Featured Non-fiction essays
Wayward Revolutions
Lately, I have been asking myself why it is that Black Feminist study is so central to my understanding of how to live a political life. Why, as a Brown settler also shaped by colonialism and living on Indigenous land in the place often referred to as Australia, do I find myself reading and re-reading Saidiya Hartman’s work? What is it that Black study offers?
A Place of Punishment: No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani
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.’
Non-fiction
No Struggling Alone
That the unit of the individual is too small to enact political transformation is the simple wager that Jodi Dean uses to open Comrade. It is a work of political theory that is well-timed, as neoliberal states have failed their citizens en masse and ideas such as solidarity and mutual aid have threatened to go mainstream in the West.
Archives of Loss
Reading the losses arrayed in this anthology to write this review – even as they were tempered by expressions of joy or hope at ecological resilience, or calls for action – I felt somewhat overwhelmed. In that state, I recalled the classic Freudian account of melancholy as a mourning of loss that becomes pathological, because it is perpetual.
A Dying Art
These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford.
Rebel Bodies
These books lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Nonfiction-as-speculation feels oxymoronic. The two words tug against each other, ‘nonfiction’ leaning toward documentation, ‘speculation’ toward imagining. A strange hybrid genre results that strives to offset the bloodless abstraction of scientific projections and the future’s unreality.
The House That SIHIP Built
Dispossession was hardwired into this ambitious housing program, at both the household and community level. Enter the anthropologist, Tess Lea. Darwin-born, Lea is an acute observer of the everyday practices that characterise the wild, disorderly, and strange cultural world of the interventionist settler-colonial state. This involves committed and forensic analysis of documentary hulk, reading and deciphering pages and pages of detailed policy paperwork that repel close attention. And it also involves fieldwork: immersion in the everyday ways under study.