BEYOND THE BOUNDS

Abstract

For John Kinsella place and space, with all their historical, cultural, political, geographical, epistemic and environmental dimensions, are explicitly constitutive of his writing. But the ruling imaginary of this writing is “displacement,” the problems and paradoxes of home, country, travel, knowledge, ecology, activism that characterise his critical and poetic engagements. From multiple angles Kinsella’s writing anatomises the unsettledness of Australian history and consciousness, but it also conceives of these national dimensions in inter- and transnational terms. Kinsella is always concerned to show place, belonging and “international regionalism” alive in negotiations with the writing of any location, of all social and biological environments. Further his work reflects an activist politics of knowledge, with its recognition that a broad knowledge of locality needs to critique “Place” studies and discourses from privileged institutions of learning that fail to acknowledge the place-knowledge of communities that do not have access to means of articulating what makes their “local” knowledge relevant, dynamic and essential to themselves as well as to the wider world. At the same time, this critical discourse is shadowed by the affective realities of displacement, of never being able to be at home.

Keywords:

• poetics
• John Kinsella
• displacement
• international regionalism
• space

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See <https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF>.

2 For a reading of Australian poetry, in its nationalist modes, as an invasive species, see Evelyn Araluen, “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum,” Sydney Review of Books 11 Feb. 2019. <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/snugglepot-and-cuddlepie-in-the-ghost-gum-evelyn-araluen/>.

3 John Kinsella and Russell West-Pavlov, Temporariness: The Imperatives of Place (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2018).

4 “The Atlas of Caesium-137 Contamination of Europe after the Chernobyl Accident.” <https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/31/056/31056824.pdf?r=1&r=1:8>.

5 See “Corthna, Carraiglea, Anchor Lodge – From Schull Journals,” Polysituatedness: A Poetics of Displacement (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2017) 261–67.

6 See Philip Mead, “Connectivity, Community and the Question of Literary Universality: Reading Kim Scott’s Chronotope and John Kinsella’s Commedia,” Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia, ed. Peter Kirkpatrick and Robert Dixon (Sydney: Sydney UP, 2012) 137–55.