Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue on Alexis Wright’s work includes ten academic articles, seven of which focus on Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), while three discuss the author’s two other novels – Plains of Promise (1997) and The Swan Book (2013) – and oeuvre as a whole. The issue also contains art and poetry by Australian Indigenous creative artists, as well as the reprint of a review of Carpentaria and a reflexive essay on translating Wright’s works into Chinese. From the centrality of Indigenous epistemologies in Wright’s oeuvre to her narrative creativity, representation of country, commitment to a sovereignty of the mind, humour, and refusal of genres, the various contributions to the special issue propose original analyses and approaches to better understand Wright’s nuanced, complex novels and non-fiction works.' (Publication summary)

 'The “state of exception,” as defined by Giorgio Agamben, has often been evoked in postcolonial contexts as a means of accounting for the way in which exceptional circumstances are used to justify depriving people of their rights under the law. This issue addresses how exception is represented in postcolonial literatures, through the depiction of states of emergency, zones of exception, and various processes of marginalization. In all eight case studies, laws can be seen as subject to interpretation because they represent forms of writing and therefore reflect subjectivity; the authors highlight how their enforcement requires strong ethical principles to protect human freedom and dignity. Literature registers effective resistance when it delineates singular paths – often exceptional ones – towards empowerment in a way the historian cannot.' (Publication summary)

'In postcolonial contexts marked by multiple forms of displacement and replacement, this issue examines the ambivalent value of placelessness. Another word for dislocation and dispossession, placelessness can also be approached as a force resisting the desire to lock things into place, leading to creative re-inscriptions and reinventions. Through its characteristic reticence, short fiction offers a privileged means to register fractures that take place and yet cannot necessarily be traced – events both impossible to negate and impossible to locate. Open and flexible, the short story also accommodates experiments that demonstrate the vital role of storytelling in the making of place.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2018, the theme for the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), held at Nanterre University, itself a site of student revolution in the past, was “Revolution(s),” a notion which has particular resonance for the New Literatures panel which provided the genesis of many of the articles included in this issue. Previously colonised countries, as diverse and geographically disparate as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Australia (to name but these), have all experienced revolutions in various forms, both during the colonial period and after independence. These revolutions, among which the Canadian rebellions of 1837 and 1838, the 1857-8 uprising in India, the New Zealand wars between 1845 and 1872, the first chimurenga (“uprising” in the Shona language) in Zimbabwe (1894-97), the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), and the Biafran war (1967-70) in some cases paved the way for later twentieth-century rebellions which led to independence and, in some cases, to further revolutions.' (Christine Lorre-Johnston and Fiona McCann : Introduction)

'Since the beginning of the twenty-first century Australia has entered a phase known as post-reconciliation, which for some artists and writers has marked a turning-point in race relations and issues of belonging to the multicultural society in an Asia-Pacific environment. While post-reconciliation has paved the way for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the effects of settler history can still be perceived in debates on the nation and cultural identity. Recent nationalist claims and cultural tensions raise concerns about the country’s ability to overcome the colonial past and fully embrace the multicultural ideal. In his article on recent Australian fiction, Nicholas Birns reminds us that Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, in her extensive study of Peter Carey’s work, suggested that the novelist was engaged in a postcolonial quest for identity. Ryan-Fazilleau’s valuable contribution to the study of Australian literature is raised in Birns’s examination of the works of some twenty-first-century Australian authors and the place of technology in their sense of identity.' (From : Introduction)

'It is a tradition for the organizers of the annual conference of the Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SAES) to choose a topic that will be found doubly relevant, first as conducive to exchanges across the disciplines constitutive of English studies, and second as emblematic of the region where the event is hosted. The 2016 SAES conference took place in Lyon, the city where the mighty Rhône and sedate Saône rivers flow together, at the very tip of the peninsula or “Presqu’île” nestled between the two hills of Fourvière and La Croix Rousse. “Confluence” was therefore the theme proposed to the delegates who met there between June 2 and June 5, 2016. The site’s geography played an essential role in the development of the Roman military camp that became the capital of the Gauls as Lugdunum flourished between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, and is now the most important educational centre in France after Paris, at least if we are to believe the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It also happens that Lyon is my hometown, the city where I grew up and went to university to study English. It is a rather apt and, to me at least, moving coincidence that my 2011-2017 mandate as general editor of Commonwealth Essays and Studies and president of the Société d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth (SEPC) should come to an end with the publication of this joint issue for which I have edited six essays. Four of them were presented during the 2016 Confluence conference, but all of them engage with its federating topic on several, complementary levels as shall now be seen.' (Introduction)