Thursday ~ 25 June, 8:30 PM US Eastern / Friday ~ 26 June, 10:30 AM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: Contemporary Australian women’s war fiction is iconoclastic in its impetus to decode long histories of silence and marginalisation. Both papers in this panel approach the topic of war from new and often-neglected perspectives: the one, from that of Australian women’s engagement with war through relationships forged at home or overseas; the other, from the viewpoints of a Sri-Lankan Australian diasporic writer and an Australian First Nations’ writer. Both papers argue for women’s voices on war to be attended to, with contemporary novels inviting a gendered and racialised version of war that has hitherto been largely ignored.
Sue Kossew’s paper, “The (Global) War Romance: War Bride Novels by Contemporary Australian Women Writers”, engages with contemporary Australian women’s texts that are concerned with ethical questions and relationships that emerge from women’s wartime experiences. It examines the genre of the war romance, showing its capaciousness and ability to deal with the complexities of cross-cultural intimacy brought about by war. It does so by analysing two novels – Alli Parker’sAt the Foot of the Cherry Tree (2023 and Eleanor Limprecht’s The Passengers (2018) – that address the issue of war brides, demonstrating how this genre, often thought to be lightweight and escapist, has the potential to raise serious feminist issues about the role of women and of “transgressive” sexualities in war.
Anne Brewster’s paper “The Representation of War in Contemporary Australian Women’s Literary Fiction” starts by examining how Shankari Chandran’s diasporic novel Song of the Sun God represents the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war. Examining the risks of graphic violence and the trope of the wound it poses questions about agency and gendered subjectivities in war. It goes on to read Melissa Lukashenko’s recent novel Edenglassie in the context of Rachel Perkins’ work on the Australian wars, asking what it might mean, both for First Nations’ writers and for the nation itself, to conceive of relations between settler invaders and Indigenous people as warfare. In engaging with diasporic and First Nations’ texts, it speculates about these texts in the context of the broader enquiry – who controls the narrative of the nation’s violent history – in order to disrupt dominant narratives.
PARTICIPANTS:
Sue Kossew
Anne Brewster