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In April 2019, a group of seventeen writers from nations across the Southern hemisphere convened for an intensive three-day workshop Writing from the South: Writers in Conversation. This event, led by Gail Jones and John Coetzee, was the main event of the project’s Southern Encounters theme. The writers considered a range of topics. These included: what it means to be a writer in the  southern hemisphere? What is the role of cultural metropoles of the North in the life of writers from the South? Does one’s place of birth or residence has formative role in one’s psychic makeup? How important it is that one’s writing be distributed and read in the North? What is lost or gained in writing in ‘world’ languages like English and Spanish? Are we obliged to represent our own worlds? Is ‘Southern’ writing transcultural writing?

The first two days of the event concluded with public literary readings in the evenings.

Public Literary Readings 1: Wednesday 10 April 2019

Brian Castro, Stuart Cooke, Ceridwen Dovey, Gail Jones, Tina Makereti, Anna Kazumi Stahl, Anthony Uhlmann, Marlene van Niekerk

Public Literary Readings 2: Thursday 11 April 2019

Kim Scott, Yewande Omotoso, Pedro Mairal, Nicholas Jose, Eva Hornung, James Halford, Martin Edmond, Mariana Dimópulos, John Coetzee. 

Event Output: James Halford: ‘Southern Conversations 2: Writing the South of Sydney’, Sydney Review of Books, 25 February 2020.

Biographies

Brian Castro is the author of eleven novels, a volume of essays and a poetic cookbook. His novels include the multi award-winning Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing. He was the 2014 winner of the Patrick White Award for Literature and the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry. (image: Annette Willis)

J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. He has published sixteen works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. Among awards he has won are the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

Stuart Cooke is a poet, scholar and translator based on  the Gold Coast, where he is a senior lecturer in creative writing and  literary studies at Griffith University. His books include the poetry  collections Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2011), and the critical work, Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a theory for Australian-Chilean postcolonial poetics (2013). His translation of Gianni Siccardi’s The Blackbird was published last year.

Ceridwen Dovey’s debut novel, Blood Kin, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award and selected for the U.S. National Book Foundation’s prestigious ‘5 Under 35’ honours list. The Wall Street Journal named her as one of their ‘artists to watch’. Her second book, Only the Animals, won the inaugural 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. Her new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives, was published in 2018, and her short non-fiction book, Writers on Writers: On J.M Coetzee has recently been published as part of Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series.

Mariana Dimópulos is an Argentinian writer and translator. She has published three novels, many short stories and recently an essay on the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. As a cultural journalist, she contributes to the feuilleton of the most popular newspaper in Argentina. At the University of Buenos Aires she is a lecturer on Translation Theory. She has translated Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Musil and J. M. Coetzee, among others.

Martin Edmond was born in Ōhākune, New Zealand and now lives in Sydney. He has worked as an actor and stage manager, lighting designer and as a screenwriter. His books include Luca Antara: passages in search of Australia (ESP, 2006); Dark Night: walking with McCahon (AUP, 2011), and Battarbee and Namatjira (Giramondo, 2014). He is a past winner of the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-fiction. His most recent book is Isinglass (UWAP, 2019).

James Halford is a writer from Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (UWAP 2019), a Latin America travel memoir. The recipient of a 2016 Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellowship, his critical writing focuses on comparative approaches to contemporary Australian and Latin American literature. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and has also studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico and Spain.

Eva Hornung’s most recent novels are DogBoy and The Last Garden. DogBoy won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2010 and has been published in 17 languages worldwide. The Last Garden won the Festival Award for Fiction, the SA Premier’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2018. She is, among other things, a farmer in country SA.

Gail Jones is the author of two short-story collections, a critical monograph, and the novels Black Mirror, Sixty Lights, Dreams of Speaking, Sorry, Five Bells, A Guide to Berlin and The Death of Noah Glass. Her fiction has won many literary awards, including the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award, and has been translated into nine languages.

Nicholas Jose has published seven novels, including Paper Nautilus (1987), The Red Thread (2000) and Original Face (2005), three collections of short stories, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (a memoir), and essays, mostly on Australian and Asian culture.  He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing, 1987-90 and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide, and Adjunct Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University.

Pedro Mairal is an Argentinian novelist, travel writer, poet and screenwriter whose work has been translated and published across five continents. He has authored a collection of short fiction, three volumes of poetry, a collection of newspaper columns and five novels, including El gran surubi, which is composed entirely of sonnets, and The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra.

Tina Makereti writes essays, novels and short fiction. Her latest novel is The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and she co-edited Black Marks on the White Page (2017), an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. Her first novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings won the 2014 Ngā Kupu Ora Aotearoa Māori Book Award for Fiction. Tina teaches creative writing and Oceanic literatures at Massey University. Her collection of personal essays, This Compulsion in Us, will be published early 2020.

Yewande Omotoso is an architect, with a masters in creative writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel Bomboy (2011 Modjaji Books), won the South African Literary Award First Time Author Prize and was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. Yewande’s second novel The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus) was published in May 2016. It was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Aidoo-Snyder Prize, the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize, and the UJ Literary Prize.

Kim Scott’s most recent novel is Taboo (Picador, 2017).  Proud to call himself Noongar, Kim is also founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project (www.wirlomin.com.au). He is Professor of Writing in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. (image: Janine Boreland)

Anna Kazumi Stahl is a fiction writer based in Argentina. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on transnational (East-West) identities in South American, U.S. and German literatures. Her current research explores South-South and East Asian-South American transnational cultural expressions in literature and visual media.

Anthony Uhlmann is Director of 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.

Marlene van Niekerk was the first South African author to be shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and is best known for her award-winning novels Triomf and The Way of Women.

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Chamoiseau has been an important source of inspiration for Wright for many years and their collaboration offers an opportunity to think about the ways in which the worlds of Caribbean and indigenous Australian writing resonate and intersect with each other. They will be speaking publically together at a keynote roundtable of the conference Caribbean Meridians at Western Sydney University (February 7-9, 2019) as well as a public reading and discussion in the Sydney CBD (details TBA).

To register your interest in attending these sessions, please email aacsconf2019(at)gmail.com

For further details about Caribbean Meridians, including the call for papers please visit: /caribbean-meridians/

Proposals for presentations at the conference are due September 30.

Patrick Chamoiseau is the author of Prix Goncourt winning novel Texaco, as well as Solibo Magnificent, Creole Folktales and Slave Old Man, among other many other literary and autobiographical works. He is also an intellectual leader in the Caribbean and Francophone world. He is especially well-known for his work with the Creolité movement, whose Éloge de la créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant, is considered a landmark in the intellectual history of the Caribbean. His latest book, Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity, is an essay on the contemporary global refugee crisis that calls for a ‘global politics of hospitality’. He lives in Martinique.

Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the Gulf of Carpentaria. She is the author of the novels The Swan Book winner of the ASAL Gold Medal, and Carpentaria, which won five national literary awards in 2007, including the Miles Franklin Award. Her first novel Plains of Promise was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize.  Her other books are Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in Tennant Creek, the short story collection Le Pacte de Serpent, Take Power, a collection of essays and stories celebrating twenty years of land rights in Central Australia, and Tracker, stories of the Aboriginal visionary leader Tracker Tilmouth (which won the 2018 Stella Award). She has written widely on Indigenous rights, and organised two successful Indigenous Constitutional Conventions, ‘Today We Talk About Tomorrow’ (1993), and the Kalkaringi Convention (1998).

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An exploration of relations (and relationality) between literary communities, writers, and literary practices of the ‘South’, or the countries of southern latitudes (i.e. Southern Africa, Australia, the Pacific, and South America)

Female Orphan School, Western Sydney University

ABSTRACTS

Working with the Humedal Antiñir: Ethnographic, Transcultural Poetics in Southern Chile – Stuart Cooke

In this presentation I will introduce a wetland on the outskirts of Puerto Montt, Chile, as a site for transcultural poetic encounter. Working in collaboration with acclaimed Mapuche-Huilliche poet and activist Paulo Huirimilla, I am detailing the ecological and cultural importance of the Humedal Antiñir and its potency as a site for story and poetry. In my presentation I will describe the Humedal as a site of shared, indigenous and non-indigenous enquiry and will propose, on the basis of insights drawn from this enquiry, some new approaches to site-specific research. I will also provide an introduction to Huirimilla’s poetics, and will contextualise his thought in terms of some ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ theory.

Through creative practice (a series of poems authored by Huirimilla and myself), translation (between English, Mapudungun and Spanish), literary analysis and fieldwork, including interviews with Huirimilla, Mapuche elders and local scientists and archaeologists, Huirmilla and I are hoping to evoke something of the transcultural complexity of the Humedal. We argue that open, exploratory poetic forms are necessary to account for the complexity of knowledges at play. Importantly, our methods are not directed ‘inwards’ in order to explore our interiorities, nor do they seek to describe, in static, timeless details, the features of an inanimate, uninhabited natural landscape.

In sum, our research is interested in the following questions, which I will attempt to answer during the course of the presentation:

a) why is the Humedal a fecund site for poetry?
b) what is a decolonial, ethnographic poetics?
c) how might such knowledge ‘move’ transculturally, or be translated for non-Huilliche and/or international readers?

The Aesthetics and Ethics of the Mesh in Kwaymullina’s tribe trilogy – Muzigirwa Munganga

The indigenous people of the settler colonies of the South are often doubly othered, thought of as belonging to prehistoric, pre-technological societies and relegated to the lowest positions in these countries. Yet indigenous responses to pressing global issues, as expressed through science fiction thought of as a literature of ideas, I argue, can help us to think about how to confront the challenges of a world facing an unprecedented ecological crisis. This paper will focus on the ecological thought and the idea of interconnectedness among human and nonhuman beings (the ‘mesh’) in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s tribe trilogy. It will discuss the narrative strategies used to foreground the mesh, the specific ensuing local and translocal epistemic issues and how the texts construct a specific readership which is enabled to make sense of the mesh through different cognitive processes and thus responds to the narratives’ aesthetic, emotive, ethical, and political invitations.

Against “the South”: Literary Relation and the Grounds of Comparison – Alys Moody

J. M. Coetzee’s attempt to evolve a framework for analysing the literature of “the South” has evolved primarily through a consideration of white settler colonial writing from South Africa, Australia, and Argentina. While—as the other papers in this session demonstrate—there is ample scope for connections along southern lines that unsettle the settler colonial frame of this concept, this paper is interested in interrogating the framework itself. What are the limits of taking such a large-scale geographical concept as the southern hemisphere as a framework for analysing cultural formations? What other lines of literary relationality does such a framework cut through or preclude? And is it productive to recuperate a framework designed for comparative work across settler colonial populations, in order to examine these colonies’ indigenous peoples? Such questions raise issues about how we establish grounds for comparison, and about what the political, as well as intellectual and aesthetic, stakes of such comparisons may be.

BIOGRAPHIES

Stuart Cooke is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Griffith University. His books include George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: a West Kimberley Song Cycle (2014), Speaking the Earth’s Languages: a Theory for Australian-Chilean Postcolonial Poetics (2013), and the poetry collections Opera (2016) and Edge Music (2011). His translation of Gianni Siccardi’s The Blackbird (from Argentina) is forthcoming with Vagabond Press.

Alys Moody is a Lecturer in English at Macquarie University. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism, forthcoming with Oxford University Press later this year and, with Stephen J. Ross, is the editor of an anthology of source texts for global modernism, scheduled for publication with Bloomsbury in 2019.

Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga is a Congolese (from D.R. Congo) Scientia PhD student in English literary studies at UNSW. He holds an MA in Literary Stylistics from the University of Birmingham (UK), where he wrote a thesis on relevance theory and narrative suspense under the supervision of Michael Toolan. His research interests span literary stylistics, literary theory and criticism, narrative analysis in fiction and film, (post)modernist and contemporary literature and theory, especially the interdisciplinary areas of ecocriticism in recent fiction.

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