AustLit

'If we were to take recent controversies in the Australian literary scene as an indication of its current priorities, we would—at least on one pronounced level—encounter what can be generally called an ethics of inclusivity for diasporic writers. Regardless of the degrees of sophistication of these debates, their participants appeal to the primacy of diasporic identity—its sheer visibility—as a necessary part of the constitution and imaginary of contemporary literature vis-à-vis the nation’s demographic composition. This call for equity of representation is frequently paired with an emphasis on the labour of diasporic writers in surmounting obstacles for publishing narratives about multicultural life, and the structural biases of literary institutions, cultural awards and (white) critics against diasporic writing. The shared assumption here is that there exists an overlap of inequalities between social and literary worlds. What often remains a moot question is the extent to which disseminating diasporic representation is aligned with models of consumption prediction that are predicated on a direct relationship between institutionally fashionable terms such as diversity and inclusion, and maximising business performance schemes. As Sara Ahmed has observed, diversity is associated with conditions of work which are already promoted by organisations. ‘The story of diversity’, she writes, ‘thus becomes a story of diversity’s inclusion into the terms of an institution’ (9).'

 (Introduction)

'Key figures in the history of the Australian Academy of the Humanities have at times referred apologetically to it appearing to be a kind of gentlemen’s club (see Donaldson, ‘Idea of an academy’ 22-4). While this is in some ways an appropriate representation of features of the Academy’s past, this paper seeks to show that it has always been a much more complex institution and has changed over time. Focusing on the first three decades of the history of the Academy, it traces the emergence of different ideas within this institution about the humanities cause—about what the humanities are and how they should be supported. By way of introduction, the paper considers ideas held by leading scholars in the Australian Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Academy’s predecessor, as they began to formulate their views about what the humanities cause was and why an Academy was necessary to promote it. It then goes on to describe how the Academy in pursuing this project over its first three decades became increasingly enmeshed in a changing relationship with the government of the day. The Academy was to rely on its elite, club-like status to influence government but, as will be argued, the basis on which this elite status has been claimed was to shift over time. The paper concludes with a brief reflection on what this history suggests about how the Academy might respond to the challenges the humanities face today.' (Introduction)

'During my first semester of online teaching in 2020 I began keeping a form of teaching archive that was new to me.1 In addition to the usual lectures and slides, I began to accumulate a number of files with a .txt suffix. This is an archive of one of the unexpected affordances of teaching over Zoom: the chat window. I did not know what to do with the chat window, but my students did. They asked questions. They made jokes. They developed extended comedic and often critical conversations about the texts we were reading and how I was teaching them. These chat.txt files are an archive of students seeking and finding social connection in an online English classroom during a pandemic. They are also important to me as a record of a semester in which I tried to use that online classroom to begin to rethink what it means to do the work that has been the focus of my career: teaching and researching Australian literature.' (Introduction)