In this ground-breaking book, Judy Atkinson skilfully and sensitively takes readers into the depths of sadness and despair and, at the same time, raises us to the heights of celebration and hope. She presents a disturbing account of the trauma suffered by Australia's Indigenous people and the resultant geographic and generational 'trauma trails' spread throughout the Country. Then, through the use of a culturally appropriate research approach called Dadirri: Listening to one another, Judy presents and analyses the stories of a number of Indigenous people. From her analysis of these 'stories of pain, stories of healing', she is able to point both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous readers in the direction of change and healing.
In 1969 Kim Janik was a young man shining with promise?handsome, brilliant, studying at Harvard on a physics scholarship?and he was in love with Laurie Alberts, a troubled teenager from a wealthy Boston suburb. Twenty-five years later, when Kim?s naked and decomposing body was discovered on the Wyoming prairie, one photograph?that of the Harvard junior and the seventeen-year-old?was found in his abandoned car. This book is Alberts?s attempt to piece together what happened in between. An accomplished novelist, Alberts brings to her task the searching intelligence, clear-eyed candor, and narrative grace that have marked her previous books. She painstakingly recreates her turbulent relationship with Kim and traces the twisted course that led to his eventual ruin. A story of obsessive love, societal upheaval, and the warring impulses of survival and self-destruction, Fault Line moves beyond the limits of the traditional memoir into the realms of biography and literary journalism. With interviews and letters, Alberts augments her lucid reflections in an effort to comprehend Kim?s life and death and her place in both. The result is a singular work that melds the inner and outer worlds with a seamless intensity.
Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities investigates how the experience of slowness in contemporary narrative practices can create a vision of interconnectedness between human communities and the nonhuman world. Here, slowness is not a matter of measurable time but a transformative experience for audiences of contemporary narratives engaging with the ecological crisis. While climate change is a scientific abstraction, the imagination of slowness turns it into a deeply embodied and affective experience. Marco Caracciolo explores the value of slowness in dialogue with a wide range of narratives in various media, from prose fiction to comic books to video games. He argues that we need patience and an eye for complex patterns in order to recognize the multiple threads that link human communities and the slow-moving processes of climate and geological history. Decelerating attention offers important insight into human societies' relations with the nonhuman materialities of Earth's physical landscapes, ecosystems, and atmosphere. Caracciolo centers the experiential effects of narrative and offers a range of theoretically grounded readings that complement the formal language of narrative theory. These close readings demonstrate that slowness is not a matter of measurable time but a "thickening" of attention that reveals the deeply multithreaded nature of reality. The importance of this realization cannot be overstated: through an investment in the here and now of experience, slow narrative can help us manage the uncertainty of living in an era marked by dramatically shifting climate patterns.
This book offers a unique focus on the everyday ethics of community development practice in the context of local and global struggles for equity and social justice. Contributors from around the world (from India to the Netherlands and USA) grapple with ethical dilemmas and tensions, including how to: respect and learn from Indigenous values and philosophies; challenge environmental destruction; gain consent in divided communities; maintain or breach professional boundaries; and develop new paradigms for transformative community organising, sustainable development and ethically-sensitive practice. Offering theoretical frameworks, philosophical perspectives and practical case examples (from sex worker collectives to tree action groups and Australian Indigenous communities) this book is essential reading for community-based practitioners, students and academics.
What are memories to us that live and die; Is it joy, pain, regret, hope, pride, hatred. Do those memories become the things we cherish for a lifetime? If the mind forgets does our heart remember? All these things wrapped in emotions and feelings; do these memories make us mortal, do they make us human? In a world of legends, where religion, science, and magic meld together, there are those who live their lives as well as they can, holding on to their memories and allowing their feelings to guide and move them toward a better future through life and into death. And then there are those whose lives are unending, everlasting, and unchangingthe Amara the Immortals. Four lives have begun to move along a path bound to the fate of every immortal. Although their lives cannot be given up or taken, they move according to a destinya cursethat was left behind by those of the past many centuries ago. A prophecy has foretold the deaths of the deathless, but who or what could bring an end to the Immortals? In this novel, the immortals must face the possibility of extinction as the events of an ancient prophesy begin to unfold.
Visitors to the Red Centre come looking for the real Australia, but find a place both beautiful and disturbing. There is wilderness, desire and an Aboriginal philosophy of home. But there is also the confusing countenance of the Australian frontier, a meeting place between black and white, ancient and modern. Songlines and Fault Lines explores the Red Centre through the eyes of those who have walked it, in six remarkable stories that have shaped our nation. It follows Aboriginal Dreamtime Ancestors along a songline, trudges with John McDouall Stuart as he crosses the continent, and walks the Finke River in the footsteps of anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow. It keeps pace with conservationist Arthur Groom as he reimagines the country's heart as tourist playground, ponders a philosophy of walking with British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, and then strolls the grog-troubled streets of Alice Springs with Eleanor Hogan. Retracing time-worn pathways and stories of Australia's centre, Glenn Morrison finds fresh answers to age-old queries.
Stevie is 17. She's peak cool, or so she thinks. In the middle of the wide-eyed stagger from girlhood to womanhood Stevie is sent to live in the middle of nowhere with her grandma. Suffolk – the home of doggers, folklore and Stan. Stan is peak geek, not that he knows. There are secrets in the marshland, songs that will show Stevie the way. Interwoven with beautiful live folk music from award-winning band TRILLS. Songlines is a coming-of-age love story in all its awkward teen glory. This edition is published to coincide with the production at the Pleasance Courtyard Beneath, Edinburgh in August 2018 presented by HighTide and DugOut Theatre.
The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that provides a literary analysis of Cobain’s creative writings, Arthur Flannigan Saint-Aubin’s The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain’s Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and songs crafted by Nirvana’s iconic front man from the perspective of cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate Cobain’s texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions of his art. Cobain’s distinctive version of grunge, understood as a subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an understanding of the self as part of a larger social order. Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain’s writings independently of the artist’s biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In turn, through Saint-Aubin’s elegant analysis, Cobain’s creative writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By foregrounding Cobain’s ability to challenge coextensive links between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon’s works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and perform antiracist critiques of American culture.
Berrigan uses the story of Job to ignite our religious imagination and show us the way to effective protest and true faith. Continuing his series of livel reflections on Scripture, he inspires us to action and assures us of God's fidelity.
The uncertainties and newness that surround us today prompt radical questions about ourselves and our relationship with the external world. How do and can we belong to the places and spaces of today? Movement and Belonging: Lines, Places, and Spaces of Travel describes current realities and suggests ways in which you can define yourself in an ever-changing world. Using the travel writings of V. S. Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick White, and D. H. Lawrence, Movement and Belonging demonstrates that «authentic» travel - embracing changing boundaries and cultures - enables you to create sites of belonging where you can find your sense of self.
