Reading Across Borders: Dr Jini Kim Watson with Assoc Prof Debjani Ganguly

Presented as part of the Readings Across Borders Seminar Series The Australian Government’s extreme and militarised response to asylum seekers since 2001 has been much criticised, primarily by legal scholars from the standpoint of international and human rights law. The goal of this paper, in contrast, situates “The Pacific Solution” as part of a longer story of postcolonial sovereignty in Oceania. Rather than focusing on the relationship between a paranoid Australian sovereignty and the figure of the refugee, I consider the necessary and prior constitution of Pacific Islands as potential external detention sites through a lens attentive to colonial history, decolonizing desires and contemporary regional relationships. To do so, the paper examines two key literary representations that address the postcolonial political imaginaries of Oceania: first, the groundbreaking novel written in the waning years of Australian colonial rule, The Crocodile (1970), by Papuan educator and politician Vincent Eri; and second, a collection of satirical short stories from well known Tongan-Fijian cultural critic and writer Epeli Hau’ofa, Tales of the Tikongs (1983). In reading these texts for their depictions of colonial and neocolonial relationships in the Pacific, I trace important transformations in the configuration of sovereignty, nation, culture and territory. Such shifts, I argue, create the pre-conditions for our twenty-first century moment in which the body of the asylum-seeker functions as a new form of global currency. The paper’s purpose is to show, from a literary and cultural perspective, how the expanding phenomenon of offshore detention both relies on and reproduces the unevenness of sovereignty across those nations involved in the “Pacific Solution.” Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University and, during 2014-2015, Honorary Fellow at the Research Unit in Public Culture, University of Melbourne. Her research centres on postcolonial Asia/Pacific literatures, urbanism and political modernity. She is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (2011) and her articles have appeared in Postcolonial Studies, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Contemporary Literature, and Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry amongst others. The Reading Across Borders series, convened by the English Program in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, brings writers of renown and experts in the study of literature to ANU. Popular authors and famously difficult books will be examined in an intimate and informative forum. Experts in the study of literature and culture and prominent Australian and international authors will address questions such as: What makes particular novels significant to generations of readers? The ‘Reading Across Borders’ series will bring discussion of important works of literature from around the world to interested readers from ANU and beyond. RSVPs through Eventbrite are essential: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/reading-across-borders-dr-jini-kim-watson...