Exiled Writers, Human Rights, and Social Advocacy Movements in Australia: A Critical Fugal Analysis - Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
I wrote this essay after interviewing two writers in exile in Australia, one a journalist from the Ivory Coast; the other a poet-musician from Iran. Both are now Australian citizens, but they each spent several years in detention centres in Australia and endured considerable trauma in their years of exile. Much can be learnt on many levels from connecting with and reading writers who are exiled for speaking ‘uncomfortable truths’. One of the problems of post structuralist metaphors of the death of the author, and indeed the potential circularity of fugue, and euphoria of post modern digital writing, is that these fail to connect with the actual lived reality of the writer's experience; this is arguably the existential hazard of all writing, yet such metaphors when contrasted with the experiences of writers in exile whose lives are endangered; ring hollow as the dizzy euphoria of a society exhausted by an excess of media consumption.
I wrote this essay after interviewing two writers in exile in Australia, one a journalist from the Ivory Coast; the other a poet-musician from Iran. Both are now Australian citizens, but they each spent several years in detention centres in Australia and endured considerable trauma in their years of exile. Much can be learnt on many levels from connecting with and reading writers who are exiled for speaking ‘uncomfortable truths’. One of the problems of post structuralist metaphors of the death of the author, and indeed the potential circularity of fugue, and euphoria of post modern digital writing, is that these fail to connect with the actual lived reality of the writer's experience; this is arguably the existential hazard of all writing, yet such metaphors when contrasted with the experiences of writers in exile whose lives are endangered; ring hollow as the dizzy euphoria of a society exhausted by an excess of media consumption.
The essay is published in a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2010), and is about to be re-published in a hardcover book of the special issue, Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations, edited by John Nguyet Erni, and available through Amazon.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cultural-Studies-Rights-Critical-Articulations/dp/toc/0415677297.
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