Abstract: Taking the form of a discussion among an art historian, a curator and an artist, the article explores the assumption that it is love, rather than material gain, that motivates art and cultural workers. Addressing the internalisation of the ideology that one loves one's labour, the interlocutors consider the gendered and class conditions of work in the cultural and academic sectors. Reading ‘theory’ against ‘practice’, they reflect on their own work experiences and upbringings, their curatorial research, and their readings of feminist and Marxist theories of artistic and feminised labour. The discussion considers how the precarious conditions of cultural labour today divide and isolate workers, immersing them in antagonism and competition, and how reflections within feminist art history and theory have possibly downplayed the ongoing (rather than historical) importance of class as well as reproductive labour. Highlighting the dangers of over-identifying with work, the three contributors consider the potential of dis-identifying from work roles and from institutional conventions as one strategy that can potentially challenge the exploitation of the self as well as others. The article concludes with a consideration of how ‘labours of love’ might be collectively revalued and prioritised.

Abstract: This article approaches the optic of ‘reproduction’ in feminist theory and politics from two sides: a) the discussion of social reproduction currently at the top of the agenda of materialist feminisms, that is as a specific modality of gendered, racialised and often unwaged labour; and b) the sense in which social reproduction can be taken as the ‘reproduction of the conditions of production’, in Louis Althusser's analysis. These two approaches to the question of reproduction are used to open a path to a sample of historical and contemporary art practices, readable either in terms of a feminist deployment of reproduction as a spectrum of gendered tasks, or in terms of performing the impasses of a kind of social ‘non-reproduction’ that belongs to the second type, with the social reproduction perspective assuming the function of institutional or, perhaps, ‘infrastructural’ critique. The article covers the period between the 1970s and the present.

Abstract: This article explores the emphasis on usefulness in contemporary art, focusing on social practice art in the United States and Europe through Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s establishment of the ‘Asociacion de Arte Util’ in 2011, and the rebranding of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) as a ‘useful museum’. The article addresses the affirmation of usefulness and ‘use values’ within these case studies and beyond in relation to Marxist, post-Marxist, and feminist theories of social reproduction and the state. By attending to issues of citizenship, race, and migration, the article asks how we should approach the aesthetic and political stakes of artworks that strive to be ‘useful’ through performing tasks associated with social reproduction as they have historically taken place in the home or via the welfare state.

Abstract: The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp at objects and what connects us to them and them to us and us to each other, and then slings away the safety wheels by wondering: who we are anyway? But what happens to the essay in the age of 'hyperobjects' (Morton 2013) like global warming? This essay examines how the anti-methodical techniques of the essay (personal, lyric) might be placed to respond to life in the Anthropocene, when the 'I' of the essayist finds itself in increasingly uncharted waters, when 'nature' itself, let alone 'human nature', begin to look like quaint conceptual knick-knacks, and when humans can no longer claim special ontological status over nonhumans. Philosophers, anthropologists, environmental humanists and other scholars are increasingly experimenting with modes of writing enmeshing scientific data and critical theory with affectively charged, embodied and intimate accounts. At the same time, essayists are rethinking the boundaries of the personal, and trying new ways to write from a standpoint rejecting human/nonhuman binaries. This essay seeks to draw connections across the disciplines, to invite further alliances between creative writers and fellow academics, as together we essay the Anthropocene with entangled nonfiction.

Abstract: This article considers the use of diary entries as primary source material in autoethnographic research. It examines how the act of diary writing can reveal a trajectory into, and away from, an experience of depression and how diary entries can provide grounds for conjecture about possible futures and imagined self-narratives. It describes how ‘radical courage’, as identified by Phillips, can displace suicidal ideation and bolster a new self-narrative of an imagined future. The article highlights the value of diaries. More than a source of raw data for research and creative writing projects, they offer diarists a safe place to explore and create alternative and productive selfnarratives. In their unedited state, they are a first-person, present-tense record of emotional states, showing how context and events impact upon an individual’s life. Diary entries can reveal to the diarist and researcher alike the beginnings of a new selfnarrative that is not yet fully imagined nor articulated. The article includes selected diary entries and reflections on depression as a lived experience to show the connection between radical courage and a narrative of the future. This narrative form – a narrative of the imagined future – is commended for its therapeutic potential as a cognitive strategy to build resilience. Through writing and speaking, the story develops as it is lived; by being lived, the story becomes embodied

Abstract: This article compares and contrasts two monumental architectural ensembles: Walter Sisulu Square of Dedication in Kliptown, Johannesburg, opened in 2005 by President Thabo Mbeki; and The Palace of Culture and Science, a Stalinist skyscraper ‘gifted’ to Warsaw by the Soviet Union in 1955. This architectural juxtaposition serves as the point of departure for the article's two, interconnected key themes: an inquiry into the complex continuities and contradictions between the political and economic reconfigurations experienced by South Africa after 1994 and Poland after 1989; and an exploration into what the author defines as the ‘political morphology’ of monumental architecture. The bulk of the article is concerned with a critical investigation into how scholars conceive of the relationship between the morphological (spatial, geometric and aesthetic) characteristics of built form, and their political or economic correlates. Must there be – as the scholarly consensus suggests – an intrinsic connection between democracy and architectural humility, and between authoritarianism and monumentality?

Abstract: The concepts of social reproduction and immaterial labour, normally deployed in accounts of art since the 1960s, can and should also be deployed in the examination of earlier periods of art practic...

Abstract: For over two decades, the number of candidates undertaking, and completing, research higher degrees in the discipline of creative arts has continued to grow, yet the anxiety associated with the exegesis, or critical component, to the award has not dissipated. This article reports the views of a small number of research higher degree candidates and their supervisor in response to questions posed by the TEXT ‘Exegesis now’ call for papers. In this sample, the exegesis was perceived as a necessary and useful component to the award by all respondents, who are completing diverse creative projects. However, respondents also express some anxiety and uncertainty over what is required in the exegesis in terms of formal, structural and compositional elements. Discussion of the views expressed by respondents identifies common challenges and proposes a number of strategies that may provide greater certainty and alleviate some of the anxiety for candidates and their supervisors. It includes a template for a comprehensive exegesis and two ways the exegesis can be structured to form a rigorous frame around, and supportive complement to the creative work.

Abstract: The South Asian Network for the Arts (SANA), established in 2000, facilitated artistic exchanges across the highly contested borders in the region. SANA was made up of Khoj in India, Vasl in Pakist...

Abstract: While Canadian scholar Lisa M Fiander argues that fairy tales are ‘everywhere’ in Australian fiction, this paper questions that assertion. It considers what it means for a fairy tale to be ‘in’ a work of contemporary fiction, and posits a classificatory system based on the vocabulary of contemporary music scholarship where a distinction is made between intertextuality that is stylistic and that which is strategic. Stylistic intertextuality is the adoption of features of a style or genre without reference to specific examples, while strategic intertexuality references specific prior works. Two distinct approaches to strategic fairy-tale revision have emerged in Australian writing in recent decades. One approach, exemplified in works by writers including Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan and Juliet Marillier, leans towards the retelling of European fairy tales. Examples include Forsyth’s The Beast’s garden (‘Beauty and the Beast’), Lanagan’s Tender morsels (‘Snow White and Rose Red’) and Marillier’s short story ‘By bone-light’ (‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’). The other, more fractured, approach is exemplified in works by writers including Carmel Bird and Murray Bail, which do not retell fairy tales but instead echo them and allude to them. This paper proposes that recent Australian works that retell fairy tales are less likely to be set in a recognisably Australian context than are works which take a more fractured approach to fairy tale. It also explores the notion that, presently, transporting European fairy tales, whole, into an Australian setting, seems to be a troubling proposition for writers in a post-colonial settler society that is highly sensitised to, but still largely in denial about, its colonial past.

Abstract: The following article attempts to track the points where the imaginings of indigeneity emerged from their colonial context in the form of discursive practices or concepts. the argument is that the origins of these imaginings are located in our shared history of colonisation at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. The main aim of this article is to problematise Western aesthetic discourse and briefly show how contemporary Indigenous art problematises this discourse. This article shows that the mechanism used to assemble these imaginings was configured by an aesthetic of ugliness, particularly of the monstrous. This depiction, constituted by historical processes, established the first discursive rules of the formation of the European conceptualisation of ‘indigeneity’: 1) terror, horror and tragedy, 2) capturing and enslavement, 3) similarity and anthropocentrism, and 4) conquest. These discursive formation processes provide part of the blueprint of the Western imaginings of indigeneity.

Abstract: This article attempts to think about Partition in terms of what Jacques Ranciere calls a distribution or partition (partage) of the sensible, with deep, ongoing ramifications in the present. It exa...

Abstract: First person narratives drawing on experiences in mental health settings and services provide important insights into the lived experience of suffering, healing and recovery. An emerging and influential role within mental health services is that of the 'lived experience' worker. People employed in what are known as 'lived experience' roles have powerful stories to share. The use of personal narrative aids connection with current service users, demonstrating that hope for a better life is possible and challenging stereotypical or stigmatizing attitudes by highlighting shared humanity and common human experiences. This article tells one such story, where parallel narratives and multiple perspectives are used to highlight the benefit of encouraging vulnerability to foster connection.

Abstract: The Australian beach has often been considered in academic approaches as a place of binaries – focusing on either the mythic (Fiske, Hodge and Turner 1987) or the ordinary (Morris 1998). An edge to the Australian continent, the liminal space of the beach is one that has received some attention. Using Edward Soja’s (1996) ‘Thirdspace’ concept allows the beach to challenge the space as a liminality and emerge as a more complex beachspace, both mythic and ordinary and more all at once. The Australian beach is a place of significant beauty, while simultaneously a place of risk and danger. Visitors to the space are immediately warned to only swim between the flags, and many beaches are patrolled for the majority of the day all throughout the year. Technology has been employed to identify risk despite the inherent unpredictability of the beach (such as shark sighting technology, weather predictions, and wave cameras), with an aim to provide a safe, everyday space available to all Australians to use. The potential risks of accidental death are high on the beach; however, many representations of death tend to include homicide or suicide. ‘Facing death’ is interested in examining how Australian writers of the beach portray death. Classic texts like Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957) are discussed alongside more contemporary texts, including Fiona Capp’s Night Surfing (1996), Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), and Romy Ash’s Floundering (2012). These writers portray death as an inevitability or a continual threat. Films such as Newcastle (2008) represent accidental death in a tight knit local community; in comparison Blackrock (1997) deals with both murder and suicide. This paper illustrates how examining the beach as a more complex space by interrogating Australian writing on the subject allows for an interesting understanding of how death is represented on the

Abstract: For creative writers, transmedia storytelling represents the opportunity to craft stories across a diverse narrative ecology often made up of print and digital elements. Increasingly, this requires writers to move beyond linguistic narrative renderings, and embrace the semiotic affordances and limitations of numerous media. While contemporary research highlights the importance of multimodality as a facet of transmedia storytelling, little research has focussed on the ways creative writers might approach such an undertaking. This paper examines several transmedia texts characterised by the role multimodality plays in establishing a narrative that, while dispersed across media, maintains narrative cohesion despite the different modal capacities of the media used. Through considering the factors required in continuing narrative consonance, including character and representation, the paper examines iterative multimodality as a framework for understanding how creative writers leverage narrative modes and interaction within and across media.

Abstract: At the turn of the last century, writers like Atha Westbury and Hume Cook were asking whether Australia had its own fairies, its own fairy tale lore. They attempted to fill the perceived lack of traditional fairy-tale narratives with their own published works of fairy tale. The titles authors chose for their collections – for instance, Olga Ernst’s Fairy tales from the land of the wattle and Annette Kellermann’s Fairy tales of the south seas and other stories – often revealed an overt wish to build a fairy-tale tradition that was distinctly and uniquely Australian. While some of these tales simply relocated existing European tales to the Australian context, most used classic fairy-tale tropes and themes to create new adventures. Other writers and collectors, like K Langloh-Parker, Sister Agnes and Andrew Lang, sought to present Indigenous tales as examples of local folk and fairy tales – a project of flawed good intentions grounded in colonial appropriation. These early Australian publications are largely forgotten and, in many ways, the erasure or forgetting of narratives that were often infused with colonial attitudes to gender, class, race, is far from regrettable. And yet there was a burgeoning local tradition of magical storytelling spearheaded by the delicate fairies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s brush and the gumnut babies of May Gibbs that celebrated the Australian environment, its flora and fauna, populating and decorating new tales for the nation’s children.

Abstract: Based on the research and development of a theatre drama. Silent Sisters, I consider how the partition of India-Pakistan when over ten million people were displaced is remembered in the diasporic context in Britain. These recollections and representations may be explored in terms of three main registers: first, objects and memories from the partition period itself in the subcontinent; second, those that may be from elsewhere but then are embedded in partition contexts; and third, those that throw light on the phenomena of partition from afar through fragments of ‘skipping memories’. The first broad context may encompass imagery that is directly from the period of mass displacement, extremely rare in that most people were too caught up in the urgency of carrying only bare essentials if anything at all lest they be killed, raped and/or looted. The second series of contexts may refer to free-floating representations, created in and on different time-spaces, but once embedded in semiotically rich contexts about partition take on new meanings and resonances that can be equally emotive. Relatedly, a third case is of how objects and memories become part of a generative archive that encompasses a range of media on the theme of partition – a canon that is potentially endless. In this case, the archive is pieced together out of tendrils that remain, tangible and intangible. It is an intersensory archive that is not just retrospective but also future-orientated in terms of what the fragment might catalyse - visual, narrativised, embodied, recited, sung, enacted, and digitalised.

Abstract: Although ecocriticism has roots in Romanticism, much discourse around ecopoetry has come to hinge on a distancing from a ‘Romantic’, ‘ego-driven’ style of poetry, seen to be unethical. Such positions problematize lyric poetry, given its strong association with both Romanticism and the formal centrality of the self. This paper contends that lyric is often conflated with a reductive view of Romanticism and seeks to uncouple the form from such views. Looking to the work of Australian poet Robert Adamson, lyric is framed here as a performative mode rather than a genre, and is presented as an engaged type of ethical discourse which functions via reader answerability. Maintaining a Merleau-Pontean ontology as regards the lyric subject and the dynamic between word and world, and drawing upon Barthes’s use of the term ‘place’, the paper concludes that the lyric can function as a decidedly ethical ecopoetry, in which the place of lyric is also the place of the ecopoetic. Biographical Note Willo Drummond is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Macquarie University and a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award. In 2014 she completed a Master of Research thesis examining the ethics of the lyric mode in Australian ecopoetics, a project which included a small suite of poetry entitled ‘Propagules for Drift and Dispersal’, and a critical analysis of the work of Robert Adamson. Her current research considers extended mind perspectives and creative writing, with a focus on the early notebook practices of U.S. poet Denise Levertov. A poetry reader for Overland Literary Journal, Willo’s writing is published, or forthcoming, in Cordite Poetry Review, Meniscus, The Quarry, Australian Poetry Anthology 2015, Bukker Tillibul and Mascara Literary Review.

Abstract: This paper analyses the institutional relationship between Creative Writing and Literary Studies, with their erstwhile close association and current drift towards disciplinary separation in view. It is in three parts. The first outlines some histories of the academic discipline of Creative Writing in the university. The second examines what’s involved for Creative Writing in discipline formation in the university, and touches on the role played by professional associations (with a particular emphasis on the case of NAWE in Britain). The third part comments on recent moves towards developing Creative Writing Studies.

Abstract: At this time in history, climate change predicts that we are once again dwarfed by nature. Nature is as Massey (2008) suggests, understood as the classic foundations for our contemplation of place and our fascinations with belonging to place. As creative writers, artists and scholars respond to escalating temperatures, rising sea levels and natural disasters, on a daily basis, the threat of climate change events loom large in the contemporary imagination. Humankind’s pride in domination over all things natural is being put to the test, as we begin to anticipate the terrifying spectacle of our own damnation. From an ecological and eco-critical perspective, climate change may be considered, as the contemporary ‘abomination’ as it poses both a moral and a psychological paradox for us all. It is not an hallucinatory fantasy, nor is it a social pathology. Contemporary Australian Gothic drama explores the paradoxical relationship between perceptions of what is absent and what is present, between past and future, between climate, nature and disappearing landscapes and geographies. It is within this paradox of perception that Australian Gothic drama responds to literary legacies of Romanticism as we ‘lament the loss of spiritual connections’ to nature (Bate 1991: 17). This paper discusses the environmental and eco-critical themes embedded in two of my theatrical works, Dust 2016 and Salvation 2013, in which notions of evil in the Romantic sense are discovered in the ecologies of landscape, place and space from which we as humans are, in turn, becoming alienated.

Abstract: This paper proposes an expansion of the field of South Asian Partition Studies to include the work of globally dispersed diasporic artists. Undertaking a detailed study of the work of three contemporary artists, Nilofar Akmut, Zarina Bhimji, and Navin Rawanchaikul, this paper suggests that the legacies of the Partition of British India in 1947 traverse geographical boundaries and have been inherited by a generation who were not witness to its cataclysmic events. In specific artworks, Partition is variously directly or obliquely referenced, and provides a contextual frame for the construction of personal identities. Exhibited in Britain, these artworks also serve to remind audiences of the consequences of British Imperialism, and propose that the Partition of British India should rightly be included in narratives of British History.

Abstract: This paper analyses hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) poetry as examples of the nuclear sublime, which Rob Wilson argues is ‘one of the unimaginable, trans-material grounds of a global condition that, paradoxically, can and must be re- imagined, represented, and invoked to prevent this trauma of negativity from happening in post-Cold War history’ (1989: 1). We argue that of all atomic bomb literature, poetry best captures the devastation of atomic warfare and a message of hope for the future because of its emphasis on the economy of expression and, as Robert Jay Lifton argues, its ‘symbolic transformation’ (1991: 21). The ineffability of experience, explored in the Burkean Romantic Sublime, will be discussed as persisting into the politics of the twentieth century and impacting on definitions of the nuclear sublime. While hibakusha continue to be discriminated against – compounded recently by the ongoing catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex – the nuclear sublime compels them to record their experiences in testimony, literature or poetry or to risk a ‘forgetting’ that may lead to the annihilation of the human race. This paper argues that poetry – specifically tanka and haiku – best captures the nuclear sublime.

Abstract: With attention to the growing prominence of ‘cultural and creative industries’ and the rise of liberal arts education in Hong Kong, this paper presents three case studies of instructors who teach undergraduate Chinese-language creative writing in Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions. The article begins with a brief overview of Chinese-language creative writing programmes and posits three conceptual models of the writing workshop: a site of apprenticeship to foster self-expression, a setting for skills training, and a space for social critique. Given the limited research on Chinese-language creative writing in Hong Kong, the paper documents the experiences of three prominent instructors, Hon Lai-chu, Mary Wong Shuk-han, and Wong Leung-wo. The findings indicate that despite the heterogeneous nature of course goals, class sizes, target students, and instructors’ training and background, all three instructors envision the workshop as a site for mentoring self-expression. While they do not emphasise skills-based teaching, the instructors share an implicit commitment to social criticism in their pedagogy. The paper concludes with reflections on the use of defamiliarisation as a pedagogical practice that underscores this social critique.

Abstract: The essay's capacity to narrate a situated and embodied experience that entwines poetics, politics and affect enables the form a particular methodology. Contemporary critical theorist Rosi Braidotti has argued for the urgent need to revise theoretical aspects of affect and authenticity so as to more fully register the increasingly complex way we experience embodied subjectivity (2013). In this article, I argue that the contemporary literary essayist is well placed to negotiate such a revision, and that renewed interest in the form of the literary essay during the last two decades can be read as a timely contribution to such a project.

Abstract: This article engages with three films by the Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari: The Roof (2006, 61 minutes), Port of Memory (2009, 62 minutes), and Recollection (2015, 70 minutes). My rea...