AustLit

'The celibacy of Catholic “women religious”, or nuns, presents a dilemma for familiar narratives about the 1960s and 1970s as Australia’s “liberation decades”. In this article, I analyse an important oral history archive, not previously considered for this purpose, to explain how women religious “made sense” of their sexuality in relation to the social and institutional transformations of this period. I argue that women religious in Australia redefined celibacy as mature heterosexuality, and by doing so, they identified as ordinary women even as they held to their special status within the Catholic Church.' (Publication abstract)

'This article proposes to view Australian Chinese cultural products through a Sinophone studies lens to clarify the position of Australia in transnational patterns of Chinese-language cultural production. Three examples illustrate how Sinophone studies can expand research on Chinese-language culture in Australia, by showing them to also be instances of wider phenomena: Chinese-language theatre, Federation-era fiction, and the foreign student literature of the 1990s. Examining how these examples fit into wider patterns of Chinese-language production allows us to expand dyadic views of diaspora or transnationalism while also directing greater attention to community diversity and marginalised texts. The Australian Chinese studies community is right to celebrate the length and breadth of Chinese cultural production in Australia, and considering Sinophone Australian literature and theatre in the context of global Sinophone cultural production can help sharpen perspectives on what is shared and what is particular about the Australian case.' (Publication abstract)

'This article makes a case for reframing refugee literature through reading Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, translated from Farsi by Omid Tofighian. Written in detention on Manus Island via text messages on WhatsApp, Boochani’s book has won wide acclaim in Australia and internationally, not only among literary critics, but as a work of popular appeal in writers’ festivals and cultural prizes. The popular narrative around No Friend but the Mountains has introduced it, on the one hand, as a representative specimen of refugee literature, and more specifically as an example of life writing of a stateless Kurd. We argue that Boochani’s work resists reductive characterisations of refugee literature both through its literary investments and its multiple affiliations with political and discursive interests. By attending closely to stylistic properties and its discursive contexts, we emphasise that No Friend but the Mountains is not just a protest against Boochani’s own treatment by the Australian government but a tracing of how the lived experience and literary subjectivity of refugees in the Global South contests facile categorisation and unitary nationalism.'(Publication abstract)

'The concept of circular thinking is readily attributed to patterns of Indigenous knowledge, characterised as distinct from the supposed linearity of Western epistemology; to approach epistemology through this metaphor is to anticipate identity by difference and underscore the autonomy of knowledge within bounded cultural coordinates. In seeking a more nuanced appreciation of the interwoven contours of human knowing, I consider some leading Indigenous Australian thinkers who understand cultural identities to be consolidated through creative repetition and recognised within dynamic relationality. These explorations include Mandawuy Yunupiŋu’s interpretation of Yolŋu thought as a process of making “new connections and new separations”; the performance of manikay (public ceremonial song) by Wägilak singer Daniel Wilfred; Tyson Yunkaporta’s conceptualisation of “turnaround”; Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu’s framework of ngurra-kurlu (home-having); and Stan Grant’s interpretation of an Indigenous Voice to the Australian Parliament. In contrast to the circular demarcation of identity by difference, these voices demonstrate how difference within identity can give impetus to mutual formation and growth, suggesting a Hegelian twist on notions of circularity in which critical differentiation generates an expanding gyre of recognition and meaning.' (Publication abstract)

'This article presents a linguistic analysis of Australian Acknowledgements of Country, an ancient Indigenous practice now increasingly prevalent in Australian public life. Acknowledgements of Country are typically spoken at the beginning of events by either Indigenous or non-Indigenous people. While celebrated as a practice that gives voice and primacy to Country, Indigenous peoples and their cultural practices, they have also attracted criticism for being tokenistic and minimising the severity of the genocide and continuing exploitation of Indigenous peoples. Supporting a body of work that critically engages with the values and structure of Acknowledgements of Country, we deploy a variety of tools from systemic functional linguistics to analyse 20 examples (both spoken and written), using the lexicogrammatical and discourse semantic systems of agency, transitivity and appraisal. Our findings show that there are both obligatory and optional parts in the Acknowledgments of Country, and that these linguistic choices can illuminate contemporary power dynamics and political stances. Our intention here is to the highlight the language choices that place obligations and duties on speakers in delivering their Acknowledgements of Country.' (Publication abstract)

'Joel Birnie’s achievement in My People’s Songs is to show that Tasmanian Aboriginal people have long had to assert themselves against and with a colonial narrative (mingling sorrow, triumph and self-criticism) that Aboriginal Tasmanians had been wiped out. From the late 1960s, politicians and public servants began to relinquish the idea that only those deemed “full-bloods” are “Aboriginal”, abandoning blood quantum in favour of personal identification. In the 2021 census, 30,186 residents of Tasmania identified themselves as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, a 28 per cent increase from the 2016 census.' (Introduction)