Reviews

This book puts Carby’s brilliant scholarship on display. Imperial Intimacies is highly readable, a memoir of her youth in the UK, as the daughter of a mixed-race couple – a Welsh mother and a Jamaican father – who married after World War II. The book not only contains meticulous archival research on the imperial relationship between the UK and its crown colony Jamaica. It is also a race-cognizant history of life in post–World War II Britain, reflecting on the historical spectrum of ideas about race and so much more.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.

The word clicked something into place. Bibliomemoir: it was books that had helped me to do this, because I didn’t know any other way to do this. I didn’t think there was anything remarkable about this way of writing the self while I was doing it: it seemed self-evident, inevitable that books would help me think about myself.

Our dependence on the environment is the ultimate proof that there is such a thing as the common good.

Lisa Gorton’s new collection Empirical translates the notion of charismatic megafauna, which may be seen alongside more lyrical creatures at the Melbourne Zoo…, into that of charismatic megapoems.

What Khatun so deftly accomplishes is the almost impossible task of working from inside imperial intelligence (in all senses of the word), but thinking from traditions outside them, bringing entire repositories of knowledge from epistemes not accorded legitimacy by hegemonic codifications of colonial world-making.

Culture might not live off Country, in the city, but all culture will be lost if the child is taken; a child taken by the welfare system loses Country anyway, and at the same time they lose their family.

If memoirs are confessions, then Chris Fleming’s autobiographical treatise On Drugs moves in wonder and probing curiosity over the events, actions, and impulses that he confesses.

By juxtaposing the accounts of settlers – who believed that the appropriation, and later purchase, of land was legitimate – with the effects of their occupation on Māori, Hawken highlights the greater struggles of Māori within the European narrative of settlement.

‘Writers and metaphors might not lead us directly to a change in policy. But that is not to say that writing cannot do things in the world. It can shift our frame of reference, for one.’