The essays in ‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling. [NP] Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.
Table of Content
List of Figures; Chapter 1: Introduction: Transcultural Studies in Australian Identity, Paul Longley Arthur; Chapter 2: Remembering Aboriginal Sydney, Peter Read; Chapter 3: Files and Aboriginal Lives: Biographies from an Archive, Anna Haebich; Chapter 4: Writing, Femininity, and Colonialism: Judith Wright, Hélène Cixous, and Marie Cardinal, Alison Ravenscroft; Chapter 5: The Staging of Social Policy: The Photographing of Postwar British Child Migrants, Kerreen Ely-Harper; Chapter 6: Writing Home from China: Charles Allen’s Transnational Childhood, Kate Bagnall; Chapter 7: Australian? Autobiography?: Citizenship, Postnational Self-Identity, and the Politics of Belonging, Jack Bowers; Chapter 8: A Nikkei Australian Story: Legacy of the Pacific War, Yuriko Nagata; Chapter 9: Displaced Persons (1947-1952) in Australia: Memory in Autobiography, Jayne Persian; Chapter 10: Between Utopia and Autobiography: Migrant Narratives in Australia, Katarzyna Kwapisz Williams; Chapter 11: Vietnamese Australian Life Writing and Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues, Michael Jacklin; Chapter 12: Heroes, Legends, and Divas: Framing Famous Lives in Australia, Karen Fox; List of Contributors; Index.
About the author
Paul Longley Arthur is Director of the Centre for Global Issues, and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Edith Cowan University, Australia. He has published widely in cultural and communication studies, biography, history and literature.
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