Migration

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.

‘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.’

‘Sanary and Meranda’s story can be seen as more than a simple tale of altruism, it is a reminder of the close links that have bound New Caledonia and Australia together.’

Beginning with his mother’s creased identity card from the era when Cyprus was colonised by the British Kouvaros links the great themes of twentieth-century migration to the affective structures provided by both photography and cinema that give a purchase for those lost and uprooted individuals swept up in these global eddies. His relatively short and multi-faceted meditation provides an analytical scaffold as well as a moving response to his own question – what do we owe our ancestors and the dead?

Towards the end of the novella Saudade, as the now teenage protagonist Maria-Cristina, the daughter of Goan immigrants in Angola, sits facing the Mozambican family servant Caetano on the eve of Angolan independence, she realizes that they are both ‘orphans of Empire’. The author, Suneeta Peres da Costa, has given us an evocative language for understanding the liminality of these two characters. They are both orphans or soon-to-be orphans, and also abandoned as Portuguese colonial rule crumbles in the 1970s.

It is, then, at the interface of the post-multicultural and the neo-cosmopolitan that Gunew locates her project, aimed at opening up a different engagement with a world in which older models for imagining the relationship between the local, the national and the global have lost currency. In calling her project pedagogical she clearly indicates its ambition: to teach new ways of looking at cross-cultural and global relations. However, she also insists that she has no intention of telling readers what to think. Hers is a ‘stammering pedagogy’, a tentative process ‘suggesting differences without providing comprehensive answers’. Her method involves forms of denaturalisation or estrangement as means to ‘enable receptivity to other ways of ‚Äúbeing at home in the world‚Äù’.’

Poet Peter Skrzynecki reflects on the long life of his collection Immigrant Chronicle.

‘I had only been on Manus Island for a few hours when I rushed over to the central bus stop in Lorengau town. We met in person there for the first time.’

pro-refugee sentiment within Australia has tended to find institutional expression in particular pockets of liberal sentiment – one of which has been the infrastructure of Australian literature. That’s the context for Boochani’s book, a text that emerges from a scaffolding of literary activism that it itself helped facilitate.’

The way nations quantify and code identity is enmeshed in many ‘invented traditions’ but of course these also operate at a semi-conscious level and can be inflamed very quickly, as we are witnessing right now.