Brigitta Olubas

A Mongrel, Migrant Language

In her 2015 essay arguing for the universalism of differences, Madhavi Menon proposes that the capaciousness of queer theory might provide a(nother) way in to the conceptual and practical domains of thinking diverse differences in the world. Returning us, implicitly at least, to Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s first axiom: ‘People are different from one another’, Menon opens out some of the imperatives of thinking through the ways that we might ‘universalize partition as the condition within which we all labour’ (2015: 121). In this, Menon is, of course, diverging from ‘the Enlightenment sense’ of universalism; that is, ‘partitioned particularity’, or ‘one difference pretending to be absolute’ (2015: 130) and proposing as alternative a universalism that ‘[refuses] to make difference coherent, selfidentical, or the basis for identity’ (2015: 121). Menon’s proposition, and the revised, differentiated sense of universalism she presents, resonated for me as I read Sneja Gunew’s new book, inflecting the latter’s diverse – at times explicitly perverse (2015: 97) – engagement with the literary terrain of the global as a potentially queer practice over and above her discussion of individual literary texts which present queer characters, perspectives or worlds. And at the same time, it seemed clear that Gunew’s practice in this book exemplifies the kind of universalism that Menon posits, beginning with the critical conviction that ‘the truth of our lived realities is that we are both one and the other’. In broad terms, Menon’s essay highlighted for me the ways Gunew’s work manages to suggest, or to implicate, ever-wider circles of reference and connection for its arguments around literary cosmopolitanism, world literature, and multiculturalism, and in the process to trouble the coordinates of each. But it was also in the more precise moments of Gunew’s argument, from her articulation of a ‘stammering pedagogy’ – ‘a process of suggesting differences without producing comprehensive answers’ (2017: 9) – to the methodology of the ‘post’ as Lyotard’s future anterior, ‘structured by anamnesis, a recollection or going back’ to the cosmopolitanism that ‘was left out of multiculturalism’ (2017: 10), or in her account of ‘acoustic cosmopolitanism’, that is, the ‘hum or “presence” of other languages (Indigenous as well as others) [which] fundamentally destabilize[s] the authority that English appears to enjoy within a national culture that strenuously perpetuates

“The illusion of old solitude”: Shirley Hazzard's Capri

Shirley Hazzards Greene on Capri provides an account of a Capri habitation that extended, not uninterrupted, but at frequent and regular intervals, from the postwar years until the end of the century through the lens of the longstanding friendship between herself, her husband (literary translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller), author Graham Greene, and a number of Greenes other friends. The focus of Hazzards memoir is thus on a literary world characterised by a privileged cosmopolitanism and an autodidactic erudition that are now past; the memoir is marked by her sense of this loss as much as it is marked by the loss of her friend and her husband. Her own position, moreover, is marked unmistakably by her sense of the gendered nature of the literary world she inhabited. This essay examines the ways Hazzards elegiac account of the passing of a particular kind of literary sensibility draws from both the traditions of representing Capri itself but also from a broader tradition of writing and thinking about islands and their place in a rootless, Anglophone cosmopolitanism.