Cirrus@Austlit

'What are the values that define the profession of university English Studies in Australia, and how do those values align with what we may identify as the values of literature? And what values should a professional association of ‘English’ academics prioritise when speaking on behalf of its members and their discipline(s)? In 2021 and 2022, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) instigated a project to revise its mission statement and draft a statement of values. The project came about as a response to a series of public pronouncements by past and present academics, politicians and journalists about the nature of the discipline of English, on a range of matters from the very name of the field, to its economic value as the subject of education, to its impact on students and the broader community. This essay reports on the project’s results to articulate the mission and value statements for AUHE. It also seeks to open up a series of questions about the nature and identity of our profession and its place within contemporary Australia.'( Publication abstract)

'This article examines travel guidebooks to Indigenous Australia, focussing on predominantly Aboriginal-authored texts. Acknowledging the body of work that has critiqued travel guides as mediators of oppressive cultural discourses, it is as much concerned with the risks inherent in these texts, as it is interested in their potential as sites of authorship and reading that enable anti-colonial ambitions. Two questions animate the discussion. First: to what extent are Aboriginal guidebooks consistent with conventional understandings of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians? And second, how do these texts influence tourist activity in ways that respect Aboriginal sovereignty? While not providing a definitive answer to either of these questions, the article, nevertheless, opens up an examination of the cultural work performed by Aboriginal-authored guidebooks during a period of rapid change in the politics of race in Australia.'  (Introduction)

'Tasmania is often spoken of domestically as a “problem”. Indeed, talk of “the problem of Tasmania” circulates through intellectual and governmental as much as everyday discourse. For writers like Peter Conrad and Tim Bowden – expatriate Tasmanians who write of their “return” to the island – the discourse on the problem of Tasmania is particularly challenging. As returnees, the narrators of Conrad’s Down Home (1988) and Bowden’s The Devil in Tim (2005) engage in reflections on identity, alterity and history in ways that exploit and resist the stereotypes, tropes and narratives that have traditionally underpinned discussion of the Tasmanian problem. This essay argues that while the texts can be read as complicit with the ideology that sustains the idea of that problem, in their turn to encounters with “ordinary” Tasmania they present alternative visions of the state that question the ideologies that position the island as limited, backward and perpetually beset by intransigent challenges.'

Source: Abstract.

'Celebrity Colonialism brings together studies on an array of personalities, movements and events from the colonial era to the present, and explores the intersection of discourses, formations and institutions that condition celebrity in colonial and postcolonial cultures. Across nineteen chapters, it examines the entanglements of fame and power fame in colonial and postcolonial settings. Each chapter demonstrates the sometimes highly ambivalent roles played by famous personalities as endorsements and apologists for, antagonists and challengers of, colonial, imperial and postcolonial institutions and practices. And each in their way provides an insight into the complex set of meanings implied by novel term “celebrity colonialism.” The contributions to this collection demonstrate that celebrity provides a powerful lens for examining the nexus of discourses, institutions and practices associated with the dynamics of appropriation, domination, resistance and reconciliation that characterize colonial and postcolonial cultural politics. Taken together the contributions to Celebrity Colonialism argue that the examination of celebrity promises to enrich our understanding of what colonialism was and, more significantly, what it has become.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.