JEASA has concluded the challenging year 2020 with the present general issue. Modest, but no less important, this assemblage of scholarly articles and a book review attests to a continuing commitment of EASA’s journal to showcasing both European and Australian scholarship in current Australian studies.
The first article by Michael Williams, titled “Sojourners & Birds of Passage: Chinese and Italian Migrants in Australia and the United States in Comparative Perspective, 1871-1914,” offers a robust comparative study of less common aspects of Chinese and Italian migration to Australia and the US around the turn of the 20th century. The article claims that most migrant histories published in the past and today tend to neglect detailed analyses of migrants’ motivations and ties to their villages, families, and communities in their homelands, and that it is crucial for our better understanding of the transnational flows of people to examine the
phenomenon of return migration.
Jean-François Vernay returns in his article “From Context to Text: Peter Carey’s Monstrous Creation in My Life as a Fake” to Carey’s intriguing novel and provides a fresh reading by revising the historical context of the Ern Malley affair which inspired the novel and highlighting the intertextual links between the texts comprising the famous literary hoax and Carey’s creative use of these texts. The article, by emphasizing the text/context relation and questions of legitimacy and authenticity, shows how the novel still resonates today.
In the last article, Andrea Roxana Bellot introduces the work of a less-known writer Beatriz Copello, who migrated to Australia in the 1970s from politically unstable Argentina. In her analysis of Copello’s semi-autobiographical and rather experimental novel Forbidden Steps Under the Wisteria (1999), which explores issues of migration, exile, memory, as well as women’s lives, Bellot shows how the novel moves from the symbolic and imaginary world of oneness with nature, to the real world of prohibitions and the loss of innocence.
Finally, Bárbara Arizti from the University of Zaragoza in Spain offers a very fine review of Rethinking the Victim: Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing co-authored by Anne Brewster and Sue Kossew, and published by Routledge in 2019.
Enjoy reading new JEASA!
Martina Horakova
general editor