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The fifth China Australia Literary Forum (CALF 5), ‘Ideas of the Future/Building Relations’, brought writers, critics and publishers from Australia and China together in dialogue about literature and cultural translation. It was co-hosted by the Writing & Society Research Centre, the Australia-China Institute for Arts and Culture, the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, and the China Writers’ Association.

Over four sessions chaired by Isabelle Li, Nicholas Jose, Denise Varney and Jing Han, invited delegates were asked to speak for ten minutes on one of the program themes: i) Worlds of the Future, ii) Ecology and the Environment, iii) Economies and Networks, iv) Building Relationships.

Below are the speeches in each session, along with their accompanying translation.

PANEL ONE: WRITERS #1 (Chair – Isabelle Li)

• Lisa Gorton (novelist, poet) – ‘The Readers Digest Great World Atlas’
• Kate Fagan (poet) – ‘”Keep Every Story Live”: Natalie Harkin’s Archival Poetics’
• Mr Dong Xi (novelist) – ‘The Purpose of Writing is Communication’
• Ms Zheng Xiaoqiong (poet) – ‘The Way of Poetry’

PANEL TWO: WRITERS #2 (Chair – Nicholas Jose)

• David McCooey (poet) – ‘Future Worlds’
• Felicity Castagna (novelist) – ‘Past, Present and Future Worlds’
• Ms Xia Jia (novelist) – ‘Believe in the Future’
• Mr Long Yi (novelist) – ‘Enjoying the Internet’

PANEL THREE: CRITICS

• Justin Clemens (poet, critic) – ‘The Smallest and most Minimal of Beings’
• James Ley (critic) – ‘Untitled’
• Mr Yan Jingming (critic) – ‘The Future of Literature’
• Mr Li Guoping (critic) – ‘Untitled’

PANEL FOUR: PUBLISHERS

• Xiang Ren (scholar of publishing) – ‘Literary Publishing in a Connected Digital World’
• Mrs Ying Hong (editor and publisher) – ‘Belief in the Future’
• Sam Cooney (publisher) – ‘Building Relationships: Blak Brow: Stepping Back to Move Foreward’ (English Only)

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Friday 23 August, 2019, Female Orphan School, Western Sydney University, 11:00-12:30pm

The past half-century has seen the rise to prominence of the concept of the event. This introduces a crucial element of groundlessness, chance, the aleatory, non-necessity into being. The world comes about as it is, not on the basis of prior determinations, as above all in theology and conservative politics, but on the baseless basis of the void. Here, however, I’ll start out, not from philosophies of the event qua philosophies, but from the event as cultural symptom; a symptom that also has its counter-symptom. We might put the point like this: the concept of the event has had a certain currency in the culture over the past three or four decades or more; this, not only in philosophy and theory and criticism, but in the arts, and even in certain specific forms the sciences. But elsewhere or in the larger culture, we have seen the effective growth of a formidable resistance to the concept, if a resistance that is largely implicit, not articulated as such, even in large measure unknowing. Our period might actually seem to be strikingly obtuse to the event or the conditions of the event, and much inclined to disbelieve in or even discredit them. The concept of the event comes philosophically to the fore and is properly formalized precisely in an age notably and even intransigently hostile to events as such. The resistance has many aspects, ranging from the effects of the wholesale mediatisation of culture to the massive growth of the culture of security to the new technology spreading new forms of control of the alea to that minor variant, the `anti-evental’ backlash in literary theory and criticism. A major if not the principal form of it, however, as is becoming clear to us from some admirable work (Enteman, Locke and Spender, Klikauer) is managerialism or managerial reason.

This talk gets its orientation from one question: where does the most significant English-language novelist of the period stand in relation to the structure of opposition (and the paradoxes) I have outlined? In a very interesting and complex position, I’ll suggest, that is all his own. I’ll give a very brief survey of the two sides of contemporary culture’s paradoxical relation to the event. I’ll also very briefly place my own case in relation to Derek Attridge’s concept of Coetzee and the event in his notably important and influential book J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading. Coetzee’s treatment of the possibility of the event in my sense is oblique, indirect, multi-faceted, very subtle but very slight. I don’t expect to be able to sum it up or even adequately represent it here. I’ll aim however to talk about two aspects of it, both of which in effect involve taking a position relative to the contemporary paradox and institute a more or less devastating critique of managerial reason. I will particularly look at the first part of Dusklands, and the relation of Eugene Dawn to the American military’s OR (Operational Research), now credited with being one of the origins of contemporary theory of management; and at The Childhood of Jesus, looking particularly at the relevance to it of a reading of Leibniz on the one hand, and Miguel de Unamuno’s reading of Don Quixote on the other.

ANDREW GIBSON is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has held visiting professorships and honorary appointments at the College Internationale in Paris, Northwestern University in Chicago and Tokyo University among other institutions. He’s currently a Visiting Professor to the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide, where he is giving a series of masterclasses on the fiction of J.M. Coetzee. Andrew is a permanent advisory editor to the James Joyce Quarterly and was recently appointed Associate Member of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading.

All welcome. info: writing@westernsydney.edu.au

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This one-day symposium, which is part of the Dialogues theme, featured presentations by eight specialists on the fiction of Gail Jones. Jones is a member of the Other Worlds team and one of Australia’s foremost novelists. The papers offered in depth readings of her body of fiction and explored its importance from formal, thematic, and contextual points of view.

Program

Flyer

Session 1: Lou Jillett and Anthony Uhlmann

Session 2: James Gourley and Elizabeth McMahon

Session 3: Tony Hughes-D’Aeth and Brigid Rooney

Session 4: Meg Samuelson and Tanya Dalziell

Biographies:

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Director of the Westerly Centre and the Chair of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP 2017), Paper Nation: The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (MUP 2001), and numerous articles on Australian literature, film and cultural history. Tony was the co-editor of Westerly Magazine from 2010 to 2014. Photo: Travis Hayto Photography

Tanya Dalziell works in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her most recent books include Gail Jones: Word and Image (Sydney UP, forthcoming) and Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamer and Drifters on Hydra 1955-1964 (Monash UP, 2018), co-authored with Paul Genoni. Photo: Travis Hayto Photography

James Gourley is a senior lecturer in literary studies at Western Sydney University and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. His research addresses modern and contemporary literature. His recent work on modernism and its relation to contemporary literature appears in College Literature and English Studies.

Lou Jillett recently completed her PhD at Western Sydney University. Her thesis investigated the theme of wandering in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. She co-convened a three-day international McCarthy conference  2014 which led to an edited collection of essays, Cormac McCarthy’s Borders and Landscapes (2016). Lou’s current research focuses on ecocritical approaches to the theme and representation of disappearance in Australian literature, and the function of walking within that literature: as record, as remembrance and as reclamation of space.

Elizabeth McMahon is an associate professor in the School of Arts and media, University of New South Wales. She researches in the fields of Australian literature and Island Studies and her recent monograph, Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016), won two national awards. With Brigitta Olubas she has edited numerous book collections, the most recent on the fiction of Elizabeth Harrower (2017). A forthcoming collection on Antigone Kefala will be published by University of Western Australia Press in 2019. She has edited journals continuously since 1997: Australian Humanities Review for ten years; and Southerly since 2008.

Brigid Rooney teaches Australian literature in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. She has written widely on twentieth century and contemporary Australian literature and has co-edited scholarly collections on such topics as Christina Stead and Australian literature as world literature. She has published two sole-authored books: Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (University of Queensland Press, 2009) and Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity (Anthem Press, 2018).

Meg Samuelson is an associate professor in the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and an associate professor extraordinary at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She has published widely in Southern African literary and cultural studies. Her recent and current research engages with photography in Zanzibar, coastal form in narrative fiction from the African Indian Ocean littoral, surfing cultures and the Indian Ocean shore-break, sharks as uncanny figures of racial terror in the Anthropocene, the southern orientations of J. M. Coetzee’s writing, the oceanic south and world maritime literatures.

Anthony Uhlmann is a Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His first novel, Saint Antony in His Desert, was published by UWAP in 2018. He is the author of two monographs on Samuel Beckett, and most recently Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov. His work focuses on the exchanges that take place between literature and philosophy and the way in which literature itself is a kind of thinking. Besides Other Worlds he is currently working on a project on Spinoza and Literature with Moira Gatens.

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7-9 February 2019
Female Orphan School, Parramatta South Campus
Western Sydney University

The idea for the conference began with a conversation between Alexis Wright and Ben Etherington about the influence that work of the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau had on her when she was writing Carpentaria (2006). His example helped her to develop an approach to narration that could capture the voice and imagination of the peoples of the Gulf region. Accordingly, the conference set out to explore similar resonances between the Caribbean and other places. The term ‘meridian’ was adopted to prompt presenters to think about the real and imagined lines of connection between distant and disparate places. This seemed particularly appropriate for thinking about the links between Australia and the Caribbean; regions that have quite separate positions within global social and environmental systems.

Presenters were encouraged to think about the modes of connection between the Caribbean and places across the world. These encompass the Atlantic world which has been at the centre of transnational scholarship on the Caribbean, but they also extend across the Western hemisphere and the Pacific to Asia, Oceania, and beyond. Presenters looked for unusual, perhaps unexpected lines of connection or relation such as those that have moved from the Caribbean south to Australia (‘meridian’ once meant ‘south’), as well as ‘South-South’ relations where ‘South’ refers to the ‘Global South’. The idea of the meridian also reflects back on the Caribbean, which is criss-crossed with intra-regional connections that can escape scholarly notice. How do Caribbean perspectives inflect and alter conceptions of time, space, and/or world? How have the peoples of the Caribbean imagined the world and the kinds of connections and affiliations that bind it? Are there specifically Caribbean meridians?

Download the AACS 2019 Program

Download the AACS 2019 Call For Papers – Caribbean Meridians

Download the AACS 2019 annual newsletter

KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS

Keynote 1: Anna Cristina Pertierra, ‘Tracing the Transpacific: Media and Digital Cultures, from Caribbean to Asia’

Anna Cristina Pertierra’s opening keynote discussed the ways in which her research in Cuba and Trinidad on transatlantic digital cultures has shaped her approach to the understudied phenomenon of transpacific trade and consumer cultures. It was through her work in the Caribbean that Pertierra discovered that it is not only possible to study big global forces in small islands, but that such forces cannot be properly studied without understanding the role of small islands in the world-system. For instance, they often been at the forefront of the production of new commodities and, thus, at the vanguard of emergent consumer cultures.

Keynote 2: Raphael Dalleo, ‘Haiti, Harlem, Hamburg: Anticolonialism’s Rhizomatic Roots’

Raphael Dalleo began his address by pointing to the strong tradition in the Caribbean of debating models for relational thinking. He connected the notion of meridians to the ideas of Édouard Glissant, calling for ‘rhizomatic’ approaches to transnational histories of Caribbean rather than one rooted in the movement between the Caribbean and former imperial metropoles. Accordingly, Dalleo’s focus was on the US occupation of Haiti in the 1920s, and the way in which responses to it deeply shaped influential political and creative networks of anti-colonialism in diverse places, from Harlem to Moscow, Germany, France, and London, then returning back to the Caribbean.

Keynote 3: ‘Warriors of the Imaginary: Alexis Wright on Caribbean Writing and World Making’

The keynote conversation between Alexis Wright and Ben Etherington began by considering the formative influence that Patrick Chamoiseau’s work has had on Wright’s writing (the session takes its title from Chamoiseau’s resonant phrase ‘Guerrier de L’Imaginaire’/‘Warrior of the Imaginary’. From there it developed into a discussion of the ways in which Wright has looked to writers from diverse places to create her highly localised literary worlds. She talked about world-making as a form of cultural renewal in the aftermath of colonialism, in particular. They then turned to consider whether localised world-making through storytelling is meaningfully considered within the terms of ‘world literature’.

Keynote 4: Michael Bucknor: ‘Diasporic Intimacies: Caribbean Meridians and Literary Histories’

Michael Bucknor’s closing keynote took the idea of meridians as a frame that allows us to look for gaps in established accounts of Caribbean literary transnationalism, especially those associated with British-based writers. His focus was on post-war Canadian Caribbean diasporic writers, and the remarkably similar ways in which they created a space within the Canadian literary field to their London-based contemporaries, especially through a conjunction of print and broadcast initiatives. These local manoeuvres were buttressed by the circulation of correspondence among writers across the post-war Caribbean diaspora, which were part of forging a network of intimacy.

The conference’s 17 panel sessions involved 50 speakers and covered a spectrum of approaches to Caribbean meridians. They included a number of papers that looked to unexpected connections between the Caribbean and Australia, from the earliest convict narratives (Elizabeth McMahon) to contemporary efforts to reimagine the connection between slave and convict histories (Sienna Brown). There were also panels on Asian-Caribbean meridians and Transatlantic Meridians.

Models of social and creative relationality were a constant feature of the discussions. These included meditations on the work of Édouard Glissant (Michael Griffiths and Dashiell Moore), rethinking the nature of Caribbean intertextuality in an era of postcolonial canons (Emily Taylor), and working through modes of relationality centred on the ocean and environment (Andrea Davis, Antonia MacDonald, Sue Thomas, Anne Collett). Further details of the papers can be found in the program, which includes a full list of abstracts.

The Caribbean Meridians Conference was a part of the project’s Dialogues theme. Click here for other Dialogues theme events.

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Monthly Poetry Reading Series ‘No Wave’ and the Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature project presented a special event:

‘A Night of Prose’, featuring Mariana Dimópulos and Ariel Magnus, with special guests Gay Lynch, Matt Hooton and Nick Duddy.

Thursday 22nd August, 7pm, The Wheatsheaf Hotel, 39 George St, Thebarton, Adelaide

Flyer

(image: Michael Coghlan, Wikimedia Commons)

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‘Early This Morning’

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Published in Transcultural Encounters in Knowledge Production and Consumption, Encounters between East and West Springer Nature, Singapore, 2018, pp. 65-80.

Book Chapter

Image: Transcultural Building, by Anthony Albright, Flickr

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Review (Australian Book Review, Jan-Feb 2018, pp. 15-16)

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Event advertisement

‘Writing Southern Worlds’ – Meg Samuelson

What substance can we give to the idea of the south? One of the defining features of the geographic south is the greater proportion of ocean to land. Samuelson’s paper floated the idea of the ‘blue southern hemisphere’ and reflected on southness as a littoral condition. With some reference to the writing of JM Coetzee, it sought to articulate a ‘southern world’ that is distinct from both the ‘world’ of ‘world literature’ and the postcolonial ‘south’, but which is also not antithetical to either.

‘An Idea of the South’ – Anthony Uhlmann

Uhlmann’s paper responded to the question as to how we might conceptualise an idea of the south. Is it possible for such an idea to be robust and ‘universal’ in cultural terms? If so, how might such an idea look? How might it be defined? What work would it be expected to do? The paper looked at the problem in cartographical terms. It considered the idea of potential and idea of relational particularity. The work is speculative and ‘in progress’ and contributes to thinking around the issues at stake in ‘Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature’.

‘Against Network Thinking’ – Ben Etherington

This presentation critically considered the project to uncover/recover/discover so-called ‘South-South’ networks of literary and political exchange which recently has become popular. Etherington argued that this project is underwritten by the same methodological disposition that has driven what might be called ‘North-North’ literary scholarship to focus on transnational cosmopolitan literary networks. Not only does network thinking leave out determinedly local and localizing projects, but it is often incapable of seeing the implicit solidarities between those projects. Such solidarities cannot be identified by attending only to the empirically verifiable networks that may or may not connect these habitats of literary production. Rather, scholars need to employ a speculative mode of world literary interpretation. Etherington concluded by discussing the meridian lines (in Paul Celan’s sense) that run through disparate literary practices.

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MEG SAMUELSON joined the Department of English & Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide as a lecturer in 2017, after having held positions as an associate professor at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She has published widely in South African and southern African literary and cultural studies. Her current research and teaching interests include Anthropocene thought, coastal and maritime literary and cultural studies, critical theory and literary debates, Indian Ocean studies, the southern hemisphere, world literatures and women’s writing. She works primarily on literary texts, but also has projects that focus on photography and film, and other cultural forms.

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