: Dramas of the Impossible Subject Suvendrini Perera , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Phoenix : Sri Lanka Journal of English in the Commonwealth , no. 12 2015; (p. 17-37)
1 White Law of the Biopolitical Suvendrini Perera , Joseph Pugliese , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia , vol. 3 no. 1 2012; (p. 87-100)
'Drawing on Ruby Langford Ginibi's writings on the law throughout the 1990s we discuss how law, as an apparatus of biopolitical governmentality, frames, positions and inscribes the very sites, institutions and bodies essential to the reproduction of Australia as a racialised nation-state. The paper builds on the collective work we have done for over a decade in documenting how whiteness enmeshes with law in securing and reproducing colonial and racist forms of biopower, and its effects on the embodied subjects who are its targets: the scandal of the Tampa; the horrors of refugee suicide and self-harm in immigration prisons; the Cronulla race riots; the continuing attempts to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty; the fomenting of Islamophobia and the normalising of racial profiling; the violence of the Northern Territory Intervention; and escalating Aboriginal deaths in and out of custody. Our paper focuses on a number of current crises that evidence only too clearly the violences unleashed and licensed by white laws of the biopolitical.' (Authors abstract)
1 Impossible Threshold? Refugees, Diaspora and the Frontiers of Citizenship : Narrating Asylum Seeker Stories Suvendrini Perera , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Continuum : Journal of Media & Cultural Studies , vol. 23 no. 5 2009; (p. 647-662) Bridging Imaginations : South Asian Diaspora in Australia 2013; (p. 85-110)
1 'All the Water in the Rough Rude Sea' Suvendrini Perera , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australia and the Insular Imagination : Beaches, Boarders, Boats, and Bodies 2009; (p. 33-51)
1 y separately published work icon Australia and the Insular Imagination : Beaches, Boarders, Boats, and Bodies Suvendrini Perera , New York (City) : Palgrave Macmillan , 2009 Z1852184 2009 single work criticism 'Most studies of Australia begin with the "the island-continent." The surrounding oceans are little more than a backdrop for the dramas that occur on dry land. This is the first book to turn its attention to the oceans and coastlines that make and remake the limits of Australia through events such as the arrival of asylum seekers' boats, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Bali bombings and maritime peacekeeping missions in the Pacific. Against the imperatives of war, security, aid and disaster, various configurations of bodies, boats, borders and beaches testify to the power and the limits of Australia's insular illusion.' (Publisher's blurb)
1 1 y separately published work icon Our Patch : Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 Suvendrini Perera (editor), Perth : Network , 2007 Z1392982 2007 anthology essay
1 The Good Neighbour: Conspicuous Compassion and the Politics of Proximity Suvendrini Perera , 2004 single work review
— Appears in: Borderlands , vol. 3 no. 3 2004;

— Review of Australia's Ambivalence Towards Asia : Politics, Neo/Post-Colonialism, and Fact/Fiction J. V. D'Cruz , William Steele , 2000 single work criticism
1 1 y separately published work icon Borderlands Borderphobias : The Politics of Insecurity Post-9/11 vol. 1 no. 1 Anthony Burke (editor), Suvendrini Perera (editor), 2002 Z1065498 2002 periodical issue
1 Future's Imperfect Suvendrini Perera , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: Alter/Asians : Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture 2000; (p. 3-24; Notes: 280-281)

Perera situates her exploration of Australian histories and futures 'in the context of the millennium and its anxieties'. She considers the appeal of 'Hansonism' and draws on a range of literary texts to demonstrate the limits and the potential of the imperfect, ideal of 'coexistence'.

1 'We Can Be Killed but We Can Never Be Silenced' : Narratives of Co-existence in Recent Sri Lankan Fiction Suvendrini Perera , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: CRNLE Journal 2000; (p. 13-23)
This review discusses three Sri Lankan expatriate texts - When Memory Dies by A. Sivanandan, North South and Death by Bamini Selladurai and Cousins by Chitra Fernando.In her discussion, the author outlines the way in which stories of small places have been used to articulate alternative understandings of Sri Lankan history. Against the official histories of partition are complex, entwined histories and relationships of Sri Lankan people. She encourages the reader to be ready to listen to multiple unfashionable histories; to be able to think different pasts in order to be able to make new futures.
1 From the Journals of Chitra Fernando Chitra Fernando , Shelagh Goonewardene , Suvendrini Perera (editor), 2000 extract diary
— Appears in: CRNLE Journal 2000; (p. 9-12)
1 Dravidian Curls (Fragments from an Unfinished Narrative) Suvendrini Perera , 1999 single work short story
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 25 no. 1 1999; (p. 111-123)
1 Wogface, Anglo-Drag, Contested Aboriginalities... Making and Unmaking Identities in Australia Suvendrini Perera , Joseph Pugliese , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Social Identities , vol. 4 no. 1 1998; (p. 39-72)
1 'You Were Born to Tell These Stories' : The Edu-ma-cations of Doctor Ruby Suvendrini Perera , 1998 single work criticism
— Appears in: Meridian , May vol. 17 no. 1 1998; (p. 14-30) Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia , vol. 3 no. 1 2012; (p. 74-86)

'Less than fifteen years ago, on 23rd May 1984, a few months after her fiftieth birthday, a black woman who had always told her nine children she would write a book some day, sat down to do so. She had left school at the age of fifteen, unable to imagine a future for a black teacher of either white or black children. Instead,she trained as a clothing machinist in Sydney, and through hard necessity later acquired the bush skills of 'fencing, burning off,lopping and ring-barking, and pegging roo skins'...' (extract)

1 Claiming Truganini : Australian National Narratives in the Year of Indigenous Peoples Suvendrini Perera , 1996 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cultural Studies , October vol. 10 no. 3 1996; (p. 393-412)
1 Lost in the Translation : Asian Refugees and the Discourse of Australian Multiculturalism Suvendrini Perera , 1995 single work criticism
— Appears in: Rubicon , vol. 1 no. 2 1995; (p. 120-130)
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