‘Aftermath...’ is a personal essay that uses K Stewart to formulate a way to relate and connect personal and universal crisis. Asks ‘can framing our crisis as interrelated result in less political and personal division?’
Pagination
153-161ISSN
1448-2924Language
engResearch statement
Background: Literature can play a key role in connected present and past, public and personal experiences of crisis. With this work, the researcher formulates a critical understanding of 'aftermath' in a historical period marked by continual crisis. Using Frank Kermode's work on endings, the researcher asks if aftermath is an ideologically suspect figuration when applied to a place and time still bearing the negative impacts of colonisation and environmental catastrophe. Using Kathleen Stewart's conception of anthropology as conversations that occur at 'a space on the side of the road', the researcher here works creatively to connect personal and universal crisis. She asks ‘can framing our personal experiences of crisis as interrelated result in less political and personal division?'
Contribution:
Aftermath is a formally innovative piece of life writing. It is memoir that deploys research in the form of citation, as well as interviews, and personal reflections by the author. As such, Aftermath is a contribution to a growing movement in contemporary life writing that considers and challenges the limits of established forms of journalism and scholarship. The researcher's ongoing interest in formal innovation across different kinds of literary practise in apparent here, as is her ongoing interest in the writing of crisis, across genres.
Significance:
The Griffith Review is a major Australian literary periodical. This essay was commissioned for their edition Hey, Utopia which featured known and emerging writers speaking to the possibility and problematics of utopian thinking. This edition included creative writing, scholarly work and reportage. The essay 'Aftermath' was picked up on Longreads and received international digital distribution. It was a Longreads story of the year in December 2021. In 2022, it was translated into Latvian for distribution in a periodical funded by the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation.Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO MinorIssue
73Publisher
Griffith UniversityPlace of publication
Brisbane, Qld.Source
The Griffith Review
