Australian Literature in a Global World
30th  anniversary conference of the
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
. Dates:  29th  June – 2nd July 2008
. Location - University of Wollongong, Function Centre

Bronwyn Bancroft: "One Family One Earth"

ASAL 2008 Keynote Speakers

Lydia Wevers (NZ).
Title: Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture: Lydia Wevers

Biographical Note: Lydia Wevers is the Director of the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. She has taught in universities in Australia, the UK, and Europe, is a specialist on postcolonial literature, book history, literary history and travel writing, and has published widely on New Zealand and Australian literature, including two anthologies of trans Tasman fiction with Elizabeth Webby. She taught Australian literature at Victoria for six years, and is working on a book about the many crossovers of trans Tasman literatures.

Barry Andrews Address: Nicholas Jose; Introduced by Harry Heseltine
Title: Australian Literature Inside and Out

A consideration of how Australian literature is framed, or unframed, for different audiences and purposes: national or international; iconic or proudly unAustralian; loved or irrelevant. An institution regularly visited by the black swan of trespass. I'll draw on my experience as writer and teacher in the field, from Adelaide to Beijing and now Bankstown, and as editor in the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature project. At a time when contemporary Australian writing is flourishing, is there a disconnect from the literary past? Do we need a new kind of literary history to straddle this? I'll refer to the Chinese presence in Australian writing, and invoke Frank Moorhouse's call for a ‘bonafide, continuous, affined readership’ to enable a literary culture.

Keynote Speaker: Graham Huggan
Title: 'Globaloney and the Australian Writer'.

Abstract: It is now some twenty years since Peter Pierce lamented the 'dichotomising habit' of Australian literary historians, but this habit arguably persists, at least in public discussions in which the present and future of Australian literature are confidently presented from a series of often directly opposing points of view. One view, the industry equivalent to the 'gloom thesis', proposes that Australian literature is dying, and cites evidence in dwindling recruitment and enrolment numbers at Australian universities, and in the depressing number of Australian literary classics that are currently out of print. The other view, equally forthright, is that Australian literature is booming, not least because of structural changes brought about to the publishing industry by globalisation, and as evidenced in the flourishing of Australian literature in international markets, in the expansion of writers' prizes and festivals, and in the active contribution of Australian writers, both 'high-art' and popular, to ongoing discussions of Australian national culture in an increasingly mediatised public sphere. Neither of these views is strictly wrong; the main problem is how to reconcile them: how to account for the new life of Australian literature --and, by association, Australian literary studies-- in an era of globalisation and the media-driven transformation of the public sphere. The problem is exacerbated by a tendency --in Australia and elsewhere-- to make sweeping statements about globalisation: statements by no means restricted to the media, and often wilfully exaggerated or distorted in their effects. One word popularly given to these distortions is 'globaloney', breezily defined by the American political commentator Michael Veseth as a critique of the rhetoric of globalisation designed to uncover the 'vivid images, clever metaphors, and persuasive narratives' that manipulate our understanding of globalisation structures and processes that are far more complex, contradictory even, than these simplified images, metaphors and narratives suggest. Globalisation, I want to argue, also affects perceptions of Australian literature, from the baleful pronouncement that it is dying to the Panglossian assertion that things have never been so good. In this paper, I shall look at specific instances of globaloney in current arguments about the effects of globalisation on Australian literature, at least some of these emanating from a residual suspicion towards writers --especially celebrity writers-- who happen to live abroad. My basic argument will be that cultural nationalism continues, despite periodic announcements of its demise, to provide the ideological bedrock for debates about the future of Australian literature; and, more provocatively perhaps, that it continues to generate significant globaloney of its own.

Biographical Note: Graham Huggan is Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds and founding co-director of the university's cross-disciplinary Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. Previous Australian-oriented publications include Peter Carey (Oxford UP, 1996) and, most recently, Australian Literature: Postcolonialism, Racism, Transnationalism (Oxford UP, 2007). He is currently working on a book with Helen Tiffin on postcolonialism, animals and the environment.
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Keynote Speaker: Ken Gelder
Title: ‘From Demidenko to Dead Europe: Politics, Ethnicity and the Australian Literary Community’.

Abstract: This paper considers the ‘politicisation’ of contemporary Australian literature, looking at who is involved and to what end, and opening up the notion of what constitutes a ‘literary community’.  It takes The Hand That Signed the Paper and Dead Europe as its case study, tracing the debates around these novels and looking at the way readerships are fractured along political and affiliated lines. These novels are drawn into debates about anti-Semitism and multiculturalism, all in the framework of conservative perspectives about literature and culture that prevailed under the Howard government. But they also, perhaps unusually, play out a relationship between Australians and Old Europe. They are not about globalised identities at all (and they are certainly not cosmopolitan novels); instead, they are about tribalised, local identities where everyone is aggressively racialised. In this respect, they may also be a sign of the times in Howard’s Australia.

Biographical Note: Ken Gelder is Professor of English at the University of Melbourne.  His books include The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-1988 (1989, with Paul Salzman), Atomic Fiction: The Novels of David Ireland (1993), Reading the Vampire (1994), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (1998, with Jane M. Jacobs), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004) and Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007). He is currently co-editing a series of anthologies of colonial Australian popular fiction, and is co-writing a sequel to The New Diversity covering Australian fiction 1989-2007, tentatively titled After the Celebration

Keynote Address AASRN : Merlinda Bobis

Title: 'The Asian Conspiracy': Deploying Voice/Deploying Story
‘Listen, the Asians are coming!’

Writing and publishing the peripheral story and voice is a strategic and conspiratorial enterprise. For Asian-Australian writers, the major concern is entry and settlement: How to hurdle the demand for ‘the Australian story’. How to slip past the gatekeepers of stories in the industry. How to become a permanent resident in the body of Australian literature. Novelist and dramatist Merlinda Bobis examines how
Asian-Australian writers strategise through these negotiations. In both the produced story and the story of creative production, these writers deploy a niche in the subtle artery of the mainstream listener: somewhere in the crossroad of the ear, the heart and the spine.

Biographical Notes: Award-winning writer Merlinda Bobis has published novels, short stories, poems and plays. She has received the Prix Italia, the Australian Writers’ Guild Award and the Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize for ‘Rita’s Lullaby’; the Philippine National Book Award, the Judges' Choice Award (Seattle Arts Festival) and the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories for ‘White Turtle’ ('The Kissing', US ed); and the Philippine Balagtas Award, a lifetime recognition for her fiction and poetry in English, Pilipino and Bicol. Her first novel ‘Banana Heart Summer’ was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal; and her poetry collection ‘Summer Was A Fast Train Without Terminals’, for 'The Age' Poetry Book Award. Her plays have been performed in Australia, Philippines, France, China, Thailand and the Slovak Republic. As a performer for stage and radio, Merlinda works with artists from various genres. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. (Author's website: http://www.merlindabobis.com)

Keynote Panel:
‘Teaching (and researching) Australian literature overseas’.

CT Indra (India), Nicholas Birns (US), Lars Jensen (Denmark), Lydia Wevers (NZ).

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Professor CT Indra (India)
Title: The Study of Australia at the Madras University: An Overview

Biographical Note: Dr. Chidambaram Thathachari Indra severed the University of Madras, Chennai from 1976 to 2007. She was Chair, Department of English from 1995 to 2007. She introduced Australian Studies Course at the Masters level in 1998. She was instrumental in setting up the Australian Studies Resources collection in English Department along with Prof. Eugenie Pinto. In 1999 she visited Australia with AIC sponsorship. She lectured in the Universities of Sydney, Hawke Institute, South Australia and Wollongong. She took the initiative to arrange for an Australian academic to teach at the University every year through AIC, and for Asia Link’s Writer-in-Residence program. She has supervised three doctoral dissertations on Australian writings and culture. One Ph.D scholar was awarded AIC junior fellowship to work on Australian Theatre. Dr. C.T. Indra diligently promoted the performance of contemporary Australian plays through the Department’s theatre wing. She was organizing secretary of the first ever Australian Studies International Conference in 2002, in collaboration with IASA.   She was given in November 2007 Australia-India Council Special Award for outstanding partnership. Dr. Indra was also a recipient of Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellowship to Harvard University, British Council visitorship to Cambridge University, Faculty Enrichment award to Canada from Shastri Indo Canadian Institute. She has been the Director of the International Centre of Madras University since 2004.

Nicholas Birns (US)
Title: "Elusive Australia: Some Transpacific Reading Practices"

Biographical Note: Dr Nicholas Birns teaches at Eugene Lang College of the New School in New York. He is the current Secretary-Treasurer of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He has been associated with the editorial staff of Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian literature, since 1993 and has served as Editor since 2001. His book Understanding Anthony Powell was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2004. He has published in Arizona Quarterly, The Hollins Critic, and Ariel. He is co-editor of a Companion to Twentieth Century Australian Literature (Camden House, 2007). He has two further books under contract: an overview of recent literary theory and an encyclopedia of literary criticism from antiquity to the present.

Lars Jensen (Denmark)
Title: 'What Australian Studies in which Europe?' Reflections on what Australian Studies has been and may become in Europe'

Biographical Note: Lars Jensen has a Ph.D. from the School of English, University of Leeds, UK (1997), in Postcolonial Studies. He has taught at Roskilde University since 1996, and in Cultural Encounters since it opened in September 2000. He is a Board member of EASA (European Australian Studies Association) and has given papers at a number of Australian Studies and postcolonial conferences since the early 1990s. Recent publications include the book 'Unsettling Australia' from 2005, and a co-written book in Danish on Edward Said (2006). Finally, he is one of three general editors of 'A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in Continental Europe and its Empires' which contains articles written by around 150 different scholars (due out in May 2008).

Bruce Bennett (AUS)
Title: TBA
Biographical Note:TBA