Kay Schaffer

Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights

In the fifty years during which human rights have gained an international currency, personal narratives have become a potent vehicle for advancing human rights claims. This article considers the importance of storytelling within an emerging and increasingly fractured human rights discourse as the circulation and reception of stories result in unpredictable readings and outcomes that both make visible and also forestall new rights claimants, subjectivities, and futures.

In the wake of first contact : the Eliza Fraser stories

List of illustrations Preface 1. Her story/history: the many fates of Eliza Fraser 2. Eliza Frasers story: texts and contexts 3. John Curtis and the politics of empire: The Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle 4. Policing the borders of civilisation: colonial man and his others 5. Cannibals: Western imaginings of the Aboriginal other 6. Modern reconstructions: Michael Alexanders history and Sidney Nolans paintings 7. Patrick Whites novel A Fringe of Leaves 8. A universal postcolonial myth?: representations beyond Australia - Gabriel Josipovici, Michael Ondaatje and Andre Brink 9. And now for the movie: popular accounts 10. Oppositional voices: contemporary politics and the Eliza Fraser story.

Unruly Spaces: Gender, Women's Writing and Indigenous Feminism in China

Since the 1995 Beijing Womens Conference contemporary womens writing in China has been a privileged site for the exploration of gender relations and female specificity. After defining a specifically indigenous Chinese feminism, this paper studies four directions in womens writing that impact upon feminist practice: rural womens stories that encourage advocacy for womens rights; new historical fiction that challenges the established representations of women in history; popular novels and blog sites by urban women that sexually subvert traditions; and poststructuralist ‘personalised writing’ that disengages from male-centred discourse and explores womens radical alterity. We argue that these writings give rise to many sites of activism, not only for Chinese women in urban and rural areas, but also for Chinese womens involvement in trans-global feminist networks and cross-cultural exchanges. Chinese feminists today, through the medium of creative writing, articulate a new politics of difference, refracted through English-speaking and European theories, but adapted to local traditions, histories and regional affiliations, directed toward an indigenous, Chinese-style of feminism with expansive possibilities and an array of indeterminate outcomes.

Indigenous Australian voices : a reader

Indigenous Australian Voices presents artwork, prose, and poetry of thirty-six contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and artists from the offshore islands, the Northern Territory, and all six states of Australia. It brings together, for the first time, little-known writings by men and women who capture the diversity of their lifestyles and perspectives in a far more compelling way than better-known accounts of anthropologists and travellers.

Narrative, trauma and memory: Chen Ran's A private life, Tiananmen Square and female embodiment

The Tiananmen Square massacre was a cataclysmic event not only in Chinese history but in the international history of the late twentieth century. Coming at the end of a decade of rapid change and at a time when China signalled its intention to join the global world order, the event deeply scarred the country. It left behind a legacy of trauma, compounded by collective repression, unacknowledged individual loss and pain, cynicism and betrayal, that is still to be addressed. So many young people died in the Square. For Chinese people the sense of “Guo Shang” (“to die young for the country”) still haunts a generation of survivors. All victims and their families still carry a heavy burden: “To go on living is painful” (Lin Mu). In his preface to the recently published The Tiananmen papers Zhang Liang states: “History seems frozen there” (Nathan and Link, 2001, p. xi). Unlike other sites of traumatic human rights abuse in the late twentieth century, traumas that have been revisited in memoirs and campaigns for redress, the state has not allowed any transformation of this experience into public discourse: no campaigns for redress, no recognition of the suffering of Chinese citizens, no reparations, no tribunals, no reflection, no apologies, no healing processes. In this instance, the “truth” of the past has been buried in an amnesiacal fold of history, secretly held in people’s hearts and minds. Although silenced on the macro-level, on the micro-level writers and artists, particularly those who left China after the 1989 turmoil, have begun to revisit this site of trauma, reflecting on the betrayal of the state and the loss of idealism for a generation of youth. In the last decade a number of Chinese writers, living both within China and abroad, have published narratives that address the national and personal trauma that resulted Asian Studies Review June 2006, Vol. 30, pp. 161–173

Scare words: ‘Feminism’, postmodern consumer culture and the media

(1998). Scare words: ‘Feminism’, postmodern consumer culture and the media. Continuum: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 321-334.

'Land of the free'? Circulating human rights and narrated lives in the United States

Abstract In the 50 years during which human rights has gained an international currency, personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims. This is particularly true in the United States where personal narratives attesting to human rights violations frequently gain wide exposure through mass publication and publicity, media circulation, and global information flows. This article explores the circulation of human rights narratives in the United States, examining some of the ways that stories enter into public discourse through published life narratives, television talk shows, news reports, campus lectures and publicity tours, websites, and the like, and are taken up by popular and academic audiences, spurring debates within the fields of legal and political theory, international relations, religion, morality and ethics, often far removed from the originating event or site of human rights violation. The article considers the many intended and unintended effects of this circulation on storytellers, their audiences, and the campaigns they represent.

Post-Tiananmen Narratives and the New China

In the late twentieth century, student protest movements sparked massive campaigns for human rights across the world. None, however, would eclipse the June 4 Movement in China. In terms of sheer numbers alone, the event was monumental.

Life Sentences: Narrated Lives and Prisoner Rights in The United States

On September 8, 2000, Nelson Mandela stood before a cheering crowd of young Australians in Melbourne’s Colonial Stadium to address the World Reconciliation Day tribute concert. World Reconciliation Day had begun as a social studies project of ninth graders at Melbourne’s Trinity Grammar School. Here was grassroots activism in practice, a human rights initiative spearheaded by local teenagers who had studied Mandela’s life and decided to enlist him in their effort to promote reconciliation between Australia’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.

Belated Narrating: “Grandmothers” Telling Stories of Forced Sexual Slavery During World War II

On March 11, 2001 Korean “grandmother” Kap Soon-Choi walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at the University of Michigan in the United States and sat down between two younger women, one her interlocutor, the other her translator. After leaning toward her interlocutor for the first question, she began her testimony, translated into English as “We were so very poor.” For over an hour Kap Soon-Choi told her harrowing tale of abduction and forced sexual slavery in a Japanese military “comfort station” to a hall full of hushed college students. She told her story; she wept; she resumed. After her formal testimony, Kap Soon-Choi responded to audience questions for another hour. Throughout the two hours of testimony to her radical degradation, the Michigan Daily photographer shot photos for the next day’s paper.