Inhumanities: Asylum seeker letters and the precarious human rights of contemporary life narrative

Abstract:: The letters exchanged between asylum seekers and the activists who campaigned on their behalf during the Pacific Solution are now becoming available for scholarly research. In this project the Burnside/Durham and the Smith collections are read as uniquely Australian repositories of life narrative. In a series of critical articles these letters and their correspondents will be interpreted as epistolary communities which have a major contribution to make to debates about subjectivity, national citizenship and belonging. These major new resources will then feature in a monograph on testimony and the limits of the human in the emerging international scholarly field of the human and human rights in literary studies.
Grant type:: ARC Discovery Projects
Funded by:: Australian Research Council

The University of Queensland