AustLit

‘If something is repeated often enough, then it crystallises itself as truth in the cultural consciousness. It took me a long time to unlearn and discard the mythic images that the old country was trying to sell to me. I’m sure there are still residual traces. See how I dare not invoke its name.’

'An exploration of identity across global and digital territories, Cher Tan’s essays of bend and break boundaries to resist easy categorisation.

'Peripathetic contains work that is self-reflexive, wry, intelligent and restless. It includes a lyric essay on the tropes surrounding the cultural signifiers of ‘normal’ vs ‘weird’; an extended critique on the tensions the term ‘authenticity’ presents; a meditation on the artist as influencer; the existential tensions that are connected to ‘performance’ in everyday life; and an autofictive essay on Tan’s 20-year history of ‘unskilled’ labour that prises apart contemporary ideas of class and capital.

'The collection is as non-linear as Tan’s work and life: traversing subjects from technology to late capitalism, interrogating power, borders and capital while considering the ever-evolving facets of identity, self, and culture in a hyper-real world. In Peripathetic, Tan has created a collection of essays that blends cultural criticism, experimental writing, autotheory, (inter)net writing and literary memoir, bringing us new ways of viewing familiar artistic territory.' (Publication summary)

'Based on Alice Pung’s novel about an Asian student in an elite Australian school in the 1990s, this timely production feels scattershot and unconvincing'

'Brian speaks to Cher about the right to opacity, risk-taking and experimentation in writing, and what it means when textual and cultural hybridities intersect.'

'Welcome to the world of snackable content.

'Listen closely: like an ambient soundscape, its soft tides wash over you and you devour it quickly. Sometimes, it repeats an opinion you’ve already developed, affirming previously held beliefs. From afar this tone appears poetic but zoom in closer and you will see that they are generated to trigger particular affective feeling – what Sianne Ngai describes as ‘the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is paradoxically united with boredom’. Did SEO create this monster? Or was it the inner workings of the thing we now call capitalist realism? The answers lie inside your personal algorithm, an enigmatic void that soothes your soul with its mirrors.'  (Introduction)

'S.L. spoke to Cher about desire, finding solidarity across difference, and their ambivalence towards the notion of ‘clout’.' 

'A “non-place”, as Marc Augé describes in his 1995 essay-turned-book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, is a venue whose uniformity of design makes it indistinguishable from another, regardless of where you are in the world. One can think of shopping centres, supermarkets and airports as non-places, although more recently we can also include cafes, Airbnbs and social media profiles. In Augé’s view, a non-place is a “supermodernism” that has emerged out of globalisation, resulting in “places of memory” that are unbroken chains. These places become so familiar they eventually become socially estranging.' (Introduction)

'In ‘Second City’, the titular essay by Eda Gunaydin in Second City, an anthology of essays collected and published by the Sydney Review of Books, Gunaydin begins: ‘I spent the summer between 2013 and 2014 as many 20-year-olds do: working at a restaurant.’ It’s a sentence that includes as much as it excludes, echoing the popular internet phrase ‘if you know, you know’. The essay goes on to explore the ramifications of gentrification in Parramatta, alongside a certain gentrification of the self through education and upward mobility. With a stylistic panache and an erudite wit, Gunaydin goes on to ask, towards the end of the essay, ‘… if displacement did not begin five years ago but two hundred and thirty years ago, what use is there in attempting to freeze its current class and racial composition in amber?’ This mode of writing is something I’ve observed amongst writers on the so-called ‘margins’ in the last few years: as writers move away from the giddy nascence of a minoritised literature that is nevertheless situated inside an anglophone canon, narratives become less concerned with a centre and more interested in interrogating the complexities that arise from marginal conditions. Struggle is considered alongside joy, privileges alongside oppressions.' (Introduction)

'When Jasbir K. Puar coined the term ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), she was referring to a liberally-sanctioned queerness that had gained credibility in a post-9/11 world. It was, according to her, a biopolitics that pits a ‘sexual exceptionalism’ of the ‘global gay left’ against ‘perverse, improperly hetero- and homo- Muslim sexualities’. Within homonationalism, there lay the ‘convivial relations’ between queerness and neoliberal tendencies – such as privatisation, militarism, surveillance, deportation and empire – that lean on a nationalistic ‘imagined community’ while hawking an illusory feeling of freedom. Not dissimilar to carceral feminism, homonationalism espouses a quasi-progressive rhetoric that justifies racist, xenophobic and aporophobic positions.' (Introduction)