Abstracts Global Is at Ion Post Colonial Writing

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts
Globalisation And Postcolonial Writing: An Australia-India Exchange - Abstracts of Papers (Monash University)
Bill Ashcroft: 'The Post-colonial Transformation of Globalization Discourse'
Both 'post-colonialism' and 'globalism' have had a meteoric rise since the 1980's, and because they have emerged from different branches of the social sciences they often appear to be incompatible ways of conceiving world culture. In some respects they are. Post-colonialism, unlike some forms of globalism, does not claim to be a grand theory. Rather than a homogenizing discourse it is a way of talking about the discursive strategies of colonized societies in a way that establishes alliances and comparisons. The remarkable fact is that the language to describe the heterogeneity of globalization, what we might call its 'cultural turn' around the end of the twentieth century, has come directly from post-colonial studies. Since the intensification of globalism studies in the 1990s contemporary theories of globalization have been marked by the strategic deployment of post-colonial theory. What makes post-colonial theory so useful is that it has developed a language for questioning the imperial cartography that has defined global relations since the early modern period. This language needed to be adopted because by the 1990s globalization could no longer be explained in terms of traditional social science models. This transformation of global discourse demonstrates one way among many in which globalization itself has been directed by the post-colonial. When we ask what agency former colonies like Australia and India might have in a globalized world we may see that, ironically, in discursive terms , the impact of postcolonial countries can extend beyond, and be very different from, the actions of their respective national governments. Neither globalization nor colonization have impacted in the same way, the same degree, nor with equivalent political results, upon different communities. But post-colonial literary studies show us that the local community need not be impotent in this engagement, that the colonized, whether in India or Australia, may transform imperial discourse by a process of active interpolation. In this way literary studies offers a political contribution to the engagement of local
communities with global culture. It is in the transformative strategies of postcolonial discourse that the global significance of post-coloniality may be realised.
Clare Bradford: 'Negotiating Identity: Refugee Narratives for Children and Young Adults'
The instabilities and conflicts of world politics have produced vast refugee populations whose traditions and practices have been radically destabilised by war, poverty, and forced migration. In the large and growing body of children's and Young Adult texts which thematise the experience of child refugees, young characters are represented as engaged in identity formation within settings such as refugee camps, border regions between nations, and militia groups. This paper considers the extent to which refugee narratives construct child protagonists, as the Convention on the Rights of the Child would have it, as 'agents of social transformation'. In particular, it explores tensions in such narratives between rights-based discourses and the socialising agendas of children's literature, which has traditionally favoured humanist paradigms privileging individuation and progress from childhood to adulthood. The focus texts will include Deborah Ellis's Parvana's Journey (2002), Michele Maria Surat's Angel Child, Dragon Child (1989) and Ben Mikaelsen's Tree Girl (2004).
Ruth Brimacombe: Portly Prince / Splendid Rajah: Albert Edward and the Aesthetics of Indian Royalty.
The Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) in 1875-6 made what was then described as a Royal Progress around India. During his visit, the Prince made several grand state entries, processing on the back of a gorgeously caparisoned elephant in the style of a Mughal Emperor. The "royal entry" is a standard ceremonial feature of Royal Progress in the European tradition, but as Clifford Geertz established it is also a form of royal ritual found in many other cultures. The artists who accompanied the Prince on his travels captured many alluring images of these events, among them William Simpson, working for the Illustrated London News, and Sydney Prior Hall, who travelled as the royal artist. The Russian artist Vassili Veretschagin subsequently painted the grandiose The State entry of King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, into Jaipur in 1876, still hanging in the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. This paper will draw upon European and Indian artistic precedents to show how these representations of "Royal Entry" fit within a global tradition that has cultural resonance for both an Indian and English audience. Using Geertz's discussion of the mystical charisma of the royal person as a starting point, it will explore how these illustrations manifest the transcendent appeal of royal ritual, and their
impact. These splendid processions visually associated Albert-Edward with Mughal and Rajput predecessors, and ultimately this paper will enquire whether the resulting images record the successful personification of the Prince as "Shah-zadah" or if they simply document a classic case of imperial mimicry.
David Carter: 'From Textual Politics to Cultural history: Australian Literary Studies "after" Postcolonialism'
This paper examines emerging trends in Australian literary (and cultural) studies in their intellectual and institutional contexts. It describes the institutional 'discontinuities' of literary studies in the Australian academy, characteristics which have led to a distinctive shaping of poststructuralist theories and academic practice. In intellectual terms it pursues the emergence of new modes of cultural history ('after' textual politics), the central role played by Indigenous and race issues ('after' cultural nationalism), and the work on modernity and cosmopolitanism ('after' postcolonialism).
Terry Collits: 'Representing Chinamen: Problems Facing the Idea of a Postcolonial Conrad'
Of all canonical authors, Conrad seems the most available for postcolonial rereading. Yet two problems have dogged attempts to read Conrad 'from the perspective of the (postcolonial) other': where he 'stands on the spectrum of political attitudes to European imperialism and the uneasy feeling that his representations of non-Europeans are marred by racist discourse. At one level, Conrad is clearly not as a 'racist' but a committed anti-racist. His earliest 'Malay' fictions present a multiracial array of characters 'even-handedly', affirming the common humanity they share with Europeans. The limits of liberalhumanist fairness and realist representation were tested when Conrad broke with both in the radical experimentation of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. That 'break' eventually exposed his fictions to charges of orientalist bias and even racism. This paper addresses those political, moral and aesthetic questions by focusing on one particular group: the 'overseas' Chinese characters in novels such as Typhoon and Victory. It re-examines Conrad's journey from the shoals of liberalminded decency and political correctness into the dangerous waters of racial otherness. Above all it addresses the political and aesthetic problems that the representation of Asian characters presents for English-language fiction.
Phillip Darby and Marcia Langton: 'Reimaging Security from the Everyday'
This panel will discuss the need for rethinking security and its constituent practices, drawing on postcolonial theory and everyday life experiences.Taking account of the globalisation of neo-liberalism and the impact of 9/11, we will argue that there has been a narrowing of the zone of the political.It is therefore necessary to look for politics in new places and different guises.Hence we turn to the everyday and the creative arts: to the knowledges of ordinary people, to the role of performance in re-making collective senses of place and identity, to the possibilities of collaborative modes of research generating new strategies of action.By working along these lines, we will canvas how a new lexicon of security might be brought into being.We will flesh out our arguments by reference to the struggles of Australia's Indigenous peoples. This project goes forward under the aegis of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne.Planning is in progress to develop collaborative engagements in India, and more generally in South and Southeast Asia.
Nilanjana Deb: 'Curry, Mod Oz Style: South AsianAustralian Identities and the Imaginary Homeland'
Within the field of postcolonial literary studies, diasporic writing requires different frameworks of interpretation as opposed to 'rooted' literatures, because of its specific nature. The politics of multiculturalism, both state-managed as well as personal, the immigration policy histories of states, as well as the reasons for immigration of various diasporas demand a closer study. I examine the key themes in the work of Chandani Lokuge and Adib Khan, authors whose works have gone a long way in establishing the importance of South Asian Australian writing in the last decade. Both authors write about homelands that have been subjected to the pressures of partition politics and displacement. The Calcutta that Khan writes about exists in counterpoint to Dhaka, both capitals of a Bengal divided by the violence of communal politics in 1947. The homeland is re-membered, not by exoticising it for a 'Western' readership, but through a heightening and fragmenting of the past. The Bengal to which Adib Khan's characters return and the Sri Lanka that haunts Manthri in Australiain If the Moon Smiled are recreated in strange and sublime ways. Remembered urban and rural locations exist as distinct and very different topoi in the writing of both Khan and Lokuge.
It is interesting to scrutinize the role of religion in much of emerging South Asian diasporic writing. In A Solitude of Illusions, the characters are shaped by their ethnic-linguistic-religious conditioning. Adib Khan's imagined/remembered Calcuttais concentrated in Park Circus and Tangra,'safe' areas for Calcutta's Muslim population in a city that lives with the distant memory of the violence of 1947. Religion shapes the sensibility of Manthri in If the Moon Smiled as well, from her childhood training to her final despair at the inability of her Buddhist texts to give an answer to her predicament in an alien land. Religion shapes not just the sensibility of characters but the aesthetics of the novel as well something that we see in the choice of events, colours and symbols by both Lokuge and Khan. My paper attempts to re-examine the dilemmas and issues that the 'carriers of dual histories' in these novels face in their attempt to negotiate two worlds, both 'rich and strange' to their consciousness.
Alan Dilnot: 'Dickens and Empire: India andAustralia'

Dickens's presentations of Indiaand Australia are in many ways very comparable.In both cases the nomenclature was loose: 'India' included Ceylon and Burma, 'Australia' was more frequently called 'New South Wales', but at times included New Zealand.Yet these were inexact concepts that excited deep interest in Dickens.In his journals Household Words and All the Year Round there are more than 50 articles on India and more than 50 on Australia, usually not written by Dickens, but certainly commissioned and closely edited by him.In these articles and in speeches and letters he shows that he had strong views on what these places could mean to Britain and on what Britain could mean to them.Occasionally he was sternly critical of the home government's policy.That they ought to become an important part of Britain's future is also indicated by him sending out his sons, with Walter going to India (and soon dying there), and Alfred and Edward to Australia. (For good measure he sent Francis to Canada). Of most relevance to us, however, is the use he makes of India and Australia in his fiction, for it is there that we can find differences as well as similarities in the two treatments.In both cases evidence is found mainly in two novels.India is represented by Dombey and Son, with Major Bagstock (Indian Army, retired) and his "native" servant, and much more importantly by The Mystery of Edwin Drood, where two characters, Neville and Helena Landless, are from Ceylon, and where much of the novel's imagery and symbolism is drawn from the subcontinent.Australiais mentioned frequently in the two first-person narrative novels, David Copperfield and Great Expectations.In the first a fair number of the novel's characters migrate to Australia; in the second, two major characters, Magwitch and Compeyson, return to England from Australiaand could be said to drive the plot.
Ultimately, the major difference in the fiction is this: "India" is the realm of violence and passion; "Australia" isBritain's secret mirror.
Debra Dudek: Flee[t]ing Freedom: Refugee Narratives by and for Children

Global ideas about multiculturalism organise around notions of tolerance and freedom, and, in Australia, these ideas are tested most explicitly when applied to the rights of refugees.Perhaps nowhere is the federal government under more pressure to defend its mandatory detention policy than in cases where children are detained.On 17 June 2005, Prime Minister John Howard announced changes to the system for families in detention and on28 July 2005, the Australian federal government announced that the 42 children currently imprisoned in Australia's immigration detention centres would be released by the end of the week.On29 July 2005, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said, 'It's an opportunity for people to be out of the detention centre environment, [but] people won't be able to behave as though they are free as a bird.'Ironically, in David Miller's picture book Refugees (2004), which, I argue, is a story that advocates imprisonment and relocation of refugees, birds again surface as a metaphor for refugees.In this paper, I examine the tension between Miller's picture book and letters by children written while they were in detention centres and published in From Nothing to Zero(2003) and argue that by reading the image of the bird as a signifier of both freedom and captivity, it becomes apparent that freedom here operates as flight rather than liberation.Australia, then, as a country that refugees initially imagine as a place in which they will be free becomes another place in which they flee.
Wendy Garden: 'Colonial/post-colonial: The Photographic Studio and the Politics of Selfrepresentation'
The space of the portrait studio has, from the onset, been one of performance a theatrical space replete with painted backdrops, curtains and props where participants knowingly posed in stances that referenced iconographies of power and prestige. In nineteenth century British India, Indian elites used photography to generate images of themselves as potent subjects within colonialism. Much more complex than mere mimicry, the space of the portrait studio was used to generate images that explored identities employing a complex rhetoric of visual signifiers informed by western art history and Indian iconographies of power. These portraits both contested British stereotypes and claimed subjectivities within a visual language the British could understand.
The space of the studio portrait, in many ways, remains little changed today.While some of the visual signifiers employed in the nineteenth century have vanished, an understanding persists of how the space of the studio operates in creating idealised images of self.This paper explores the legacy of nineteenth century portrait photographs in the construction of contemporary portrait images.It asks how this photographic space has been deployed in the aftermath of colonialism to articulate contemporary Indian subjectivities.
Sally Gardner: 'Listening and Dancing: Odissi across Cultures'

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young BengaliAustralian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.' Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices. I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasitraditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge. In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the
subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.
Peter Goldsworthy: 'The Ocean that Unites Us, The Froth that Divides Us:Thoughts on Biology And Culture'
Literary forms -poetry,lyric, story, metaphor - arose in our evolving, pre-literate brainsprimarily as methods of rememberingand storing knowledge.How these deep biologicalstructures take different surface forms in different cultures will be the subject ofthis talk, withreference to the Mahabharata and the Bible and Aboriginal Dreamings,to 6thcentury BCNorthern India and 5th century BC Athens,to Socratesand the Buddha and AjitaKesakambala,to R.K.Narayan and Les Murray.
Devika Goonewardene: Indian Knowledges of the International

This paper is about the trials and tribulations associated with teaching knowledges of and on India as part of an international relations course in an Australian university.While postcolonial studies establishes as a necessity the ability to read a culturally different text in and against the universals of Western knowledge forms, this is a need and skill that has yet to make its way into the mainstream of the discipline of international relations.Thus despite the production and global circulation of postcolonial forms of knowledge on India and the international through work in literature, history and cultural studies, the reception of such work in the Australian metropolitan university has to contend with both the antipathy of students and the spectre of neoliberalism as the standard by which the value of such knowledge is judged.Faced with such challenges, this paper charts the ways in which students of a postcolonial nternational relations have been cajoled intoappreciating the work of Bengalis such as Ashis Nandy, Partha Chatterjee, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Amitav Ghosh as windows into nondisciplinary ways of seeing and understanding India and the international.
Peter Groves: 'Post-colonial Prosody: Isosyllabics and Indo-Anglian Poetry'

Despite the long-standing cultural prestige of French poetry, the practice of isosyllabics &emdash; of measuring, that is, the line of verse by a simple
counting of syllables &emdash; has never been widely popular among British, American and Australian poets, many of whom have explicitly rejected it on the grounds of its inability to communicate intelligible metrical form in English: Thom Gunn gave it up precisely because he found the result "indistinguishable from free verse". Nevertheless, isosyllabic metres appear to have a particular appeal to modern Indian poets writing in English, such as Zulfikar Ghose and Kamala Das: Ghose has even defended the form against what he rightly sees as"hostility towards the use of syllabic metres".This paper will explore the possibility that the appeal of isosyllabics for such poets (and, in particular, of decasyllabics, which represent a disturbing dislocation of the familiar iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and Pope) may lie precisely in its status as a kind of pseudo-metre, and its consequent denaturing effect upon traditional poetic discourse.It may, perhaps, become a way of dispossessing &emdash; and thus possessing &emdash; English as a poetic vehicle for those who write it as a second language, particularly in a post-colonial context: both Das and Ghose have written &emdash; in isosyllabic verse &emdash; of the problem of possessing, as a poet, an alien tongue.
David Hanan, Moinak Biswas and Dharmasena Pathiraja: 'Realism and Ideology in Film in the Pre and Post Colonial Periods in South Asia and in Australia'
This panel on realism and Ideology in film will look at three related countries, issues and periods. Excerpts from films will be presented in the session. David Hanan will discuss the relationship between realism and ideology in documentaries and newsreels made by Australian filmmakers about Asian countries in the late colonial period (pre second world war) and in the period after the wa, including some references to the representation ofIndia. Moinak Biswas will examine the development of realism in Indian feature films as an emerging phenomenon in contrast to the mythicals (Bombay movies) over approximately the same period (1935-1960), relating this to contemporary developments within the Indian public sphere . Dharmasena Pathiraja will engage with the area discussed by Biswas, with reference to films by the leading Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak (whose major films address issues of post-partition Bengal) and to his own work as a pioneering realist and Brecht-influenced director in Sri Lanka since 1972.
David Hanan: 'Pre War - Colonialism; Post War Post Colonialism? What Documentaries Show Us'
In my presentation I will be analyzing and comparing excerpts from six documentary films (including one newsreel) made at different times and in different contexts between 1937 and 1965 in India, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia, comparing pre second world war and post second world war representation. In particular I will be examining documentary representations of colonised countries in the pre war period by Australian and British filmmakers, in an attempt to give definition to the nature of colonial period representation in 3 films, and in particular to the Australian inflection in two of these films. In the second half of the presentation, I will look primarily at the documentary representation of newly independent countries in the 'post world war period' (in particular Indonesia ), as it was perceived by Indonesian filmmakers and as it was represented by the Australia . I will conclude with the examination of a Current Affairs program about the Vietnam War. The excerpts - which are highly pertinent to any understanding of Australia's relation to Asia today - include a newsreel about the proclamation of the King Emperor (George VI) in Bombay in 1937 ; a travelogue showing parts of the Dutch East Indies and Singapore in the late 1930s; a 1942 Australian-Dutch educational and propaganda film affirming the importance of the Dutch retaining their East Indies colony now under threat from the Japanese invasion; an independent documentary film produced by the Australian Waterside Workers Federation in 1946, supporting Indonesian independence from the Dutch; a documentary about Nehru's visit to Indonesia in 1950; and a 1965 Current Affairs program about the Vietnam war as a helicopter war. One of the most striking conclusions of such an examination, at least regarding Australia , is the relatively consistent role of the left in supporting independence for colonised countries, and the role of the right in demanding the continuance of colonialism or some form of neo-colonialism.
Andrew Hassam: 'Out of India: The Overlap of the Global and the Postcolonial in the International Production, Distribution and Screening of Bollywood Movies'
'The English-speaking class first imagined by colonialism and reformulated by anticolonial nationalism are most frequently the constituents who seek the metropolitan center that they have been taught to desire.' (Jigna Desai,Beyond Bollywood)
Over the past ten years, not only has the number of popular Hindi films using overseas locations risen, but also the Occident no longer appears in Bollywood movies merely as an exotic backdrop for a song and dance routine. Europe, North America and Australia feature as the realm of Indians who live overseas, and Bollywood stars now play young, self-confident, middle-class NRIs (NonResident Indians) who are at home in a globalised world. Popular Hindi cinema relates to migration from India in a more fundamental way.The production, distribution and screening of Bollywood movies is facilitiated by well-educated middle-class Indians who themselves have been attracted overseas by the rewards of globalisation, rewards demonstrated so lavishly on the screen.In Australia, as in the UK or Canada, there is a convergence between the cosmopolitan Indian depicted in the films and the Indian-born professionals who facilitate overseas filming, distribution and screening. Yet if Bollywood movies have utilised the transnational networks of recent Indian migration, thay have also utilised an English-speaking network comprising North America, the UK and Australia.In other words, a global Hindi cinema coincides largely with the historic English-language networks of British imperial expansion.Indians with good English communication skills have proven highly attractive to the migration authorities in Britain, Canada and Australia, and it is those same NRIs who have facilitated Indian films in Australia.In this way, Bollywood cinema depends on the overlapping of the global and the postcolonial.
Dianne Jones: Artist's Presentation

In my presentation, I will speak about my background and the origins of my art. I will also refer to various artworks I have produced and speak about the motivations and purpose of creating political art with the intent to challenge and renegotiate colonialist representation. With Jones's Picnic, Brenda's Wedding and Shearing the Rams, I appropriated visual iconic imagery of colonial Australia to reposition representation of Indigenous peoples. Paintings by white Australian artists Tom Roberts and Eugene Von Geurard often portrayed a romantic idea of Australia, which was a peaceful, fat and wealthy land under endless blue skies. When Indigenous people were included in the artwork, it was all too often as part of the flora and fauna and without names or identities, insignificantly fading into the background. When white Australians were recorded either in paintings or written history they were often given the dignity of identification and value/meaning.In response to this colonial oversight, I have positioned my family as the main focus of the
paintings and given them an identity and importance that Indigenous people were not afforded. My family and I did not match the images that I was seeing in history books or artworks. Shearing the Rams was particularly important to me as my father was a 'gun shearer' and was forced to deal with racism in the shearing sheds in the land of the 'fair go'. My father went on to win shearing competitions at the local and state agriculture shows and he taught shearing to Aboriginal youth.There are many stereotypical images of Australian Indigenous Peoples. One in particular that I experienced as an artist was to be perceived as a dot painter because of my Aboriginality. I am not a member of the Papunya People and I based my Dot Paintings series upon this misconception. I am interested in addressing and challenging stereotypical assumptions and the deliberate exclusion of positive representations of my people in historical narratives. My talk will provide an insight into Indigenous views on colonial ideologies through my own personal story.
Odette Kelada: '"Open Your Binung": Exploring the Dynamics between Indigenous Australian Women Writers and White Female Academics'
Melissa Lucashenko captures the excitement and power of stories to reclaim identity and representation in her semi-autobiographical novel Steam Pigs (1997): 'I've left the slum city for the exciting world of academe. Oh, I'm the golden girl now all right, with more stories to tell than they'll ever want to hear. Listen, open your binung, hear me calling?' This paper explores dynamics between white female academics and Indigenous Australian women. It draws on the work and interviews conducted with the Indigenous writers Melissa Lucashenko and Leah Purcell,for my PhD, ' Storylines: Women Writers in Australia, Past and Present'. Contemporary Indigenous women's writing as exemplified in the work of these two writers continues the movement towards the self-representation that Indigenous theorists such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Sonia Kurtzer and Marcia Langton have long been citing as a necessity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This paper interweaves notions of race, gender and voice with the rights and ethics of representation and examines these themes in relation to Aileen Moreton-Robinson's arguments in 'Talking up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism' and Marcia Langton's notion that the term 'anti-colonial' should be used instead of postcolonial, as we do not yet exist in a 'postcolonial' society. It explores the inherent racial blindness of many white 'feminist' academics and the implications of this for establishing a 'politics of difference' that acknowledges the positioning of white middle-class women as
the 'norm' and central to dominant socio-political, historical, literary and cultural discourses.
Adib Khan: 'Living in No Man's Land'

My paper deals with the themes of loyalties and cultural fragmentation. It is particularly relevant in view of my new novel, Spiral Road, which deals with the issues of terrorism and the loyalties of a migrant Muslim.
Suboohi Khan: 'Deterritorializing Urdu: Naiyer Masud's Appropriation of Kafka'

'A style is managing to stammer in one's own language. It is difficult, because there has to be a need for such stammering. Not being a stammerer in one's speech, but being a stammerer of language itself. Being like a foreigner in one's own language. Constructing a line of flight.' (Gilles Deleuze,Dialogues, 4) Deleuze regards Kafka and Beckett, two of the most striking examples of such stammering, both of whom take language to its extremity, to its limits. Naiyer Masud achieves a similar effect in his fiction, the essence of which lies in writing like a foreigner in one's own language or by taking a line of flight in making a 'minor' use of it. Unarguably, this constitutes the beauty of Masud's prose style, a style of writing which is a way of inventing 'new forces or new weapons' and helps carve out a separate niche for Masud's fiction. Masud skilfully creates a language that is austere and impoverished and which can contradict, or oppose the dominant language structure prevalent in Urdu. Purging idioms from Urdu is one way the language is unfamiliarized, which leads Masud's readers to think that his stories are translations from a foreign language. He does not give in to the typical expectations in fiction; he opposes these qualities which deterritorialize his language from mainstream Urdu. Masud's translations from Kafka, his appreciation of Kafka as a literary artist, and his own strange and elusive stories have earned him the adjective 'Kafkaesque'. Umar Memon, Masud's translator and critic considers the need for a new fictional theory in Urdu, expansive enough to embrace Masud's radically different poetics of art. As such, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theory of minor literature enables us to view Naiyer Masud as a prose writer who by deterritorializing and reterritorializing the Urdu language creates new positions that are suitable for Urdu writers in the subcontinent, however his unique adaptation of language, to create a new model, qualifies his writing as 'minor literature'.
Chandani Lokuge, Eva Sallis and Jennifer Strauss: 'Where's Home, Ulysses?: Tales of Global Journeys'
In this panel, three writers will talk about the presence in their work of themes of location and dislocation, cultural inheritance and disinheritance, ways in which global journeys - voluntary and involuntary - can re-structure or disrupt ideas of self, home, and belonging. 'Come home to the other in ourselves' (Lokuge) 'What happens when there is no place on earth any more for you?'(Sallis) 'Living in English seemed natural as breathing' (Strauss)
Lyn McCredden: 'Contemporary Indigenous Poetry in Australia'

The new young voices in Australian indigenous poetry are complicating 'postcolonial identit'. While these poets confront issues of tradition and origin, they are also writing complex, highly self-reflexive subjectivities which move beyond postitive and negative models of hybridity. In Lionel Fogarty's New and Selected Poems: Munaladjali, Mutuerjaraera (Hyland House 1995) and his Dha'lan Djani Mitti (Salt 2005), Wagan Watson's Smoke Encrypted Whispers (UQP 2004), Romaine Moreton's The Callused Stick of Wanting (MagabalaBooks 2000), Lisa Bellear's Dreaming in Urban Areas (UQP 1996) and Kim Scott's poetry in Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing(Fremantle Arts Press 2000), a range of new and often conflicting representationsof Indigenous Australia' can be heard. This paper will examine the new Indigenous poetries and the post-colonial issues they raise.
Brigid Magner: 'An Australian Desperate in Mumbai: Gregory David Roberts'Shantaram

The publication of Gregory David Robert's autobiographical novel Shantaram (2004) marked a substantial contribution to the literature of Australian-Asian engagement. Marketed as a novel based on Roberts' own life experience, Shantaram tells the story of a prison escapee who makes a new life for himself in the slums of Mumbai. A hybrid work which is neither wholly fact nor fiction, Shantaram has generated strong responses in Australia and overseas. This paper will consider the cross-cultural aspects of the novel and their implications for Australian literary scholarship.
Anne Marsh: 'Colonial/postcolonial: Discourses of Identity in Australian Photography'

The paper analyses the work of leading Australian artists who have an indigenous heritage and work in photography, photo-based media and film. The artists focus on issues of identity and displacement, and many engage with colonial representations in an attempt to re-write history and narratives of disempowerment. The artists to be considered include: Gordon Bennett, Leah King-Smith, Destiny Deacon, Darren Siwes, Fiona Foley, Brook Andrews and Tracey Moffatt.
Michael Meehan: 'Maps, Stories, Spaces: Australian Embodiment'

This paper traces a strand in Australian writing and representation, in the visual arts, literature and the law, in which special forms of 'embodiment' are sought in the Australian landscape, the locating of a face, a voice, a corresponding energy making it accessible, knowable, communicative and instructive.The paper reviews indigenous models in the visual arts, traditional and modern, as a leading emblem of this negotiation and of a special intimacy - not of body to body or mind to mind, but of body and mind to landscape - tracing how in parallel colonialising developments in Austrlaian art, framing, colour, perspective and theme also seek to 'recognise' the landscape into a communicative and enriching human habitat. The paper then reviews this quest in Australian writing, from explorer texts through Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson, Thea Astley and Patrick White to modern urban and suburban negotiations, and thence into recent legal texts as a parallel and contrasting mode of negotiation, tracing Australian law's similar quest for local embodiment, for what Justice Brennan in the Mabo judgement called 'Australian flesh' to set upon the bones of English law. The paper reads Mabo as an authoritative call for new ways of seeing, for an enriched form of personification in our understanding of 'place', a postcolonialising independence from the obfuscating power of 'inherited propositions', and as a resonant cultural message from the High Court paving the way for a holistic, intimate and indigenous negotiation of the human and the legal presence in the Australian landscape.
Stephen Muecke: Summing Up

This presentation will draw together and highlight arguments and issues that have emerged in the course of the Conference.
Andrew Ng: 'The Postcolonial/Postmodern Gothic: Salman Rushdie's Fury'

This paper reads Salman Rushdie's cosmopolitan Gothic Fury through a trajectory of the Baudrillardian simulacra and Freud's uncanny. It attempts to show the various intertextual relationship the narrative has with well-known Gothic works. It argues that the protagonist, Malik Solanka, a renowned historian and doll-maker, transcribes onto his dolls a seething, unspeakable anger, turning them into the return of his repressed. His most famous doll, Little Brain, is Solanka's Faustian monster, a creature whose initial function is to aggrandise her creator, but who becomes the uncontrollable other who gradually destroys him. Little Brain comes to stand in for Solanka's anger in a somewhat fetishistic mechanism, but as Zizek has elucidated, the object of fetishism usually returns the fetishiser's gaze to objectify him in the end. Which is why Solanka cannot overcome his fury despite spatially distancing himself from the doll. The narrative is also a powerful critique of the postmodern cosmopolitan condition in which subjects are subscribed to a surface existence that denies their depth. Anger, for example, an emotion that ruptures the even postmodern surface cannot be allowed pronouncement. This relates to the postcolonial agenda of the narrative, challenging Bhabha's integration of postcolonial and postmodernism into a happy marriage. In fact, as my reading of Fury shows, the postmodern celebration of plurality can only be affected when that plurality conforms to the surface structure of late capitalism. In other words, postcolonialism is only allowed a significance if it adheres to the postmodern agenda of promoting a relativism that elides acute, lived differences. For many postcolonial and diasporic peoples, their "otherness" and liminality is not a cause for celebration and empowerment, but one of constant dread and helplessness. One final point aligning the narrative to the Gothic tradition is its use of framed narratives and the miscegenation of genres into an unstable whole. This can be attributed to Solanka's authorial anxiety in the face of overwhelming odds (his anger, his doll, his liminal position, his sexual liaisons), but on a larger scale, it could also be Rushdie's critical take on the pastiche-like narrative of postmodern texts. This argument is of course not unfamiliar with regards to Rushdie's work, but I am proposing to read this narrative stylistics against a theory of the Gothic.
Wenche Ommundsen: 'Cultural Citizenship, Cultural Agency: Who Speaks, Who Acts and Who Cares in Australian Refugee Stories?'
Australia's treatment of refugees has mobilised writers more than any other issue in recent years. This paper considers the nature of that engagement and its cultural implications. Who writes about refugees, for whom do they write and what are the messages conveyed by the writing? Do these texts fit into conservative paradigms for multicultural encounters in which the 'foreign' elements function primarily to enrich (and ease the conscience of) the dominant culture, or do they offer alternative perspectives on the refugee experience? Using the concept of cultural citizenship, the paper examines a number of recent texts for both adult and child readers (Thomas Keneally, The Tyrant's Novel, Eva Sallis, The Marsh Birds, Libby Gleeson,Refuge, Morris Gleitzman,Boy Overboard and Girl Underground, Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott, eds, Another Country, Sonja Dechian et al, eds, Dark Dreams) asking what, if any, effects this literary phenomenon may have on the social, cultural and political circumstances with which they engage.
Janet O'Shea: 'The Production of Locality: Transnational Choreographies in Bharata Natyam'

In this paper, I suggest that twentieth-century bharata natyam hinged upon the ability of practitioners and promoters to produce urban identities alongside national, regional, and gendered ones.During the bharata natyam revival, practitioners recontextualized a form that had been dislocated and found a place for it in a globalized dance milieu.Through this process, they aligned bharata natyam with immediate communities, as well as, in Benedict Anderson's terms, imagined ones.Like the intersection of bharata natyam with national, regional, and gender concerns, the re-localizing of bharata natyam was not organic or unselfconscious; it required specific strategies of affiliation.Instructional, promotional, and economic patterns, alongside choreographic and political ones, produced a new local affiliation for the form by establishingMadras as a center for bharata natyam performance.The 1980s and 1990s carved out a different role for the city, renamed Chennai.The revival installed bharata natyam in Chennai so successfully that, especially as figured from outside, bharata natyam now belongs in that city.In addition, Chennai's ability to accommodate translocal and transnational flows of dancers and choreography set the stage for bharata natyam's installment into more globalized metropolitan centers.
Dharmasena Pathiraja: Where there is no Partition . . . . . Ghatak and Me.

Independence and post-independence in South Asia is a fraught entity, a momentous event which while being celebratory and visionary was overridden by a deep seated violence that has dogged the histories of most South Asian
countries. In the Indo-Pakistani sub continent it exploded as the partition. The partition is one of the most haunting events of Indian independence, overshadowing it in every aspect and presaging the instability of the nation. In Sri Lanka, the ease with which 'independence' was ushered in, in a peaceful take over, attended by a lot of fanfare, despite the citizenship act of 1948, disenfranchising the plantation labour, lulled the country into a state of complaisance. Ceylon was a success story. Boasting the highest literary rate in South Asia , it was seen as a success story of independence. Our partition stories come much later, in the '80s. What did we do until then? How did we view the partition? Did we think about it in anyway as part of our legacy in Sri Lanka ? Ritwik Ghatak, best known for his films on the Bengali Partition Meghe Daka Tara ('The Cloud Capped Star', 1960), Komal Gandhar ('The Note of E Flat', 1961) and Subarnarekha (1962)., perhaps more than any other contemporary film maker was able to put his finger on the pulse of the partition. Ghatak's films are the traumatic enactment of the partition as myth, history and people. In my 30 odd year career as a film maker, I have tried to tease out the partition stories lying submerged within the 'success' of the nation. How do we in Sri Lanka look at our own version of the partition? Who presaged it? Where does it come from? Why was I so drawn to Ghatak when I first saw his films in 1978? What chord did it strike? Is it because we did not have a partition? Or because I had already sensed its presence? Was it always there bursting to happen, in 1971, in social conflict and in the long drawn out contest for land and nation from the 80s onwards to the present day? Within the non-trauma of Ceylon , my films enact a partition, that looks forward to the 'partition' psyche that is to haunt the entirety of Sri Lanka from the '80s onwards, in the ethnic conflict. . Partition here comes to mean the contest over land and the mythology that land produces through ideas of territory, belonging, nation and woman. In looking back at Ghatak as a postcolonial film maker, I want to return to the partition films of Ghatak and my own films about the non-partition together to see how they were contemporary, in form, in myth making and in enacting the 'partition. It is the contemporaneity of these films, in which one looks for a form to capture that trauma and anxiety of nation and land, of the partition itself, that I want to explore. Specifically, I shall look at Meghe Dhaka Tara and Titash ek nam dir of Ghatak, and my own films Ponmani (1977) ,Soldadu Unnehe(1980) and the recent In Search of a Road (2006).
Tess de Quincey, Santanu Bose, Ranjita Karlekar, Peter Snow: Embrace

Embrace was a collaborative, interdisciplinary and intercultural performance project that took place in Kolkata in November/ December 2003 and Sydney in
June 2004. The project was initiated by Sydney based choreographer and dancer Tess de Quincey in collaboration with Kolkata teacher Ranjita Karlekar, and had a number of strands: an artistic exchange between de Quincey's Australian company and a range of Indian artists, dancers and performers; a residency of the company at a Kolkata children's home; and the making of two performances, at the Sangeet Academy, Kolkata, and the Performance Space, Sydney. We will show selected video footage of the performances, present a theoretical paper and discuss the range of the project. We also plan to include live performances in our presentation.
Kim Scott: Writer's Presentation Paul Sharrad: 'Convicts, Call Centres and Cochin Kangaroos: South Asian Globalising of the Australian Imagination.'
As a child, I walked to school protected from summer heat by a sola topi, my family telling stories of links to camel shipments and originally sailing toAdelaide on the 'Baboo'. Governor Philip, facing the destitution of his colony in New South Wales, was forced to send to Calcutta for supplies. Trade in people, goods and ideas between India and Australia has continued ever since. My paper surveys some connections between Australia and Indiafrom the inception of the Botany Baycolony to the present. One point is that global networks of labour and trade were in place from 1788 and even before, but that these have always been shaped by structures of power such as British colonialism, something that continues to affect whiteAustralia attitudes to South Asia. After a brief survey of Australian writing about India, this paper moves on to consider contemporary representations of global networks between the two countries. It sketches some Indian literary views of Australia and examines in more detail constructions of both places by younger writers of South Asian background, notably Christopher Cyrill and Suneeta Peres De Costa.
Globalisation And Postcolonial Writing: An Australia-India Exchange - Abstracts of Papers (Calcutta University)
Conference Homepage Programme Participants from Australia Abstracts of Papers (Australia) Abstracts of Papers (India) Conference Report A Postgraduate's Perspective
Aninda Basu Roy: "Reviewing the 'Bush' Legend: Australian Cinema and Nation Formation"
In an age of 'constructedness' where one constructs and maps nation and identity, William Routh remarks in AnAustralian Film Reader "not being sure of who you are is practically the dictionary definition of being Australian". Films which are part of the Australian socio-political discourse attempt at, what Greame Turner observes as, "a semi-official project of nation formation". In developing a 'nationalist' agenda, Australian films draw upon 'aboriginal' bush legend as a marker of identity though native and indigenous literary works/texts are largely left out of the canon. This paper looks at some Australian films whichunderlie the politics of cultural practice concerned with promoting an 'Australian cinema which could be an authentic site to articulate the unique Australian experience'. Many historians like Henry Reynolds in The Other Side of the Frontier has examined the expropriation and 'killing' of Aboriginal tribes, namely to clear the land for White settlement. On the other hand, a majority of Australian films try to market the country's identity through the selling of the 'Bush' legend in an age of globalization. Such narrations therefore become powerful discourses which struggle to explain the past and in the process articulate a complex image of the Australian nation.
Anandan Latha: "Is the Emergence a Dream? A Study of Post-Caste Society in the Representations of Dalit Discourse"
Oppression of the marginalised, indigenous people of India is still a problem to be tackled in the era of globalisation even thoughIndia marches towards a Postcaste society.The ordinary man of the marginalised class is compelled to accept the standardised values set by the upper class.
A few decades ago living conditions were unbearable to this class. Arjun Dangle records their miserable existence in'Dalit Literature Past, Present and Future': "Treated like animals they lived apart from the villages and had to eat the leftovers from from the higher caste people in return for their endless toil." Accreditation came to this section of the people with the movement started by Dr.Ambedkar in 1956.It has required the efforts of the Dalits themselves to present to the world an accurate documentation of the situation.The scope of this paper is to analyse this situation through Bandhumadhav's representation in his short story "The Poisoned Bread".
Dr Brinda Bose: "Body Matters: Interrogating Sex/ualities in Indian Women's Writing in English"
Contemporary Indian life is caught in a bizarre paradoxical state that obviously did not get swept out to sea with the fall of a right-wing government in 2004, as one may have hoped. It swings continuously in a dialectic between ultraconservative and apparently progressive/radical responses to changing social parameters. Nowhere is this more apparent, perhaps, than in the variety of ways in which sex/ualities are interpreted, intercepted and interrogated in contemporary cultural production. In this paper, I will attempt to trace both the method and the madness in literary negotiations of Indian sexualities, in a selection of contemporary Indian women's writing in English. Feminism has demanded that women writers in particular should reflect and defend women's right to desiring, and that the pursuit of the fulfillment of female sexual desire - even if transgressive - should be a veritable metaphor for women's equality politics. This paper will focus, therefore, on body matters in women's writing in English from India -Are sexual politics their textual politics? Does the female sexed body emerge as a potent site of political interrogation? In other words, do bodies matter? Whose bodies matter? How do they matter?
Chitralekha Basu: "Return of the Raj: A Bollywood Saga"

THE Raj in India seems to be the flavour of the season. The well-loved and highly-identifiable themes - romance across cultures, tyrannical British rulers/soldiers determined to squeeze the life out of their Indian subjects, gory communal clashes, extravagant shikar expeditions etc. are back. The tropes in Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet (written between 1966 and 1975) and MM Kaye's
The Far Pavilions (1978) that lend themselves happily to television soaps (or West-End musicals) seem to have resurfaced in recent novels by Carolyn Slaughter (The Black Englishman), Susan Kurosawa (Coronoation Talkies) and the reissues of Rebecca Ryman's Olivia and Jay and The Veil of Illusion. But the difference between Scott's novels and their atavisticpresent-day cousins - The Last Song of Dusk by Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi, Chinnery's Hotel by Jaysinh Birjepatil and The Alchemy of Desire by Tarun Tejpal -- is in their treatment of history. While in Scott's works the twists and turns in the story are often a result of real historical developments such as the Quit India Movement, in Raj novel in its 21st-century avatar has a contrived plot that's as Bollywo as you can get. Perhaps Bollywood is the new Empire and its pay-back time for the Englishspeaking world.
Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay: "Critiquing Space and Unspoken Word: A Study of Peter Goldsworthy's Wish"
Peter Goldsworthy's 1995 novel Wish may be regarded as a continuation of the theme of heterotopologia that he has already treated in Maestro ( 1989 ) andHonk If You Are Jesus ( 1992 ). The heterotopologic problematic had been first superbly theorized by Foucault and later admirably developed by Edward Soja. These critical principles may be appropriately used in interpreting Goldsworthy's novels. While Soja's discourse primarily shows a cartographic centrality, it implicates multiplex forms of spatiality: topological, cultural and psychological. These three forms of spatiality can be understood in terms of Goldsworthy's novel Wish. In Wish, the central character J.J. moves ina world of unspoken world of sign language. Belonging to both worlds - the spoken as well as the unspoken&emdash;he seems to negotiate a strange spaceof semiotic complexity.While hovering between these two worlds, he encounters a different space where the animal and the human merge and interact ; it dismantles the oppositional politics of the real and the hyperreal. It therefore contests the constructed artifice ofsimulacra governing the so-called human world.
Dipankar Purkayastha: "Displacement and Identity: The Poetics of Migration in North East India."
As postcolonial South Asia, particularly the North Eastern states in India, after more than fifty years of independent political existence, tries to come to terms with displacement, migration and uncertainties about self-definition and
questions of cultural identity, literary imagination, particularly at the turn of the century, confronted with a wider globalised canvas, engages itself, more incisively than ever earlier, with the portrayal of a people in trauma and engaged in repeated deconstruction and re-construction of the nation space. Postcolonial North East India, which was till the nineteen fifties a more or less composite political unit despite cultural tensions, and is now split into many, with the threat or possibility of being balkanised further, is a cultural cauldron on the boil, with ethnic aspirations, language and religion, among the ingredients seasoning the broth. The inherent complexity of the idea of the nation as a cultural entity in the context of this political space may be traced back to the mass displacement of population from the erstwhile East Bengal, the partition of India, the subsequent migrations from East Pakistan and thenBangladesh, pitting cultures in contestations in the nation space. Among the many groups embroiled in the process mentioned above in the redefinition of the nation space are the Bengalis, who have faced repeated marginalization, time and again facing questions of identity, home and the homeland, as the consequence of migrations. Since the first attempt at the partition of Bengalin 1905, a large section of the Bengali speaking people in South Asia have been pawns in the power game of the redrawing of the political boundary. This paper attempts to chart the response to this power game as mapped in a few representative texts, such as the novels of Siddhartha Deb and the poetry written on the language movement in BarakValley in Southern Assam.
Jose Varghese: "Re-definitions of Global Culture, Secularism and Terrorism in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown"
Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (2005) is a novel that deals with the contemporary issues of a global culture, secularism, terrorism and so on. In this unique narrative that reminds one of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's novels that deal with similar issues as well, Rushdie tries to look at the ways in which the idea of terrorism evolves and how it gets defined in the global culture. Similarly, the term secularism too is looked at from different perspectives, showing how it gains multiple layers of meaning that can be self-contradictory at times. Rushdie deconstructs these terms in the context of global culture, which again is a contestable term, as it is never static and difficult to define in terms of space or time. The paper attempts a reading of Shalimar the Clown with reference to the real-life events in different communities of the world that are inevitably undergoing the globalization process.
Meenakshi Hariharan: "Oppression Within and Without: A Study of Representations Of Teenage Daughters in Indian Fictional Discourse"
Daughters are vital to any civilization and the survival of humanity depends on their well being and social development. Indian teenaged daughters-especially those residing in semi-urban and rural areas- are less advanced compared to their global counterparts. They face problems like discrimination within the family; as a male child is preferred to the female child, denial of formal education that may lead to their employment and empowerment, early marriage, parental pressure that prevents them from pursuing the subject of their hearts' desire and so on. Issues they are forced to tackle outside the family circle include teenage labourers as domestic servants in metropolitan cities, ill treatment and dowry deaths, child prostitution and so on .The scope of the paper is to explore the representations of the plight of adolescent girls in Indo- Anglian and Indian Regional Discourse. The critical proposition of New Historicism that considers History and Literature as parallel to each other is employed to analyze Mrinal Pande's""Girls"(2003), Nirmala Agarwal's "Desire for a Male Child"(1990), Aykkan's Cows In Bull Fight (1990), Ramendra Kumar's Chasing A Dream(2003), Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird (2000) and Dipavali Debroy's Kusum(1997).
Krishna Sen: "Minding Our Lives: Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, and the Indian Cultural Context"
Vandana Shiva, \author of the much-acclaimed Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development and several other publications, is a pioneer of the global ecofeminist movement. Shiva's dynamic blend of ecology, feminism, social activism, community health, and development was attained by the simple strategy of shifting her focus away from the predominantly urban orientation of Western feminism to the needs and problems of rural women. This effectively positions Shiva's brand of feminism as nurturing rather than competitive.It is also more concerned with the quality of life of the community at large rather than with the advancement of certain categories of women in isolation both from men and from their less-advantaged sisters - an approach that seems to synchronize well with the special concerns of developing societies.. Both Staying Alive and Minding Our Lives (which Shiva edited jointly with Maria Mies), address the cultural and political roots of social crises which are closely linked - environmental degradation, women's health, the impact of new technologies on both ecological stability and the social and personal status of rural women, and what are identified as the related issues of violence against nature and violence against women. Another book,Biopolitics, which Shiva
edited jointly with Ingunn Moser, articulates two key concepts pertaining to activist ecofeminism -'biosemiotics' and 'genethics'. Along the way, Shiva seeks to counter the main charges which have been levelled against her equation of nature and women - the charges of essentialism and reductionism. This paper will attempt to position Shiva's thought, not in the context of global ecofeminism, but within a specifically Indian cultural matrix. It will examine the mythopoeic ecological vision of the Vedas, and the powerful and generative connections established in the Vedas and the Upanishads between Nature on the one hand, and the cosmic feminine principles of Prakriti and Shakti on the other - a relationship articulated in the figure of the Devi of the Devimahatmya. This creative symbiosis gradually declined into patriarchal hegemony over women through subtle shifts in ideological emphasis in the Puranas and the Shastras. It may be argued that, although Shiva evolved her ecofeminist theories in the context of recent technological excesses against biodiversity, the connection she establishes between nature and woman derives not from an essentialist Western paradigm that sees both as objects of consumption (as articulated by Helene Cixous in Sorties , for example), but from her cultural roots, through a composite image of Nature/Woman as a configuration of power.
Margaret McDonell: "Editing Across Cultures: the Influence of Globalization"

This paper explores the current place of the editing of English in an increasingly globalised world. Editing is a value laden activity, and has the capacity to fundamentally change a text in ways that are invisible to the reader. The values of the editing process are grounded in and stem from the context in which a manuscript is edited, a context that is cultural, commercial and institutional. Globalisation can influence how a text is written, edited and read. However, globalisation and the English language are not strangers, and it is interesting to explore how recent trends towards further globalisation can influence the editorial process. Today, in a world where it is possible to email large files around the world in a few minutes, and jobs can be outsourced from one country to another, there is more than ample opportunity for an editor to be working on a manuscript that has emerged from a very different cultural context. Recently I spent some months inIndia on an Asialink residency that gave me the opportunity to work with Penguin India. As a freelance editor I found the experience exhilarating and sometimes challenging. The cultural dimensions of my craft, sometimes invisible to an editor working securely in her comfort zone, became more apparent when I dealt daily with cultural differences in situations that often took me well beyond my comfort zone. The danger for an editor (and for the text on which she is working) can be the things that she does not know, the nuances of culture of which she is unaware. Although working with a
common medium, the English language, editors in Australia and Indiaare dealing with subtle differences of language usage, suggesting that, in some genres at least, the language is moving away from rather than toward a globalised homogeneity. How can an editor deal with working outside her known milieu, and what are the language implications of increasing globalisation?
Tapati Gupta: "Romeo & Juliet: Indigenized, Decolonized"

From the mid -nineteenth century Bengal started producing a spate of Shakespeare translations and adaptations. Some were acted, others only read, still others were forgotten only to be reclaimed by the zeal of research scholars. What is important however is the way the bard is appropriated in our culture through an-'other' script, i.e. bangla. This cross-cultural encounter no doubt enriched both the Bangla language and stage. Utpal Dutt, the noted thespian, began his tryst with Shakespeare during his student days when he acted in Shakespeare playsand produced Shakespeare in the original. But soon after independence and especially during Shakespeare's quart centenary he started translating Shakespeare and producing Shakespeare in translation. From the proscenium to the open air village ambience his aim was to make the bard closer to the hearts of the Bengali mass. An institution that had so far been the monopoly of the English -educated elite became the people's commodity. His translations on the whole were faithful to the original except where culture-specific elements necessitated local inputs. But Dutt's rendering of Romeo and Juliet in 'jatra' form was a bold attempt at moulding an indigenous art form into the framework of a Shakespeare play. He had earlier translated the play and produced it on the proscenium . In the 'jatra' he transferred not only the locale but also indigenized the characters and theme. The remaking and remixing, reinforces the fluidity of borders and cultural resistance. The paper seeks to examine how the colonial and post-colonial blend into thenational and the indigenous lending the performance its uniqueness. The script from which I have worked is an actor's copy and has not been printed yet.
Malashri Lal: "VS Naipaul and the Marginal Women: India: A Million Mutinies Now"
At an international festival of Indian literature, held two years ago, VS Naipaul had an unsavoury quarrel with the women writers Nayantara Sahgal and Shashi Deshpande. Impatient with ongoing discussions on post colonialism, Sir
Vidialashed out, "My life is too short for banalityThis thing about colonialism, this thing about gender oppression, the very word oppression wearies me." Yet, in subsequent sessions VS Naipaul conceded that the thought of a wounded civilisation had derived from "the idea of people so crushed, so destroyed, so trampled over that they had no idea even of their being trampled over." About India: A Million Mutinies Now and his views onIndia's progress, Sir Vidia spoke appreciatively of that "whole movement from below." Clearly his impatience was with intellectualised literary discourse on gender, not about women as such. ( Source: At Home in the World, ICCR, 2005) This paper negotiates the text of India: A Million Mutinies Now with the purpose of highlighting Naipaul's interest in marginalised women that he notices everywhere.Mothers of Shiv Sena leaders lurk behind curtains, the wife of an imprisoned Naxalite leader recounts her days of trouble, women journalists and translators accompany Naipaul into secluded interiors. "India was a land of caste costume," remarks Naipaul, (India: A Million Mutinies Now, 244) prefacing his many queries about 'love' and arranged marriages, priestly domains and oppositional politics. In particular, this paper will discuss VS Naipaul's representation of three women, each bringing a social and political aspect of gender positioning to the forefront. Mallika, wife of the Dalit leader and poet Namdeo Dhasal reveals the interplay of pride and humiliation among the "untouchables." Given the rise of Dalit women writers such as Bama since Naipaul's book was published, his early detection of Mallika's compelling biography retains a forceful edge. Next is Kala, inBangalore, whose familial past unfurls the history of three generations of women's subjugation under relentless brahminism. The rhetoric of the Hindu rightwing is lodged there, as also its subversion. Later, Naipaul meets, in Calcutta, Arti, the wife of a Naxal activist who articulates a counter critique of Bengali Marxism and its skewed demands of equity. VS Naipaul's essay on Woman's Era stands apart from these live portraits. In fact the stilted journalism of a women's magazineand its stratagems for helping middle class English-knowing readers to make subtle adjustments to a modernising India gain Naipaul's attention but not his involvement. His ambiguous comments on the practice of "bride seeing" offset his earlier, acute observations on the women as he found them during interviews. There, Naipaul had said, "So often in Indian homes, the simple artless devotion of a wife to her husband was something that made an impression" (India: A Million Mutinies Now, 43). It is the artful world of words that Naipaul could be angry about. But women who were part of the millions, he met with curiosity, if hesitation. His reports are incisive if not detailed. Certainly, they constitute a subject worth pondering.
Santosh K. Sareen: "Seeing Beyond the Colonial: Alfred Deakin's Voice of Prophesy"
Alfred Deakin was the second, fifth and seventh Prime Minister of Australia from 24 Sept. 1903 to 27 April 1904, 5 July 1905to 13 Nov. 1908 and 2 June 1909 to29 April 1910 respectively. Definitely, for interestingbiographical/historical reasons, he not only became interested in India but also an admirer of India at a time when India was the 'most colonised' country, hardly worthy of mention. But Deakin wrote a whole two books on India - Temple and Tomb in India (1893) and Irrigated India (1893) - andthrough a remarkable time defying mental act was able to see India as 'it is/has been', free of the misleading mist of colonial appearance. This paper will explore the contours of this portrait and suggest that it is possible to see the truth beyond winds of fashion such as 'globalisation'.
Shoma A. Chatterjee: "Literature and cinema mainstream and off-mainstream"

Literature describes visuals in words. Cinema brings words to life through visuals, sound, music, dialogue, acting and splicing or mixing of shots generally known as editing. This, very simply, is the basic difference between literature and cinema. Cinema, an eclectic art form, has borrowed generously from earlier art forms like music, poetry, painting and architecture. The reverse has also been true. Novelists too, have learnt a lot from cinema. Two main views of the function of art have prevailed through history: art as imitation or mimesis, the idea Aristotle introduced in his Poetics; and art as subjective expression, the idea dominant in criticism since the 19th century. In the former, the emphasis is on a work's relationship to the outside world, which it imitates, and its effect on the audience. In the latter, art expresses something in the artist - a private vision or an accurate imitation, political propaganda or visual abstraction - and the critical emphasis is on the work of art itself? Adaptation of a literary work for cinema is not synonymous with a betrayal of the original work that motivated the adaptation. An adaptation can be 'bad' if the film itself is 'bad' in terms of its quality as a film per se, and not because it has been adapted from a literary source. Some films, despite remaining fiercely loyal to the original literary.The film in fact, is a larger piece of work than a novel because a film uses the technological tools to bring the story alive on screen to create a living ambience through sound, light, actors, music, editing, dialogue, production design, costume, etc. On the other hand, it limits the scope of the viewer/spectator to exercise his imaginative and creative powers that literature offers its reader. A film adaptation, at its very best, is by no means a lesser work
of art than its literary source. Sunil Gangopadhyay, whose Pratidwandi (The Rival) was made into a film by Satyajit Ray who retained the original title of the story, has gone on to admit that by changing the original closure to write a different ending to the film, Ray had indeed raised the film to a plane higher than the story it was based on. (371 words)
Murari Prasad: "Interrogating the Global : Arundhati Roy's Writings"

This paper deals with Arundhati Roy's critical interrogation of the current quickening of globalization, driven by her preoccupation with the postcolonial issues, such as marginality, difference and resistance. Roy, the 1997 Booker Prize winner and one ofIndia's celebrated writers in English, is a globally active opponent of globalization. In her widely published recent essays, she has pointed to the tangled intertwining of transnational corporate capital and the domestic policies of the Indian nation state which typifies the radical criticism of globalisation's potential for structural violence, particularly in rural India. While Roy's recent non-fiction writings, for example, the essays collected in The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2001) and The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2004) have attracted considerable critical attention, her perspective on the globalization problematic in her novel The God of Small Things (1997) has not been adequately evaluated. I wish to argue that Roy's novel resonates with the transnationalnature of globalization as well as withan 'anti-industrialist, proartisan' concerns, while her widely circulated critical writingsproblematiseglobalization as a unidirectionalmovement from the 'Centre' to the periphery with neo-colonial potentialbacked by time-space compression and inter-dependentmaster processesof nation state and worldwide capitalist system. My attempt in this paper is to focus on the continuity of concerns in Roy's interventions in the issue of globalization as is evident in both her fiction and non-fiction.
Jharna Sanyal: "Writing to Oneself: Reading A House for Mr Biswas and Myal as Narratives of Illness and Recuperation"
Many postcolonial novels act on the issue of the Imperial production and colonial consumption of 'knowledge'. Alien as the imported system of education and its facilitating tools are to the new physical and cultural topographies they nonetheless presume to establish a homogenous, 'universal' world of ideas and perceptions which at best remain virtual/ 'in spite of' to the consenting colonized
subject. The self/spirit draining attempts at accommodating oneself to this world results in the pathological symptoms of anxiety, dis/ease and de/formation as manifest in the two Caribbean novels, V S Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas(1961) andErna Brodber's Myal (1988).In the shadow-life of these halfmade societies Naipaul demonstrates the way reading induces symptoms of depression, addiction, frenzy, fear and delirium. Brodber's engagement with the fetishization of colonial education evinces similar dystrophic manifestations. Both the novels suggest that to write about the experience, to act on it, is to write to oneself, write to recuperate.
Debiprasad Bhattacharya: "Writing Marginality: AReading of Tarashankar Bandopadhyay's 'Dakini' ( Witch)"

The paper focuses on one of the perennial problems of the village community in Bengal.- to look upon a woman as a "witch"- a woman with sinister intention, and the consequent attempt to marginalize the woman. Even now-a-days the newspaper reports on the suspect women/women burnt to death are not rare.Tarashankar's short narrative forgrounds the problem, although the narrative is also enriched with the deep psychological probing into the character concerned, so typical of Tarashankar.
Santosh Chakrabarty: "Sarojini Naidu-The Poet 'Autochthonous'"

Critics have sometimes dismissed Sarojini Naidu as "outmoded, surpassed and demythicized". Some speak of the verbosity of her verse, while some others have lamented that her poetical themes are not 'progressive'.But her poetry is deeply rooted to the soil of India and bears out as truly 'autochthonous' by virtue of her unique ethnocentricity and an innate love for the flora and fauna, music and colour of the Indian life that she saw around her. A sure parameter of progressivism is her attitude to the life of the toilers like the palanquin bearers that is the subaltern. While a casual and cursory glance at her poetry will reveal a playfulness skimming over the surface, one finds underneath a close interest in the vast pageant of life unfolding before her in the streets ofHyderabad and in the backwaters of the country. There emerges from her portrayal of the life of the toiling masses - the palanquin bearers, Coromandel fishers et al - a solidarity with the common walks of life, linking her to the collectivity of human existence.
T.Sumathy: "Disjuncture between the euphemistic globalisation and the truths about it: a study of the Tamil Dalit Theatre in India."
"The Post colonial, with all its distortions, has afforded a place in the global sun for some modern Anglophone Indian writers; will world literature do the same for older, indigenous literatures?" is a very important question raised by Harish Trivedi, Vice-President, IACLALS (Indian Association foe commonwealth Literature and language studies) at a National Seminar in 2005. This made me think about the contribution of TAMIL DALIT WRITING in India(indigenous literature) particularly TAMIL DALIT THEATRE to the history of "Transcultural literature". In today's world of Western capitalism glorified as liberalization, Indians have to lose their names and identities for the sake of survival. Tamilians, in India, with their rich cultural and literary heritage, have a strong voice to protest against all forms of hegemony, colonial and bureaucratic, British and newer imperial ones. My paper addresses the issues of binaries (margin vs centre, indigenous vs imperials) and 'protest' as the voice of post colonial texts, with particular reference to the Tamil Dalit Theatre, as a weapon of social change. For Homi Bhabha, "the nation remains a site of heterogeneity and difference". This paper attempts to illustrate his idea by studying a Tamil Dalit play, "Koppu"' written by a Tamil Dalit Writer Pratiba Jayachandran. The play deals with the problems of an aboriginal tribe in TamilNadu, the Irulas - pointing out the disjuncture between the euphemistic globalisation and the truths about it - how the hammer fell on the sons of the soil.
Syomajit Samanta: "Fumanchu versus Boomerang: Asian-Australian Cultural Interface in 19th & 20th Australia"
Asian religion, Nationalism, Ideology & Culture made a startling impact on Australian psyche in the 19th & 20th centuries. At first it was the Indian resistance to British Imperialism, which caught the Australian imagination, esp. in the writings of Deakin. Later it was in the form of Japanese & Chinese immigration thatAsia invaded Australia both physically & ideologically. 20th century saw the formation & resurgence of a new Australia in the light of such Asian onslaught. Apart from Eurocentric resistance it was in the main the native Australian resilience that made possible the emergence of modern Australia.
Against the influx of invasion narratives, this paper explores & posits the modalities & implications of the Australian counter-attack against such influx of Asian ideology,& which was both European & typically native Australian in character. Hence modern Australia is a product of such a hybrid culture.

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School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

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School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

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School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

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Debiprasad Bhattacharya: "Writing Marginality: AReading of Tarashankar Bandopadhyay's 'Dakini' ( Witch)"

Santosh Chakrabarty: "Sarojini Naidu-The Poet 'Autochthonous'"

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies Faculty of Arts

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