y separately published work icon Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture selected work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'How can contemporary Australian literature and culture be ‘imagined’ from abroad? What particular refractions may emerge out of an expatriate reflection upon Antipodean literature and culture? This collection of essays summarizes fifteen years’ work done from an explicitly European perspective. The unashamedly outside perspective these essays present envisages a largely ‘imaginary Antipodes’ whose character is regarded from four distinct angles: indigenous literary production, white settler identities, migrant destinies, and the global construction of Australian literature, thereby gesturing towards the transnational perspective that furnishes the framing rationale for the collection itself. The thirteen essays range over a broad selection of literary and filmic texts, from classics such as Patrick White and Crocodile Dundee, via Castro, Davison, Fremd, Gooneratne, Grenville, Hall, Hospital, Lawrence, McGahan, Malouf, Martin, Morgan, Scott, Teo, or Yasbincek, through to wider issues such as indigenous poetry, the post-Mabo ‘history wars’ of the 1990s, and the global translation of Australian literature' (Publisher blurb).

Notes

  • Dedication: This book is dedicated with love, as always, to my wife Tatjana, and to our three 'offshore Australian' children Joshua, Iva and Niklas.

Contents

* Contents derived from the Heidelberg,
c
Germany,
c
Western Europe, Europe,:Winter Verlag , 2011 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
West-Pavlov explains how the essays in the publication move across four broad areas of enquiry.
 (p. 9-19)
'Why, White Man, Why?' : White Australia as the Addressee of Apostrophe in Contemporary Aboriginal Writing, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'Contemporary Australian indigenous literature is characterised by a remarkably prevalent use of apostrophic address directed at the white reader. This mode of direct address in black literary texts draws attention to the political dynamics moulding reader-writer relations in contemporary Australia. The article examines numerous examples of this direct mode of address in prose, poetry and drama, and argues that this direct mode of address is a central element in the message of black writers. The use of apostrophe implies the active 'positioning' of the white reader on the part of the indigenous speaker; only by virtue of this positioning is the reading process made possible. The direct mode of address in these texts thus demands that the reader take up a stance characterised by a readiness to listen attentively to black literary voices.' (Author's abstract)
 (p. 23-36)
Uncovering Collective Crimes : Sally Morgan's 'My Place' as Australian Indigenous Detective Narrative, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism (p. 37-50)
The Time of Biopolitics in the Settler Colony, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism

'Kim Scott's description of the Moore River Native Settlement, also known as Mogumber, in his 1999 novel Benang, suggests implicit analogies with the mid-century concentration camps of the Holocaust. The Indigenous detainees are transported there in stock cars, they are welcomed by uniformed overseers armed with whips, they are housed in barracks with barred windows, and a punishment regime of solitary confinement and ritual humiliation operates as a means of coercion (89-94, 99-102). Elsewhere in the novel, Scott leaves us in no doubt about the force of these associations: "' They had some good ideas, those Nazis," Earn said, "but they went a bit far"' (Benang 154). The analogy between twentieth-century government control of the lives of Australian Indigenous people and biopolitics of Nazism has not gone unnoticed in other quarters. Elizabeth Povinelli describes the equation, made by the Royal Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1994, of a century of child removal practices with cultural genocide, as 'an analogy made more compelling by the age of the Aboriginal applicants, many of whom had been taken in the early 1940s'. The impact of that equation was that 'Australians looked at themselves in a ghastly historical mirror and imagined their own Nuremberg. Would fascism be the final metaphor of Australian settler modernity?' (38).' (Author's introduction, p. 1)

 (p. 51-68)
'White Aboriginals' : White Australian Literary Responses to the Challenge of Indigenous Histories, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'Chapter 4 examines the phenomenon of the 'white Aboriginal,' a putative figure of cultural synthesis as proclaimed in Germaine Greer's maverick manifesto Whitefella Jump Up (2003). However, in texts such as Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves (1976) and David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (1993), Liam Davison's The White Woman (1994), and Stephen Gray's The Artist is a Thief (2001), the 'white Aborigine' figure progressively modulates into a sign of appropriation rather than of reconciliation.' (From author's introduction, 12)
 (p. 71-86)
Fencing in the Frontier, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'...examines a rather less masked from of cultural domination and inscription : that of the fence as a marker of territorial possession, management and (from the settler point of view) 'improvement.' In a number of contemporary texts, ranging from Rodney Hall's The Second Bridegroom (1991), via Doris Pilkington-Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996) and Philip Noyce's subsequent 2001 film adaptation, through to Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005) and poetry by Anthony Lawrence, the fence is analyzed as a material semiotic form inscribing both the text of the land and the spaces of texts.' (Introduction: Imaginary Antipodes, 12-13)
 (p. 87-100)
Invasion and Pathology : Australia, Mabo, McGahan and Malouf, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'...this section addresses what was, symbolically, at least, undoubtedly the most significant event in the recent history of indigenous Australia: the 1992 High Court 'Mabo' decision, which confirmed the ongoing validity of native title. Tragically Mabo appears to have had relatively little impact on Australian culture (just as it has had only a minor impact on the real practices of restoration of indigenous land ownership). One of the few literary texts to have directly registered the invisible seismic reverberations of Mabo was Andrew McGahan's The White Earth (2004) which this chapter analyzes in terms of the text's domination metaphor, that of disease.' (From author's introduction, Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 13)
 (p. 101-113)
Exile as Origin : Definitions of Australian Identities in Malouf's 12 Edmondstone Street, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
Starting with the central significance of autobiography for constructions of national identity, this essay examines the potential inherent in autobiography as a form of cultural agency capable of offering models of social existence based upon tolerance and pluralism. The issue of a possible nomadic poetics as manifest in autobiography is addressed through a reading of Malouf's 12 Edmondstone Street. Malouf's autobiography depicts a childhood in Brisbane under the sign of exile and marginality. The aporias created by the apparent tension between roots and nomadism form the mainspring of Malouf's writing enterprise, and in turn work to evoke a decentered, fragmented version of Antipodean identities, one which accurately corresponds to the multiple realities of Australian destinies.
 (p. 117-127)
The Absence of Hungary : Notes on a Didactic Autobiography by David Martin, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
In this chapter, West-Pavlov shows 'how David Martin's autobiographical fictions Fox on My Door (1987) and My Strange Friend (1991) hollow out possible origins of their stories, building a political ethics upon the absence of a moment or site of originary belonging. What emerge instead are networks of contingent, politicized and ethical relationships...' (From author's introduction, 13)
 (p. 129-142)
'Multiple Exposures' : Spatial Dilemma of Postmodern Artistic Identity in the Fiction of Janette Turner Hospital, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism (p. 143-155)
Double-Crossing One Nation : Contemporary Asian-Australian Narratives, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
This chapter 'addresses more recent immigration experiences, namely the late-twentieth-century wave of immigration - not from Europe, but from East and South-East Asia - that has fundamentally inflected the character of contemporary Australian society. The work of Brian Castro (Birds of Passage, 1983), Yasmin Gooneratne (A Change of Skies, 1991) and Hsu-Ming Teo (Love and Vertigo, 2000) reveals other trajectories in which the figure of crossing supplements that of the absent origin to destabilize excessively closed notions of national identity.' (From author's introduction, 14)
 (p. 159-170)
'This is a Man's Country' : Masculinity and Australian National Identity in Crocodile Dundee, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
This chapter '...interprets the Classic Crocodile Dundee (1986) as an example of the manner in which a version of Australianness was propagated around the world. The contours of the global market rather than domestic versions of Australian identity were from the outset the defining criteria for the selection of the traits from which a henceforth hegemonic portrayal of Australianness were constructed.' (From author's introduction, 14)
 (p. 173-192)
The Traumas of Translation and the Translation of Trauma : Translation and Cultural Plurality in Fremd and Yasbincek, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
West-Pavlov asks why translation as an index of cultural plurality receive so little attention in Australian literature and in Australian literary studies and concludes that 'texts such as Fremd's Heartland and Yasbincek's liv implicitly issue a call to literary studies to take cognisance of the ambient linguistic pluralism and the omnipresent strategies of translation out of which they emerge, but which have been hitherto largely ignored' (40).
 (p. 193-205)
Translation History as a Provocation for Literary Studies: A Case Study on the Translation of Australian Literature into German, Russell West-Pavlov , single work criticism
'This concluding piece combines these perspectives of the two previous chapters. It takes the question of polylingualism even further, suggesting that translations of Australian literature themselves constitute the 'outside' of the national literary canon in the sense that a Mobius strip has an 'outside' which is integrally unified with its 'inside'. The final chapter argues for a conception of Australian literature which encompasses the 'offshore' derivatives of the 'original,' 'native' texts as an integral part of transnational literary theory corpus in which many texts have parallel lives in several languages, and may be accessed by readers around the world in one or more of those co-existing versions.' (From author's introduction, Imaginary Antipodes, 14-15)
 (p. 207-220)
Note: With title: Translation History as Provocation for Australian Literary Studies
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Works about this Work

Introduction Russell West-Pavlov , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 2011; (p. 9-19) West-Pavlov explains how the essays in the publication move across four broad areas of enquiry.
Introduction Russell West-Pavlov , 2011 single work criticism
— Appears in: Imaginary Antipodes : Essays on Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture 2011; (p. 9-19) West-Pavlov explains how the essays in the publication move across four broad areas of enquiry.
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Last amended 24 Sep 2012 15:15:07
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