Seminars

Distinguished Egyptian American author and critic Ihab Hassan on the importance of the humanities. Listen to Ihab Hassan's full seminar presentation.

Our Next Seminar

Wednesday 30 May, 2pm, Bankstown Campus, Room 3.G.55. Sagar Dan on 'Australian Aboriginal Literature: Transnational Subjectivities in India'.

In the early 1980s a gradual interest in Australian literature began to develop in India. But Australian literature was still included under the general rubric of Commonwealth Literature or, later, Postcolonial Literature. The central argument of this paper is to examine the nature of Indian subjectivities in coming to terms with Australian Aboriginal Literature. The central research questions that come up are: why did the Indian researchers and academics show more interest in Aboriginal writers than in “White” Australian authors? Does it show that the Indian mind still distanced itself from “Whiteness” as a colonial subject position? Or does it appropriate, as Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark, a problematic of “whiteness studies”? Or does the Indian mind suffer from a critical angularity that misreads “intercultural knowledge”? In this paper I shall also try to elaborate Aboriginal Literature as a transnational subject in terms of the critical responses that it received in India. Aboriginal Literature has been re-discovered in India in terms of purely Indian subjectivities which may be largely different from Euro-Australian responses to Aboriginal Literature. I shall therefore try to explore the Indian subject position which has re-shaped and, possibly, re-constructed Aboriginal literature in India.
 
Sagar Dan is a Research Scholar at the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Burdwan, West Bengal, India where he is completing a doctorate titled ‘Contestations and Negotiations: A Study of Mudrooroo’s Novels’  

All welcome. RSVP/info writing@uws.edu.au

2012 Seminar Program and Recordings

Our 2012 seminar program includes papers from Centre members and esteemed visiting scholars. You can view our seminar program (semester 1) and listen to recordings of our seminars.

Our seminars are free and open to visitors from outside the university. If you want to come along to one of our seminars simply RSVP by sending an email to writing@uws.edu.au indicating which seminar you wish to attend.

You can also download our seminar program for 1st semester 2012.

2011 Seminar Program

Alongside the work of Centre members and students the 2011 seminar program featured papers by visiting scholars including-

  • Valerie Henitiuk (University of East Anglia) Optical Illusions? Literary Translation as a Refractive Process,
  • Teresa Stoppani (University of Greenwich) Dust reversals. Dustings, vacuum cleaners, (war) machines and the disappearance of the interior,
  • Ira Raja (Dehli and La Trobe Universities) The Elevating Influence of Friendship: Interiority, Sisterhood and Marriage in late 19th century India
  • David Damrosch (Harvard University) The Globe Writes Back: Englishes Today
  • Hanifa Deen (author) Ali Abdul vs the King: Muslim Stories From the Dark Days of White Australia


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