ASAL Barry Andrews Keynote
Nardi Simpson, Yuwaalaraay musician and writer
Details to come
ASAL ECR Keynote
Dr Emily Zong, Hong Kong Baptist University
Toward Refugee Thick Mobility: More-than-Human Emergence at Oceanic Borderlands
In this talk, I will consider literary imaginations of refugee ecology across Australia’s oceanic borderlands in the context of extinction. Public policy and media tends to totalize asylum seekers into abstract figures of security threat, faceless mass, or humanitarian rescue. While dominant bio-and-necropolitical frameworks offer important insights into studying hierarchies of life and human to counter sovereign erasure, such approaches also reinforce anthropocentric structures of life, foreclosing ecological modes of refugee political mobility.
In response, I suggest a framework of refugee thick mobility can account for entangled, contingent, and more-than-human emergence. Recent refugee literature and cinema invite ways of reading displaced humans and nonhumans together, illuminating the overlap of oceanic ecologies, species migration, extractive capitalism, and biopolitical geographies. Through more-than-human crossings, a bioregional and eco-social account reimagines oceanic borderlands as emergent sites of body-place encounters against the territorial claims and telos of sovereign Australia.
Emily Yu Zong is an assistant professor at the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her work intersects migrant and refugee writing and the environmental humanities and has appeared in Critique, ARIEL, ISLE, LIT, JASAL, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Journal of Intercultural Studies, The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, among other venues.
ASAL Dorothy Green Keynote
Associate Professor Mandy Treagus, University of Adelaide
Recentering water: thinking with aqueous forms in recent writing
How might we think of water as region? What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this paper will consider examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Using methodologies employing ‘blue focalizations’ (Samuelson), I will think with writings by John Kinsella, Natalie Harkin, Tony Birch, Melissa Lucashenko, and Christos Tsiolkas, exploring aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I will consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.
Mandy Treagus is of Welsh, Scottish and Cornish descent, and lives on the unceded lands of the Peramangk and Kaurna peoples in South Australia. She is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches literature, culture, and visual studies, with interests in critical race and whiteness, gender and sexuality. She researches Pacific, Victorian and Australian literature and culture and her publications include Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age, and the co-edited collections Changing the Victorian Subject and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter.
ASLEC-ANZ Keynote Roundtable
Details to come