Nicholas Jose

Transcultural Affinities: In Praise of Wang Zuoliang

The paper investigates the meaning of the term ‘transcultural’ as its use widens, exploring its relationship with alternative terms, some of which it promises to replace: ‘transnational’, ‘intercultural’, ‘translational’, among other examples. The paper focuses on the application of ‘transcultural’ to literature (reading, writing and interpretation) and creative writing, and also considers what it can mean in relation to pedagogical practice in these fields. It makes specific reference to translation in an interpretative and pedagogical context, on the basis that transcultural inquiry will often be accompanied by movement between languages, cultures and societies. The question is asked: is ‘transcultural’ a description of an attribute of a text, or a framework or perspective for interpretation, experiment and creative practice and inquiry? Is ‘transcultural’ then an agentive position, a way of proceeding that creates new knowledge, partly through reflection and scrutiny into its own processes: hence ‘transculturalism’ as alternative pedagogy with radical implications. Examples will be taken from a range of contemporary literary texts including The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright and China in Ten Words by Yu Hua—all texts that are marked by transcultural moves and that succeed in communicating transculturally (across different audiences/communities and/or in translation).

Deconstructing the dumpling: Australia, China, lived connections

Abstract Trading routes between China and Australia that pre-date European settlement, such as the trepang trade between Indigenous northern Australians and Macassan traders and the interactions between people along the way, symbolised by the Chinese God of Longevity figurine unearthed in Darwin in 1897, are being redrawn in the context of contemporary ideas. Aboriginal author Alexis Wrights novel Carpentaria is one example, published in Chinese translation by Li Yao in 2012. Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobos connection to Australia is another. As Australia seeks to position itself in the Asia-Pacific region, learning from China through the continuing history of lived connections between the two countries offers a new perspective.

At the Limit of Literature

What, if anything, is Australian literature? That this question can be asked, still and again, as happens directly and indirectly through this welcome new collective history, is less a matter of regret than a tribute of sorts to the Australian propensity for keeping apart from conventional categorisations. I’m not sure if this happens from Australia, looking out, or to Australia, looking in. Most likely it’s a combination of both internal pressures and external arrangements, as some of the “history of the book”—of reading, writing and publishing—in Australia details here. Re-definition of, or escape from, boundaries has been a shaping force in Australian literature since the first boatloads of convicts and settlers arrived in Sydney with a printing press in 1788 (as Elizabeth Webby reminds us in her chapter on “The beginnings of literature in colonial Australia”), until today, when boatloads of would-be refugees— from Afghanistan, from Sri Lanka, poets and journalists among them perhaps—are pushed back to sea. The convict and colonial confine is resisted in actuality, and in imaginative transposition and impersonation, linguistic promiscuity and genre-busting. As Tanya Dalziell writes about colonial fiction in her chapter “No place for a book?,” two projectsin-process intersected during the nineteenth century: “the shaping of an idea of ‘fiction’ [ . . . ] and the making of ‘Australia’” (113).1 That convolution of community (or, less comfortably, nation) and literature has continued, even as authors from Australia routinely disavow any Australianness, or seek to transcend that part of their biography through art and internationalism. The poet John Kinsella uses the term “international regionalism” for the positive potential of this double position. In a big-picture chapter called “Groups and mavericks” that is one of the best things in this multiauthored volume, he links the anxiety around definition to perceptions of Australia as “quarantined space,” an insular exceptionalism that, for better and worse, maps the “reiteration of uniqueness and separatemodernism / modernity