Cirrus@Austlit

'Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.' (Publication summary)

'Dženana Vucic on the subtle and not-so-subtle Marxist symbolism in Sailor Moon, John Docker, a "non-theatre person" by his own admission on The New Theatre, Sarah Schwartz on prison healthcare as punishment and the killing of Veronica Nelson, a poignant short story on memory and displacement from Nasrin Mahoutchi-Hosaini, Jeanine Leane's prize-winning poem, "Water under the bridge", and more.' (Publication summary)

'Overland 252 brings together the work of many, including writer Vivian Blaxell, Australian-Palestinian writer and educator Micaela Sahhar, and Greek-Australian anarchist poet π. o., to offer up fictional, poetic and scholarly reflections on place, resistance, memory, desire and activism—inherently political themes that have always concerned Overland writers and its readers. You'll also find new poetry from Eileen Chong, Emma Simington, Niko Chłopicki and Jini Maxwell, as well as new short fiction from Andrew Roff, Pierce Wilcox, Dorell Ben, plus loads more.' (Publication summary)

'New fiction, poetry, and essay from literary luminaries such as Daniel Browning, Bill Gammage, Jen Craig, Rico Craig, Luoyang Chen, Jane Downing, and Jo Langdon. Featuring cover art from Liss Fenwick's haunting Humpty Doom series.' (Publication summary)

'Jeff Sparrow on elite capture, Fiannuala Morgan on colonial literature and bushfires, Jordana Silverstein on Lily Brett and Louis Armand on John Tranter, plus outstanding fiction and poetry selected by Claire Corbett and Toby Fitch.' (Publication summary)

'In July critics and teachers of Australian literature met in Nipaluna/Hobart to commemorate the thirty-year anniversary of the Mabo decision, and to trace its various afterlives in the novels, films, and poems of the settler-colony. Keynotes and papers contemplating the changing aesthetics and politics of Australian writing were punctuated by austere reminders of the decimation of an already exclusionary humanities sector. The scattering of early career researchers subsidising precarious sessional work by drawing on their superannuation, stories of suddenly terminated contracts in place of missing colleagues, and remaining ones drowning under compounding administrative duties as professional services are stripped to their absolute and untenable minimums. The dissonance between symbolic progress and material regress was a stark reminder of the disingenuities settlement, and the inadequacy of merely representational politics. The essays in this edition of Overland are un-themed, but all investigate the relationship between place and labour, and the necessity of collectively re-imagining that relationship.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk Editorial)

'Who are we? We’re some of the volunteer readers at Overland – you might recognise our names from the editorial pages of the journal. Ordinarily, we have the pleasure of reading a selection of the works submitted to the journal each month before they move onto Claire’s desk for further consideration. We read and carefully consider each piece, but don’t make the final choice of what’s published, and we don’t ordinarily interact with the authors.' (Editorial introduction)

'There are many things that come to mind when I sit down to write about these stories. The first is how great they are: that much is clear. But hovering over that is the cloud of everything that’s happened since submissions for this edition closed.' ( Allan Drew, Editorial introduction)

'The idea of a public or collective space is inherently fluid and perhaps contradictory: a matter of constantly sham; definitions. What we witnessed on the sixth of January - at the US Capitol building was, among other things. a dispute about what a public institution is, and what it owes to which citizens. Scenes of white police officers calmly allowing Trump supporters to infiltrate the senate floor and some of the reported remarks: 'This is not America ... they're supposed to shoot BLM' nakedly displayed the inequity of some of these definitions. A number of the essays in this edition engage with our previous edition's focus on global Indigenous activism. others explore the complexity of inter-subjective space in other contexts. Writing and publishing are their own kinds of public space, structured by the conflicting definitions of race, class, and gender. In 'White Mythology* Derrida argued that western metaphysics. in attempting to erase its own historical specificity, misrepresents itself as abstract, universal, and infinitely plastic. In Australian writing the myth is more precise. William Stanner described Australian history as a window carefully placed to allow only one view of the landscape, and Australian literature is still marked by this myopia. Michael R Griffiths writes that the expression of settler nationalism is built upon a pathology of melancholia: a colonial logic of elimination which fetishises that which it destroys. This logic is palpable in much canonical Australian writing, from Lawson and Patterson, to Patrick White and Eleanor Dark, to the Jindyworobaks and Les Murray. To articulate an effective ethics of reading, writing, and publishing in this continent we must properly frame Aboriginality as an agentic subject, rather than a nationalist prop. Jeanine Leane's essay in this edition is a singular step towards better definitions. 

Solidarity. ' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Editorial)

'It feels like a decade has passed since we moved to Melbourne to take up work in the unceded lands of the Kulin nations. In our first days here, we attended several sessions of the Activism @ the Margins Conference, held in RMIT’s Capitol Theatre. It was perhaps the most diverse and interdisciplinary conference we’ve attended in our careers, with dozens of presentations challenging already contested boundaries of critical and creative performance.' (Editorial introduction)

'Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.' (Publication summary)

'In ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ JH Prynne writes that “no poet has or can have clean hands, because clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean hands do no worthwhile work.” Resistance is the tenor of reality, and action in it is compromised, bloody-handed, in the world and of it. In some senses it can seem that an ever-larger stake of leftist discourse is consumed by a miserabilist scramble for seniority on a narrowing mesa of unhistorical piety. In the crisis of social, ethical, and ecological collapse that greets us daily, clean hands look more than ever like magical thinking.' (Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk, Introduction)

'We need new voices and unconventional narratives to guard against rigidity. Plots that are distinct and lucid and sometimes boiling hot.'