This article interrogates the convergence of algorithmic colonialism and Indigenous futurism through a close reading of Claire G. Coleman's Terra Nullius and The Old Lie. Situating these novels within both Australasian and global frameworks, the study illuminates how speculative fiction critiques the entrenchment of colonial logics in artificial intelligence, data extraction, and biometric governance. Drawing on theories of data sovereignty, the CARE/FAIR principles, and comparative analyses from African and Maori contexts, the article demonstrates how Coleman's narratives unsettle Western technocratic paradigms, foregrounding Indigenous agency, refusal, and relationality. By mobilising genre innovation and narrative disruption, Coleman not only exposes the recursive violence of both historical and digital colonisation, but also proposes decolonial and abolitionist alternatives for ethical AI futures. This interdisciplinary analysis highlights the transformative potential of literary critique in advancing digital justice and reimagining the global governance of technology.
Bodies of water are not merely rhetorical devices in Jeanette Winterson's novels; they are new posthuman subject images that carry profound political and ethical connotations, directly responding to the urgent water crisis of the Anthropocene. Grounded in close reading of Sexing the Cherry, The Stone Gods, Written on the Body and other key texts, this study integrates Astrida Neimanis's theory of 'bodies of water' to challenge two interrelated yet distinct predicaments: modern water discourse reduces water to a universal and isolated abstract resource (H2O), engendering hydroschizophrenia - a cognitive fragmentation that severs water from its ecological and cultural specificity, leading to severe water resource destruction. Paralleling this, Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' embodies a philosophical rupture: it frames repetition as a sterile, non-generative cycle by severing life from its aqueous origins. Winterson subverts both paradigms by reimagining bodies of water as posthuman embodied images. Through connecting amniotic fluid with primordial evolutionary soup and revealing the abyssal qualities of the human body as a watery cyborg, Winterson endows water with gestationality, transcorporeality, and unknowability, impeling us to recognise material water as an integral part of the planetary hydrocommons we co-create. Ultimately, these figurations dismantle humanist myths of self-sufficiency and isolation, disintegrate its illusory unitary subject, and forge a relational ethic. They embody a hydrocommons 'we' - a porous, aqueous subjectivity that dissolves human/non-human binaries and extends responsibility across time and space, offering a textually grounded framework for posthuman ecocriticism and blue humanities.
The term 'poetic' is often a synonym for beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, and so on. That leads to an assumption that poetics may reveal only what is beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, or what have you about discourse - studying poems and/or *unpoems for aesthetic and other evidence of their charisma. A corollary would be that poetics cannot offer insights into uncharismatic discourse. This article asks whether the label poetic might be as much a problem as it is a commendation, having regard to discursive contexts in which a sense of heightened aesthetics may prove highly prejudicial. It brings that question to the task of closely reading the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, along with two prime ministers' speeches in response to the Statement. It shows how a widespread imposition of the poetic ideal onto the Statement's highly crafted rhetoric served to caricature and even traduce the Statement and its intentions. Australia's 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and two prime ministers' speeches in response to the Statement are well-known examples of public discourse. Closely reading them in combination demonstrates how a public utterance and its reception may be governed by a discourse-limiting idealism about the 'poetic'.
Pain is an inevitable and complex lived experience with the potential to shape our individual identities and the quality of interactions with the world. As a primary form of children's literature, picture books offer children a space to explore the experience of pain to increase understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon. How, then, is pain currently depicted in commercial children's picture books in Australia, and how might those depictions speak to current pain scholarship? This research presents comparative textual analysis of five Australian picture books regarding the representation of pain, viewed through the lens of a biopsychosocial understanding of pain. The article introduces the research problem and background, outlines the method employed, presents aspects of our textual analysis followed by the study's key findings, then raises discussion points regarding the analyses within the context of picture book theory and pain theory. The article concludes that while children have access to literature promoting pain literacy, the representation of pain is limited due the perseverance of dichotomous views of pain and recovery, and the challenges associated with expressing this complex phenomenon in verbal and visual media.
Does digital culture sound the death knell for the concentrated reading required in literary studies? Are we all too caught up in the tantalising marketplace of streaming and podcasts, clicks and likes, for the devoted attention required to read deeply? On the other hand could this diagnosis not be inverted. Could we not say that the voracious commodification of our focus that marks this digital age mandates a new purpose and raison d'etre for the discipline of English and the critical tools it imparts? Modes of attention-giving, of critical vigilance and focus, has been central to literary studies throughout its modern history. Assessing current developments in the humanities, this essay considers contemporary literary studies alongside the distraction economy. It argues that healthy attention, ultimately, is not separable as a skill or techne, but is part of an aesthetic education with judgment and evaluation and the sifting of cultural production at its heart.
In 1959, physicist and novelist C.P. Snow declared an irreconcilable rift between the 'two cultures' of the arts and sciences. In 2020, historian Nicholas Dirks declared that the two cultures still urgently needed to reconcile to solve the crisis of COVID-19. This paper argues that literary studies can play a profound role in reconnecting the cultures of the HASS and STEM disciplines. Examining the unique partnership between St George's Medical School and Birkbeck, University of London, in which academics, artists and clinicians sought radical ways to bring humanities and medical education together without reducing humanities to what Alan Bleakley calls 'edutainment' for medical education, or conversely, privileging he voice of critical theory over the real-life, complex experience of clinical practice. The modules developed in this partnership utilise literary texts, critical theory and clinical knowledge as source materials. Teaching medical/healthcare students alongside literature/creative writing students, with a transdisciplinary teaching team of clinicians and literary scholars, this partnership demonstrates that learning to think critically via literary studies enhances the capacities of both student cohorts. It evidences how literary studies develop clinical skills, and how clinical knowledge expands the conceptual understanding of the body and its representations in literature/creative writing students.
This study examines the role of literature in representing the Thai ethnic group in Vietnam, with a focus on Voung Trung's novel Moi tinh Moung Sinh. Despite Vietnam's rich cultural diversity, the Thai people face marginalisation, and their literature remains underexplored. This paper examines Moi tinh Moung Sinh (1994), the first novel in Thai literature written in Vietnamese and published in Vietnam. As the inaugural novel in Thai literary history, it holds significant cultural and literary value. This article, to the author's best knowledge, represents the first English-language study of this pivotal work. Voung Trung's storytelling illuminates Thai social dynamics and cultural practices, bridging Thai traditions with modern Vietnamese literature. His work enriches Vietnam's literary heritage while preserving and celebrating the cultural identity of the Thai ethnic group. Voung Trung's writing reflects an educational mission that, unfortunately, did not achieve its intended impact. He can thus be considered a minority voice within the majority discourse. Yet, his pioneering efforts lay the groundwork for future recognition. His legacy will certainly have resounding echoes in the, hopefully, near future, once the culture and literary Weltanschauung of the Thai people obtain the recognition they deserve.
Biographers set up an expectation, often described as a 'truth contract', with their readers to present a non-fiction account of a life. But, as Julia Novak asks, how much authorial imagination will 'contaminate' a biographic narrative and transform it into a novel? This question continues to perplex writers, publishers and readers, and is highlighted by two recent works by Australian authors who challenge definitions of biography through their style and paratextual inclusions. Anna Funder's Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life and Kiera Lindsey's Wild Love, the life of Australian colonial artist Adelaide Ironside, are marketed as biographies, yet both display fictional passages and novelistic techniques alongside referential protocols. Each author grapples with the need for imaginative incursions to recover a past life with contextual and sensory detail to engage readers in the lives of their subjects. By applying Dorrit Cohn's signposts of fictionality, this article contests the definitions of a fact/fiction binary in evaluating biographical narratives.
The question of fiction's cognitive affordance and of its instrumentality is now being reframed into a larger scope - that of Literary Studies in relation to well-being the beleaguered Literary Studies now have to account for their utility in a society which can no longer afford the cultivation of reading fiction just for a sense of ethical elevation or a broadening of the mind. As a mind-developing agency, literature and more largely literary studies - with their emphasis on high order cognitive skills and clear demarcation of disciplinary boundaries which trace the realm of literary aesthetics - are gradually giving up their distinctiveness, insularity, as well as unalloyed essence, in order to connect with other communities. By intersecting with interdisciplinary studies, literary studies are re-inventing themselves through new labels such as Cognitive Literary Studies, the Health Humanities, and the Positive Humanities. By doing so, not only are they adapting to their new environment (as evolutionary theory would have it), but they are also coming closer to revealing in a quasi-scientific way what they have intuitively been suspecting all along: that literature, health-wise, has a meliorative power on readers and therefore contributes to human flourishing.
This special issue introduction outlines the risks and opportunities for literary scholars as they negotiate the transdisciplinary imperative currently facing the discipline. Since its entry into the modern academy, literary studies has been punctuated by numerous 'turns' that suggest an interdisciplinary bearing that has often gone unrecognised. The current prediction of a transdisciplinary future for the discipline is addressed in terms of this overlooked potential and as an imperative bearing down not just on literary studies or the humanities but all academic disciplines, as disruptions in health care, the attention economy, and AI illustrate. A brief defence of the hermeneutic idea of concepts as frameworks to inhabit rather than as tools to apply to a chosen problem is offered in the context of the professionalisation of knowledge in the modern academy that has long favoured the information sciences over the interpretive sciences. The interdisciplinary value of literary training and aesthetic education is advanced across the issue in the fields of medical humanities, positive humanities, attention studies, and in projects like sustainability discourse and decolonising the curriculum.
Human critical and creative practices are increasingly enmeshed in nonhuman technologies, raising challenges for our disciplines in the context of machine-centred futures that encompass what I term here spectraltech, technological and digital capacities that feature seemingly superhuman and supernatural capabilities that haunt, double and mirror actual human capacities. As the humanities disciplines shift increasingly into a posthumanities space, literary studies is both threatened and yet well-equipped. As the authors of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (2017) illustrate, literature from every era, dating back to antiquity, has imagined human intersections with the non-human, with supernatural power, and with the creative possibilities, limits and risks in these spaces of encounter. At the same time, theorists such as Martha Nussbaum have highlighted the centrality of the humanities in fostering critical thinking, capacities for debate and critique, developing empathy, political citizenship and maintaining democracies - skills vital for speaking back to machines and systems. This article argues that in early modern literature, several of the key texts - created in a context where the supernatural was inherently part of imagining the human condition - anticipate and provide ways for thinking through the challenges of spectraltech in the twenty-first century.
In this paper, I recommend my recent efforts to Indigenise a Law and Literature subject at Western Sydney University on the counter-intuitive basis of my limited knowledge of decolonisation theory. The teacher and scholar must meet organisational imperatives (like Indigenising curricula and decolonising literary pedagogy) where they stand, which in my case was on non-specialist ground. My approach was not guided by the templates of standpoint and critical race theory but the hermeneutic principles and evaluative techniques that underwrite literary and legal studies, which I extended to a selection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous literary texts in a mostly post-Mabo setting. My approach worked with a model of transculturality rather than total decolonisation and aimed at thinking though the implications of Indigenizing course materials and the conflicts that emerged between the competing hierarchies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural, legal, and literary practices. I conclude by emphasising the importance of pursuing the implications of Indigenizing course materials across the customary separation of topics in discrete modules.
This article positions the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their adoption by universities as guiding principles within the context of the employability discourse. Through a decolonial analysis of the language of key SDGs, this article investigates the potential impacts of the SDGs on university literary studies. We argue that while the SDGs have undoubtedly broadened the discourse beyond the bluntness of employability in a manner that can empower HASS subjects, they also echo the neoliberal approach to university education evidenced by employability. We conclude that despite their neoliberal and colonial origins, the SDGs present a unique opportunity for literary studies to contribute to anti-liberal and decolonial efforts.
The Australian poet John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942), an impoverished itinerant labourer who rarely had a stable dwelling during his lifetime, is memorialised through a 'birthplace cottage' which was moved from Penola across the state border to Nhill in 1961. The relocation of heritage buildings, often involving deconstruction, rebuilding and a change of setting, inevitably reduces heritage value and precludes it from official listing. The current structure now standing in Nhill might be seen as an assemblage that has been remixed and altered over time rather than an 'authentic' heritage building. Instead the cottage can be encountered as a kind of 'stage set' for imagining Shaw Neilson's impoverished childhood, conditions that were borne by many working people of the late nineteenth century. In this article I explore the meanings of the cottage, arguing that it can be read as an artefact of Nhill's 'pioneering' settler colonial past and a celebration of a peripatetic poet, at a time when such memorialisations are being challenged.
This paper explores the dynamic and fluid nature of travelling memory, a concept by Astrid Erll, in Memories of Rain and Queen of Dreams. It aims to understand the transitional aspects of memory and temporality within migration narratives, and how these elements shape the psyche and identity of individuals and communities that have migrated, particularly from a South Asian perspective. Through a comparative reading of these works by Indian authors, this paper highlights the notion of the 'spatialisation of memory,' as termed by Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga, which is essential for understanding 'spatial remembering' in memory narrativisation. The analysis investigates key elements of diasporic memory in both novels, placing the Indian diaspora in the US and UK within the contemporary European 'time novel' narrative. This paper examines the similarities and differences regarding the concepts of 'travelling memory,' 'postmemory' and 'transnational memory,' alongside Ricoeur's ideas of temporality and Winders' postmodern 'narratime.' While the concept of transgenerational memory or postmemory has been applied to Queen of Dreams, Memories of Rain is discussed in the context of transcultural memory. This article studies various mnemonic experiences from both transnational and temporal viewpoints. Additionally, it analyses how Gupta and Divakaruni employ stream-of-consciousness and magical realism, respectively.
American Chinatown has been a complex and paradoxical economic, social, and cultural space. In the writings of Frank Chin, Fae Myenne Ng, and Charles Yu, Chinatown is depicted as a bounded community that elicits either a desire for escape or a nostalgic longing for return among Chinese Americans. However, since its establishment, the geographical boundaries of Chinatown have gradually dissolved, evolving from an ethnic enclave to an ethnoburb and eventually to a cultural community. This paper examines how literary representations have reinforced conceptions of Chinatown's boundaries across different historical periods, often at odds with observed social realities. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue between literary studies and social science, this paper unravels the 'mystery' of American Chinatown, arguing that 'real' American Chinatown has transformed from a primarily physical space into a cultural symbol. It aims to illuminate the ongoing negotiation of Chinese American identity and to underscore the enduring cultural significance of American Chinatown for both Chinese American communities and contemporary American society.
This paper understands the exportation of book translations across borders as embedded in the uneven power relations between languages and nation-states. It uses actor-network theory (ANT) as an analytical tool to explore the actors involved in bringing a Chinese contemporary children's novel - Bronze and Sunflower (by Cao Wenxuan) - to Anglo-American markets, and how they interacted to facilitate its foreign publication. As presented by this case, the book's transnational travelling can be understood as forming an actor-network, in which various human (such as rights managers, sub-agents and translators) and non-human actors (such as French language and subsidies) are involved and work together. Due to the dominance of English in the international market of book translations, this actor-network which enable a book's transnational transfer expanded after its publication in Anglo-American markets, and the English language itself turned to be a vital non-human actor who facilitated its continuing transfer.
