Monday ~ 22 June, 8:00 PM US Eastern / Tuesday ~ 23 June, 10:00 AM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: The panel centers Asia-Pacific literary geographies, specifically networks and modes of solidarity found across the diverse locations of the region. The two speakers of the panel, who completed their doctoral degrees from the same university based in Australia, will be presenting on how peripheralised locations become sites of alternative imaginaries through examinations of transnational encounters and narrative networks.
The first paper’s topic is sightings of ‘Min Min Lights’ in the Australian bush, especially in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. These ghostly lights are both a common sighting for travellers on roads and have a special spiritual significance to indigenous communities. This paper will examine sightings of the lights through the eyes of one Pak Daud, a migrant to Western Australia from Malaysia, who was featured on a horror podcast called ‘Lights Out Ghost Stories’, which focuses on ghost stories from Southeast Asia and Australia. His experiences of travelling on the highway in Western Australia and experiencing several ghostly sightings and happenings will be read against an interlocutor, named Sharyn, who is from an indigenous community, and who mediates Pak Daud’s recollections of his ghostly experiences against and through the Aboriginal understandings of the happenings in the episode. Her reading demonstrates that Pak Daud may have come in contact with some supernatural beings. The paper argues that such experiences form a unique bridge between the Southeast Asian and Australian indigenous cultures, especially through the supernatural. The paper also highlights the mixing of migrant narratives to form new Australasian stories, especially through the Western Australian experience.
The second paper juxtaposes contemporary Indigenous texts from Australia and India, namely A Most Peculiar Act (2014) by Marie Munkara of Rembarranga and Tiwi descent and Mari (2010) by Easterine Kire, a Naga writer. Both novels represent events which take place during World War II from Indigenous women’s perspectives. The paper will show how when A Most Peculiar Act is read alongside Mari, the weaving of intimate lives and complex and contested relationships of the Indigenous women characters of the texts offers other possible ways to map the events of World War II. Like the first paper, the intention is to seek connections across what dominant frameworks keep separate.
PARTICIPANTS:
Sandeep Singh
Priyanka Shivadas