Tag: Ali Alizadeh

Call for Submissions: Persian Passages (Special issue of Southerly)

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Persian speakers from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan have influenced Australian culture in many ways. What are the evocations of Persian themes in Australian writing and culture? What are the contemporary heirs to Judith Wright’s poem ‘Hafiz of Shiraz’? And what is the image of Australia in contemporary Persian texts? Guest editors Laetitia Nanquette and Ali Alizadeh are calling for submissions of poems, stories, non-fiction and literary papers for a special issue of Southerly focusing on literary transactions between Australian and Persian cultures. The editors are also interested in writings from Iranian, Afghan and Tajik writers engaging with Australia in any…

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Next monthly blogger – Justin Clemens!

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Many thanks to Van Badham for her great posts, and to Ian Buchanan for his. This month, our blogger is Justin Clemens. His bio is below. Justin Clemens writes poetry and prose. Recent publications include The Mundiad (Hunter 2013) and, with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh UP 2014). He is currently working on a tract about contemporary Australian poetry with Ali Alizadeh. He teaches at Melbourne University. Photo created through Autoscopia

The Political Imagination

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At the core of this issue of Southerly – its first section – is a collection of essays originating in papers delivered at The Political Imagination: Contemporary Diasporic and Postcolonial Poetries, a conference held at the City Campus of Deakin University on 12th and 13th April 2012. This collection has been edited for us by Ann Vickery and Ali Alizadeh, of Deakin and Monash Universities respectively, and is presented to our readers in the clear sense that it reflects a significant development in literary criticism, poetics, and literary theory. In the rest of the issue we present, with thanks to…

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‘Success’: desire, prohibition and resentment

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Ali Alizadeh My previous blogs questioned the goodness of such supposedly good things as ‘community’, ‘nature’ and ‘Australia’ as used in contemporary literary discourses. I believe the magical aura of these terms is most commonly activated to empower their ab/users. But if cherishing a community, singing the praises of Mother Nature, and paying homage to the Fatherland are symbolic means contrived for obscuring the Real – of careerist manoeuvres, economic transactions, strategic alliances and so on – in the sorts of text which, in the classic Foucauldian sense, constitute discourse (judge’s reports, book reviews, interviews, literary articles and cultural policy…

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‘Community’: networks, nepotism and exclusion

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Ali Alizadeh In my previous two posts I attempted to develop a theory of literary ideology in contemporary Australian writing. According to my formulation, such an ideology does two seemingly contradictory yet complimentary things simultaneously: it conceals the signified of socio-economic exchange-value production by displacing it with a Master Signifier (‘our nation’, ‘our physical environment’) to ensure that the prerogatives and decisions of those who absorb the surplus-value of production are naturalised; and, at the same time, it ensures that this state has a metaphysical, indeterminable quality (‘cultural heritage’, ‘ethics of land care’) which transforms the initial concealment into a…

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‘Progress’: ethics, awards and the environment

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Ali Alizadeh My last post took aim at a rather obvious ideological edifice, the new literary patriotism in Australia and its mostly transparent role in the generation of cultural and literary surplus-value for publishers, cultural organisations and affiliated individuals. But this phenomenon is a rather rare instance of an openly conservative, proudly old-fashioned bourgeois ideology at the service of the ruling classes–patriotism has been the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson would have it, for well over two hundred years. Today’s capitalist superstructure is often far more innovative and deceptive. It is an ideology that bears the aura…

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‘Australia’: literature, ideology and fetishism

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Ali Alizadeh I am delighted to be this month’s Southerly blogger, and would like to use this opportunity to explore the crucial rapport between literature and ideology. In this and my forthcoming blogs for Southerly, I’ll be reflecting on how, in my opinion, the production and reception of contemporary Australian writing is informed and in many cases formed by what Karl Marx has termed, in The German Ideology, as an epoch’s “ruling ideas”: The class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material…

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June Monthly Blogger – Ali Alizadeh!

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An enormous thank you to Maria Takolander for her excellent posts. This month, our blogger is Ali Alizadeh. His bio is below: Ali Alizadeh’s forthcoming book Transactions has been described as “beautifully twisted” by Marina White in Colosoul; “funny, angry and immensely moving” by Jeff Sparrow; and “a powerful work of prose fiction” and “truly global and uncompromisingly frank” by Portia Lindsay in Books+Publishing. “Welcome to the dark side of global village” has been Caroline Baum’s comment on the book. It is a tale of political violence, prostitution, love, a charming serial killer, mysterious refugees and radical universalism. Among Ali’s previous books are…

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