Transnationalism has been the subject of much scholarly reflection over the last two decades. In one of the earliest definitions of the term, historian Aihwa Ong suggests:
Trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism.Footnote1
This special issue seeks to understand how transnational Australian identity is represented by authors within their life writing. It asks how they portray the transversal, the transactional, the translational and the transgressive within their self-reflexive writing. The special issue is based upon a selection of papers given at the fourth Asia-Pacific Conference of the International Association for Biography and Autobiography (IABA) at the University of Adelaide in November 2021. This conference brought together over 80 academics from across the world, in hybrid format, around the theme “Life Writing: Transnationalism, Translingualism, Transculturalism”. The conference was multilingual and engaged with life writing across languages, cultures and national borders. The articles selected for this issue encompass analyses of refugee writing, travel writing and migrant writing, for example, and underscore the multilingual and multifaceted nature of Australian writing more broadly.
In the opening article, based upon a keynote address delivered at the conference, Anne Pender considers the uses of biography in contemporary Australia. In an essay that frames this volume with attention to the transactional and the translational dimensions of life writing, Pender discusses what she views as the democratic underpinnings of the genre of biography: that is, its links between the individual, the body politic and history. This article considers the principles that authorise and underpin the writing of contemporary biography in light of the work of American-Canadian biographer Leon Edel, and in view of new infrastructure that embeds biographical inquiry in Australia. It explores the analysis of cause and effect in relation to writing about the creative work of a range of figures in Australian life, all of whom occupy different subject positions in this multicultural society: Mark McKenna, Jenny Hocking and Alexis Wright. Pender considers the specific challenges of writing about living subjects and reflects on methods of translating, transcribing, synthesising and presenting their words in written form. In particular, she examines the value of collective biography as a genre of political significance in a changing society. The notion of collective biography and the stakes of writing transactionally with and for others is explored in several of the other articles in this issue, not least the one that follows Pender’s.
The issue then moves to an analysis of one of the most provocative examples of “Australian life writing” published in recent years, which was also the focus of a recent article in the Journal of Australian Studies.Footnote3 In this essay, Phoebe King maps the Australian reception of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018). No Friend is a hybrid testimonial text that narrates Boochani’s experience of Australia’s brutal border protection policies at the remote camp on Manus Island. “Thumbed” over thousands of text messages sent from a smuggled smartphone to a transnational network of collaborators and translators, Boochani’s text challenges Australian readers to reassess their complicity in these carceral policies that consign asylum seekers to indefinite detention. No Friend was reviewed extensively in mainstream and scholarly publications, and it was awarded prestigious national literary prizes that canonised it as an exceptional work of Australian literature. Newer readings of No Friend engage with it through decolonising and critical Indigenous methodologies and stress the influence of Kurdish traditions of writing and resistance. King’s retrospective view of the text’s movements through Australian literary institutions reveals the value of No Friend’s canonisation within the fraught space of a national literature as an act of both solidarity and dissent. It highlights a progression from the initial Australian recognition of this as a major literary work to its translation into multiple new editions, languages and mediums that continue to inspire new decolonial reading practices.
The focus on refugee life narrative is continued in the third article, but here the scope is broadened to analyse graphic narrative. Within this context of invisibility and atrocity, Shannon Sandford analyses Safdar Ahmed’s Walkley Award–winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre. Published online in early 2015, Villawood documents the lives, experiences and drawings of detainees in Sydney’s notorious Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. This article productively reads Villawood as an example of the vital rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia’s border spaces and to put the personal stories of detainees in dialogue with vast audiences online. Drawing interdisciplinary connections between comics studies and life narrative studies, Sandford explores the radical mobility of webcomics across digital platforms and their popular consumption in the Australian domestic sphere. She argues that webcomics such as Villawood—which bring into focus the brutality of state power—serve an important sociopolitical function in transmitting experiences from the sequestered spaces of detention, and for mobilising digitally networked followings for projects of collective witnessing.
Continuing this exploration of visual and textual narratives, the issue then turns to Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh’s examination of a significant autobiographical graphic novel. The cartoonist C. Friedrich penned The Voyage and Adventures of a Well-Behaved German in Kangarooland (Reise-Abenteuer eines Braven Deutschen im Lande der Kangaroo) in 1918–1919, while imprisoned in an Australian internment camp. Humphrey and Walsh’s analysis approaches this example of graphic life narrative as a representation of transnational displacement. The borders in this text are therefore multiple, and they include the borders of a prisoner-of-war camp in addition to national boundaries. This German migrant’s autobiographical comic thus questions the assumption that the genre originated in the US, where it has been popularised by more recent examples of transnational representation, such as Maus (Spiegelman, 1997), Palestine (Sacco, 2001) and Persepolis (Satrapi, 2007). Instead, Kangarooland adds another layer of understanding to the experience of displacement in early 20th-century Australia and amplifies an important dimension of the multicultural and multilingual nature of Australian writing.
In her contribution to this volume, Mary Besemeres considers the links between language and culture in memoirs by three Australian journalists born to non-Anglo migrant parents. Through a close examination of Manly Girls (1989) by Elisabeth Wynhausen, Whole Wild World (2016) by Tom Dusevic, and Paprika Paradise (2007) and My Family and Other Animus (2018) by James Jeffrey, Besemeres charts the ways that language—as a key dimension of migrant experience somewhat underexamined in comparison to ethnicity and nationality—bears upon each author’s interpretations of history, setting and identity. She employs Paul Friedrich and John Attinasi’s term “linguaculture” as a framework for understanding the role and position of language in works that circulate different ethnocultural perspectives. As transcultural life writing, these memoirs to varying extents capture the interrelatedness of language and culture in “Anglo” Australian contexts from the perspectives of authors growing up in the mid-20th century. Adjacent to this argument, Besemeres also reflects on Wynhausen’s, Dusevic’s and Jeffrey’s shared professional backgrounds as journalists, which inflect the stories they tell of growing up in bilingual families located in predominantly monolingual communities.
Kylie Cardell rounds off this special issue with an article that discusses three essays published online during 2020–2022 by Australian memoirists Amani Haydar (author of The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (author of I Choose Elena and My Body Keeps Your Secrets), each of which reflects on the craft of writing about trauma and explores the author’s own motivations, intentions and ethics for doing so. While writers writing about the craft of writing is nothing new, Cardell argues that these essays notably also focus on publishing and promoting memoir—on what happens after the writing has been done—and that this shift is significant. Cardell draws on Gillian Whitlock’s conception of paratext in relation to the ethics of reading memoir and considers Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s recognition of the impact of “afterlives” for autobiographical representation in order to probe the ways in which paratexts represent translational and transactional processes. This article argues that paratextual essays productively negotiate further with the formal, cultural and generic limits of memoir as social justice, for example, by calling for attention to the cultural conditions that shape memoir as a commodity. Through this lens, the article explores how authors negotiate the aftermath of publication, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of how memoirs translate trauma as both artistic expressions and instruments of social justice. Cardell calls for a deeper engagement with the “afterlives” of these narratives, recognising the ongoing impact on authors as they navigate the intersection of personal vulnerability, public reception, and the ever-present pressures of their evolving translation of the literary marketplace.
Debates over life writing/autobiography have been present in the pages of this very journal over many years. Back in 2002, Kate Douglas examined life writing and the notion of the “universal autobiographer” in two works by Indigenous women writers that dealt with questions of production, circulation and reception.Footnote4 The article focused on the notion of life writing as an artistic, representative and translational yet “profitable” medium. Questions like these remain important in 2024, and this special issue shows how life writing and transnationality continue to overlap and hinge upon questions of inclusivity. They continue Douglas’s investigations of the ideas of production, circulation and reception, but they also show that the universe of life writing in Australia has been imagined in a much more expansive manner over the past few decades. To return to Ong’s definition—which frames this volume—these articles take a broader approach than a simplistic understanding of the transnational as movement between nation-states; instead, this volume calls for heightened attention to the transversal, the transactional, the translational and the transgressive in the elusive term “Australian life writing”.
Notes
1 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.
2 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Program for funding the research that led to this conference and volume: DP190102863, Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia (Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth).
3 Nicholas Birns and Keyvan Allahyari, “Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island: Contesting Refugee Experience in the Global South,” Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 3 (2023) 531–46.
4 Kate Douglas “The Universal Autobiographer: The Politics of Normative Readings,” Journal of Australian Studies 26, no. 72 (2002): 173–79.