Janet M Wilson

Constructing the metropolitan homeland: the literatures of the white settler societies of New Zealand and Australia

This article examines the responses articulated in white settler writing from New Zealand and Australia to the location and status of these nations as postcolonial diasporas. Beginning with the early colonial sense of estrangement from and idealisation of the metropolitan homeland of Great Britain it traces a pattern of literary engagement with the European source of ethnic origin through to the present day. The article notes changing attitudes towards home and homelands due to the greater fluidity and complexity of migratory and travel paths as the binaries of home and abroad, empire and colony, metropolitan centre and provincial periphery begin to break down towards the end of the twentieth century

Reconsidering Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978); the screen adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s novel (1972)

Abstract Fred Schepisis The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), a story of horrific violence caused by racial oppression, has a controversial place in the Australian social imaginary. As a raw narrative of a part-Aboriginal mans axe-murders of white women, the manhunt which followed, his eventual capture and death by hanging just after Australia achieved federation in 1900, the film was apparently constrained by the limited framework of representation of race relations available in the late 1970s. Audiences were left numbed by the image of a segregated society, the overpowering murder scenes and the disempowerment and downward spiral of Jimmie and his half brother Mort. Yet it has also been valued as a major film in the Australian new wave cinema and judged as ‘underestimated and overlooked’. This article approaches the films mixed reception by re-examining it as a screen adaptation of Thomas Keneallys novel, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), arguing that Schepisi used an expressionist cinematography to convert Keneallys ‘ironic epic’ (Hodge and Mishra 1990: 59) into a fatalistic tragedy. In reconsidering the film in terms of its era, the article shows how the Australian landscape becomes a site of problematic race relations, overturning the myth of ‘innocent settlement’ that is associated with films of the Australian Film Commission (AFC) genre, heralding post-Mabo films like Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002), Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006) and Jindabyne (Lawrence, 2007) whose stories and mise-en-scène acknowledge earlier traumas, inducing in viewers a belated shock of recognition (Collins and Davis 2004: 92).

Postcolonial Thresholds: Gateways and Borders

Introduction to a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing coedited by Janet Wilson and Daria Tunca

'Where is Katherine?' Longing and (un)belonging in the works of Katherine Mansfield

Recent revisions and reassessments of British literary modernism have focused on its metropolitanism, and its aesthetics of fragmentation, abstraction and artfulness.1 Remappings which aim to situate modernism more fully within its socio-cultural matrix reconsider its transnationalism, such as the transformative cultural impact which occurred at the end of empire, due to the migration of colonial writers to England, many from non-elite communities, after the 1950s.2 The geographical complexity of the movement, as current research on modernist little magazines shows, complicates the traditional metropolitan framings and opens up new perspectives on the contribution to modernism of earlier writers who were neither English nor American. Katherine Mansfield is traditionally celebrated as a modernist because of her formal experimentation, as well as her links with perceived avant-garde writers and artists such as John Middleton Murry, A. R. Orage, J. D. Fergusson and others. That she might be a more liminal writer, a ‘colonial modernist’ whose aesthetic and artistic orientations were shaped by her New Zealand origins, a view which hitherto has been little acknowledged, has recently begun to receive more critical attention.3 Mansfield’s colonial identity was both formative of her metropolitan modernism and marks her out as distinctive, in particular through her obsession with ‘home’, and with what Emma Neale describes as ‘the fantasy of emotional settlement’,4 which inspired her great New Zealand stories like ‘The Garden Party’, ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’.

A Pacific sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand connection 1941-2

Abstract This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.

(Not) Saying Sorry: Australian Responses to the Howard Government’s Refusal to Apologize to the Stolen Generations

This volume pays tribute to the formidable legacy of Hema Maes-Jelinek (1929-2008), a pioneering post-colonial scholar who was at Professor at the University of Liege, Belgium. The Howard Government’s refusal to apologise for past injustices to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, after the publication of the Bringing Them Home Report (1997), inflamed protest among many Australians. In the eight years before Prime Minster Kevin Rudd delivered a formal apology in the 2008, the Sorry Movement kept the issue alive in the public domain. This article compares two fictional responses from this era, Ray Lawrence’s feature film Jindabyne (2006), and Gail Jones’s novel Sorry (2007), focusing on the performativity with which the act of apology is uttered. It reads these trauma narratives as political allegories which challenge the official narrative of Reconciliation by representing white settler responses to abusive acts committed against indigenous people, ranging from denial to guilt and remorse.

Katherine Mansfield and anima mundi: France and the tradition of nature personified

This chapter proposes a speculative reading of Katherine Mansfield’s work in relation to the medieval concept of anima mundi (world soul), that is, the belief in an animistic universe in which the earth is revivified through a spiritus mundi (spirit of the world). Although no explicit link can be made, I suggest that Mansfield had affinities with medieval cosmology which fostered a more participatory relationship between the human subject and the created world than the post-Cartesian world view does. I also suggest that this relationship between the self and the ‘other’ is often marked by a ‘decentring’ modernist aesthetic that enables her to represent it as odd, disturbing or disruptive. The first section of this chapter identifies central concepts associated with the belief in anima mundi, as found in the writings of the French philosophers, writers and artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is followed by a discussion of three motifs associated with the tradition of nature personified that survived into modernist culture with reference to particular stories in which Mansfield seemingly rewrites them into a contemporary idiom.

Introduction: Realigning the margins: Asian Australian writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2).

(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012)

Abstract This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second-generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging.

Discoursing on Slums: Representing the Cosmopolitan Subaltern

Slum dwellers are among the most disadvantaged, socially excluded communities in the twenty-first century, living at odds to or outside national and international codes of justice, experiencing diminished or non-existent human rights — whether individual, collective or cultural — inequality and dehumanization in the workplace. New levels of poverty, violence and precarity — the experience of ‘ambient insecurity’ (Horning n.p.) caused by the transfer of state responsibilities for welfare and development to market forces — exist for disenfranchised subjects whose living conditions are produced by and inserted into the production of globalization. As Gayatri Spivak points out: Economic restructuring … removes the barriers between national and international capital, so that the same system of exchange can be established globally … But now, with state priorities increasingly altered, redistributive justice through constitutionality is less and less easy, if not impossible. Philanthropy is now coming top down from the international civic society — the state is being de facto (and sometimes de jure) unconstitutional because it is asked to be managerial and take free-market imperatives. (52–54)