Recent Publications

2010

The Unsociable Sociability of Women's Lifewriting, edited by Anne Collett and Louise D'Arcens, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, UK (pub date Oct 31, 2010)

When Christine de Pizan described herself in 1405 as ‘femme a part’, she expressed a divided sense of identity that has echoed throughout women’s lifewriting up to the present day. In these three words Christine captures the uneasy relationship between the female self that is a part of communities and the self that stands apart from them. Christine anticipates Kant’s concept of unsociable sociability in which an inclination to associate with others weighs against a strong propensity to isolate oneself from others. It is this complex sense of self – seeking to belong yet yearning for solitude and distinction – that is at the heart of this volume’s exploration of women’s lifewriting. With its cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective, the volume makes a distinctive contribution to current debates on women’s lifewriting. Its emphasis on unsociable sociability offers a timely, provocative response to the established notion of the female self as a relational subject. 

Anne Collett has published widely in the field of postcolonial women’s writing, with a focus on Australia, Canada and the Caribbean. She is editor of Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture, and teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s writing in the English Literatures Program, University of Wollongong, Australia. 

Louise D’Arcens has published numerous chapters and articles on medieval women’s writing and is co-editor of Maistresse of My Wit: MedievalWomen, Modern Scholarship (2004). Her other research interest is in Australian medievalism. She teaches medieval and modern literature in the English Literatures Program, University of Wollongong, Australia.

 

The Extended Mind. Cambridge Mass, MIT Press/Bradford Books, Edited by Richard Menary, June 2010

ABC National radio talk with John Sutton and Alan Saunders at: 
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/3025314.htm

Publishers website:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12136

 

 

Cultural Citizenship and the Challenges of Globalization, Edited by Wenche Ommundsen, Michael Leach and Andrew Vandenberg, June 2010.

Citizenship, culture and globalization, as recent history demonstrates, can be an explosive mix, with the capacity to unsettle not only traditional modes of belonging, but also established ways of thinking about being and belonging. Destabilizing boundaries between culture and state, self and other, sameness and difference, cultural citizenship in the global era brings out tensions between individual and group rights, between human and cultural rights, between principles of universalism and respect for cultural difference, and between the authority of the state, the rule of international law, and the seemingly lawless operations of transnational capital.

From a range of disciplinary perspectives, the essays in this book engage with the challenges posed by globalization to notions of civic, social and cultural belonging, with the transformative nature of global forces, and with the tensions and contradictions that arise out of the simultaneous pull of cultural homogenization and push for cultural differentiation.

Publishers website:
http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=973-1-57273-925-3

 

2009

Traditional Knowledge, Traditional Cultrual Expressions and Intellectal Property Law in the Asia-Pacific region, Edited by Christoph Antons, 2009

Publishers website: 
http://www.kluwerlaw.com/catalogue/titleinfo.htm?ProdID=9041127216

 

 

 

‘Japanese Transnational Fandoms and Female Consumers,’ issue 20 of Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, April 2009, http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue20_contents.htm

The papers in this collection do not seek to provide an answer as to whether or not there is a distinct 'Japanese value system' underlying the export of Japanese cute culture. Instead, each paper articulates the different ways in which cute and other aesthetics deriving from Japan are being taken up and deployed in the context of specific communities of production and consumption, among so-called 'prosumers,' in Asia, the US, Europe and Australia. Particularly striking in this collection is the power and inventiveness of female consumers who take up a range of products and aesthetics associated with 'Japan' in an attempt to play with identities and refashion and critique existing sex and gender relations.

 

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