Rosanne Kennedy

Vulnerable Children, Disposable Mothers: Holocaust and Stolen Generations Memoirs of Childhood

In recent years, historians have pioneered comparative research on the Holocaust and colonisation in Australia. This article seeks to demonstrate that a comparative reading of Stolen Generations and Holocaust memoirs can generate unique and challenging insights into the affective, material and psychological legacies of the assimilation of children across racial and ethnic divides. By placing Sarah Kofmans memoir, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, into dialogue with versions of the Rabbit Proof Fence narrative, the article considers how the gendered trope of suffering mothers and vulnerable children has been used to mediate the trauma of childhood assimilation, and reveals aspects of this legacy that remain unspeakable in Australia.

Subversive Witnessing: Mediating Indigenous Testimony in Australian Cultural and Legal Institutions

Like many other nations, Australia has been engaged in a painful reckoning with a shameful past. In the past fifteen years, questions concerning the removal of Indigenous children from their families, known as the “stolen generations,” the extent of frontier violence, and whether genocide occurred in Australia have been central to the public controversy over how the story of “settlement” or “invasion” should be narrated. Testimony has played a crucial role in this confrontation with the past, as Indigenous Australians have been called upon to testify to past injustices and their continuing legacies in the present. In the 1980s and 1990s Aboriginal women pioneered the use of personal testimony in memoirs, bringing into visibility “forgotten” practices of child removal. 1

Building reading resilience : re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the concept of ‘reading resilience’: students’ ability to read and interpret complex and demanding literary texts by drawing on advanced, engaged, critical reading skills. Reading resilience is a means for rethinking the place and pedagogies of close reading in the contemporary literary studies classroom. Our research was across four Australian universities and the first study of its kind in the Australian context. We trialled three working strategies to support students to become consistent and skilled readers, and to equip teachers with methods for coaching reading: ‘setting the scene’ for reading, surveying students on their reading experiences and habits, and rewarding reading within assessment. We argue that the nature and pedagogy of close reading has not been interrogated as much as it should be and that the building of reading resilience is less about modelling or outlining best practice for close reading (as has traditionally been thought) and more about deploying contextual, student-centred teaching and learning strategies around reading. The goal is to encourage students to develop a broad suite of skills and knowledge around reading that will equip them long term (for the university and beyond). We measured the effectiveness of our strategies through seeking formal and informal student feedback, and through students’ demonstration of skills and knowledge within assessment.

The affects of not reading: Hating characters, being bored, feeling stupid

This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge’s idea of ‘readerly hospitality’ (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty – semiotic, emotional and intellectual. Drawing on trials of teaching methods in literary studies’ classrooms in four universities in Australia, we suggest that introducing students to the concept of ‘readerly hospitality’ – rather than assuming an appreciation of difficulty – can better prepare students for the encounters they will have in set literary texts and strengthen the effectiveness of classroom teaching.

Memory up close: Memory studies in Australia

This special issue was first conceived of over dinner in a New Zealand cafe in London, on a warm summer night in July 2010. During that evening, it emerged that we’d both already been thinking about the issues we raise here for some time. Rosanne, a US citizen, and now Australian citizen, who has lived and worked in Australia since the 1990s, had co-edited a book on World Memory (Bennett and Kennedy, 2003). Susannah, at that point a UK citizen working in the United Kingdom and with a fellowship in Australia, was in the midst of running a project on memory in national contexts and had recently spoken on what she sees as the thorny politics driving both memory’s mobility and theories of transnational memory (Radstone, 2011). Later that evening, we were joined by another contributor to this issue, Felicity Collins, who arrived hot foot from a symposium in Dublin on disputed memory in Australia and Ireland (Holmes and Ward, 2011). Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how our coming together – even in the choice of a New Zealand cafe in London – condensed many of the issues that pulse through this special issue. We knew that our connections were through memory research and through Australia. But knowing that didn’t reveal what, if anything, might be denoted by the coupling of Australia with both memory and memory studies. There in London, in the context of theories of the transnational as they were bearing in on memory studies and as they were present – embodied, even – around our table, this special issue had its genesis. That evening, we began to make plans for a symposium,1 bringing together leading memory researchers from across Australia, and it was during that event that we made plans for this volume. The title of our special issue – Memory Studies in Australia – describes its contents more or less accurately, but aims to provoke, too. Our starting point – self-evidently – is our belief that there’s something significant to be learnt from bringing together this carefully commissioned collection of memory studies research in Australia. But what might that be? After all, general questions of the pertinence of the national notwithstanding, isn’t Australia generally regarded – as one of our contributors pithily put it – as just a ‘small’ country, situated beyond anywhere that matters? And isn’t it just plain retrograde, anachronistic or even overly nationalistic to talk about memory studies in

AN AUSTRALIAN ARCHIVE OF FEELINGS: The Sorry Books Campaign and the Pedagogy of Compassion

Abstract The Sorry Books campaign, held in 1998, was a popular reconciliation event that created conditions for the Australian public to apologise to the ‘Stolen Generations’ when the Howard government refused to offer a parliamentary apology. Feminist and queer approaches, with their complex analyses of emotion in the public sphere and their attention to the formation of counter-public archives of memory, are particularly productive for analysing the Sorry Books campaign as an Australian case study of compassionate politics. In this article, I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich and others to develop a range of frameworks for analysing and evaluating the Sorry Books campaign.

Soul music dreaming: The Sapphires, the 1960s and transnational memory:

In memory studies, concepts of cosmopolitan, transnational and transcultural memory have been identified as a means of studying mnemonic symbols, cultural forms and cultural practices that cross national, ethnic and territorial borders. However, what do these concepts deliver for memory work that originates in an ‘off-centre’ location such as Australia, where outsiders often lack an understanding of the history and cultural codes? A recent Indigenous Australian film, The Sapphires, set in 1968, provides an opportunity to consider some of the claims that are made for the transnational travels of memory. The film tells the story of an Aboriginal girl group that travels to Vietnam to perform for the American troops. I discuss the mnemonic tropes and transcultural carriers of memory, particularly soul music, that enable this popular memory to circulate nationally and internationally. While global tropes and icons of the 1960s can be imported into Australia, and used to construct Australian cultural memory and identity, how effectively does cultural memory travel transnationally from Australia?

WITNESSING, TRAUMA AND SOCIAL SUFFERING: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES

This special issue*Witnessing, Trauma and Social Suffering: Feminist Perspectives* emerged from a conference that Rosanne Kennedy and Gillian Whitlock convened at the Australian National University in April 2009. The conference brought together scholars and critics from a range of disciplines, with the aim of conceptualising trauma, suffering, and witnessing beyond the paradigm of trauma theory that had become dominant, particularly in the humanities.

Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable:

The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene” at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants, all of them leading scholars in the fields of memory studies and/or the environmental humanities, had been asked to respond to the following questions: “What are the implications of the notion of the Anthropocene for memory studies? How, if at all, does the awareness of living in a new geological epoch defined by the actions of human beings affect the objects of memory, the scales of remembrance, and the field’s humanist underpinnings?”

Reparative transnationalism: The friction and fiction of remembering in Sierra Leone:

Analysis of the “productive frictions” that emerge when cosmopolitan paradigms are implemented in local contexts may nuance accounts of how and when memory travels, and when and why it stalls, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the cross-border travels of memory. I explore the frictions of truth-telling in Sierra Leone as articulated in ethnographic analyses of local engagement with the normative paradigm of public remembering and truth-telling promoted by the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and mediated in Aminatta Forna’s post-conflict novel, The Memory of Love. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disappointed victims’ expectations for meaningful transnational relationships, the novel performs and models what I call reparative transnationalism. Through the intimate but public form of literature it imagines entangled transnational futures that work toward the promise of transnational belonging promoted in much writing on transnational memory.