InASA is pleased to announce the publication of the first book in the new series Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. This interdisciplinary book series showcases dynamic, innovative research on contemporary and historical Australian culture. It aims to foster interventions in established debates on Australia as well as opening up new areas of enquiry that reflect the diversity of interests in the scholarly community. The series includes research in a range of fields across the humanities and social sciences, such as history, literature, media, philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies and politics.
The first book in the series is Geoff Rodoreda: The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction. This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised Indigenous Australians’ customary «native title» to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction.
For more details about the book and InASA’s series with Peter Lang, edited by Anne Brewster, please see https://www.peterlang.com/view/product/78495?tab=aboutauthor.