50 research outputs found
Fielding Peter Carey: economy, archive, celebrity
No full text© 2018 Dr. Keyvan AllahyariThis thesis accounts for a method of reading Carey’s fiction as works of national literature in the minor register (colonial, peripheral, small) which refract a sense of the possibility of circulation in transnational literary markets. The publication of Carey’s debut work, The Fat Man in History, by the University of Queensland Press in 1974 coincided with the termination of The Traditional Markets Agreement, which resulted in assisting American publishers to roam more freely in the Australian literary market. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the literary field, capital, and habitus, my thesis starts by examining the publication of The Fat Man as a microevent to better understand the macroevent of Carey’s position-taking in the transnational marketplace. The mid-1970s shifted Carey’s position in the field and established a trajectory through which he accumulated significant cultural and economic capital in the following decades. This method interrogates Carey’s rising visibility in relation to the construction of a new status for the postcolonial authors and the possibilities of the global publishing industry since the 1960s throughout to the present moment, including the politics of literary prizes and literary festivals, the rise of literary agents, the commodification of literary archives, and the merging of conglomerate publishing houses.
Carey’s fiction exhibits the anxieties of an Australian author ensnared in neoliberal systems of literary production and distribution, a free market economy biased against national territories (such as Australia) on the periphery of a world republic of letters. Drawing on the sociological paradigm of Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis asks how, and to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the global forces that produce and distribute his books and celebrity? And what is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? Thus, my study offers a lateral examination of two interrelated aspects of Carey’s fiction. On the one hand, it captures a continuum of Australian and transnational practices of literary distinction and advancement that governed the critical and financial success of Carey’s fiction; on the other, it produces insights into the structural homologies between the literary spaces that Carey inhabits and those of his Australian characters confined to minor systems of cultural production and consumption
From Corpus to Bio-Text; Peter Carey’s Archives as Literary Networks
No full textCarey's archives add a new facet to Carey’s public image as an Australian author. In principle, the archive is directed at posterity, defying the ephemeral nature of “personality” pieces about the writer, a phenomenon that Grahame Turner has discussed in terms of Carey’s active participation in accumulating recognition amounting to the construction of Carey’s author-persona as a “national celebrity” (136). My interest in this essay is to explore the ways that Carey’s archives contribute to our understanding of productive mechanisms of his celebrity. In doing so, I theorize the formation and the significance of Carey’s archives both as texts and objects. I argue that the archiving of Carey is energized by a collective investment by a body of cultural participants who have a stake in promoting the now ‘globalised’ author. This has ultimately resulted in relocalising the ‘corpus’ of the New York based writer back in Australia, and particularly in the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. This archive has been regularly updated alongside Carey’s growing oeuvre. In this parallel literary space, however, Carey’s cultural agency continues to manipulate his public persona.
Undocumented Futures: Afrofeminist conviviality in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street
No full textThis article reads Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) alongside what I call Afrofeminist conviviality as a form of resistance that enables repair on two levels. It defers the trafficked sex worker’s social death, ensnared in the politics of undocumented labour migration and modern slavery. It also gestures, however provisionally, towards the possibility of flourishing for the subaltern subject outside the liberal, moralist binaries of freewill and coercion. On Black Sisters’ Street interweaves stories by four undocumented West African women trafficked across the Black Atlantic, from Lagos, Nigeria, to Antwerp, Belgium. Afrofeminist conviviality can capture something of both the historical weight of resistance and the trajectorial elasticity for the undocumented African sex worker towards less violent futures.
It, thus, communicates a sense of becoming that is caring, affirmative and recuperative, while being incomplete, irregular and irreverent. Thinking with Afrofeminist conviviality in On Black Sister’s Street allows for accounting the reparative possibilities for the trafficked sex workers against the sheer cruelty of the global sex market. At the same time, On Black Sisters’ Street remains resolutely fugitivist in its hope for the thriving of the trafficked women in their undocumented futures, however unauthorised, informal and outlawed those may be
Identity is cruel : capital, gimmick and surveillance in the Australian post-diasporic short story
No full text
