Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature is a three-year Australian Research Council Funded project (DP 170101002) involving four eminent Australian writers: J. M. Coetzee, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, and Alexis Wright. They are working together with critics Anthony Uhlmann and Ben Etherington, and emerging writer Samantha Trayhurn to explore the ways in which practising writers engage with writers from other literary communities. They are also considering the ways in which these transnational and intranational relationships shape their own world-making practices.
The project was developed in response to developments in world literary studies. Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, those in this field asked questions relating to global systems of power, dissemination, exchange, translation, and interpretation, with theorists tending to work from systemic analyses to particular texts. Counter-critiques variously stressed literature’s irreducible specificity, its own peculiar world-making capacities, its resistances to commodification, and commitments to ideal forms of world literature that are opposed to globalization.
The purpose of Other Worlds is to engage with these questions not on the basis of prior theoretical commitments but as ‘world literature’ is currently being elaborated in the various engagements and collaborations of the writers involved. The themes centre on the writers’ own creative activities as they produce new spheres of world literary possibility. The project’s only starting assumption is that creative practice is itself a way thinking and that new theoretical possibilities can arise from the exchange between it and criticism.
The project’s themes explore versions of world literature that set out from their distinct and idiosyncratic engagements with the literatures of the world. Nicholas Jose’s theme, Antipodean China, considers the presence of China and Chinese literature in the work and imagination of writers in Australia, and vice versa. In Oral Storytelling , Alexis Wright considers the challenges facing Aboriginal storytelling and the way that Aboriginal stories are told. This includes considering the importance of memory, the archive, and the relation between the oral story and the written story. Gail Jones and J. M. Coetzee are collaborating on theme of Southern Encounters. This involves convening writers from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina to discuss the possibilities of writing from ‘the South’.
Alongside the main creative themes, Anthony Uhlmann and Ben Etherington are conducting a series of critical events and reflections under the banner of Dialogues. This includes seminars, symposia, and conferences both on the writers involved and other writers linked to the project, as well as developing their own essays and books in conversation with the main themes.
The project also involved a number of collaborators from across world, including some who travelled to Australia (or within Australia) as writers and storytellers in residence.