Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2025
For over two decades, Sneja Gunew has advocated for a careful examination of literary texts that have been excluded or marginalized in Australian writing because she believes that such endeavours can offer new possibilities in how we read multicultural, migrant and diasporic writing. Such writing is well placed to unsettle conceptual ideologies of familiar and dominant world views because the writers revisit silenced histories, as well as forgotten elements of their cultural past, and salvage these in their writing. The specific focus on how to re-read various Australian writers of Greek descent through the frame of the paramythi has shown they have transformed collective cultural traditions and knowledge once considered irrelevant, fanciful or illogical into something new.
Some writers draw on their oral tradition for aesthetic purposes, but others have found that the collective voice of the past contains meaningful truths for them, or a voice that can powerfully contest prevailing power structures, especially the dominance of Western world views. Christos Tsiolkas in Dead Europe has challenged what he sees as the myth of Europe by deconstructing it. He places Europe in the centre of his narrative only to show how dead it actually is, especially around its peripheries. He subjects Europe, as well as Australia's colonial past to scrutiny. Similarly, Pheng Cheah contests the centrality of Europe by using the time/space illustration on colonial temporality. Stylianos Charkianakis, Dean Kalimnios and Antigone Kefala contest the centrality of the English language or monolingual colonization by drawing on their cosmopolitan double vision and using polyphony to defamiliarize the English language. These are some of the possibilities translingual texts offer contemporary readings of Australian writing, given they bridge the past and the present, the local and the global. All the writers in this study are mediators of culture – complex and experimental writers who make accessible various forms of identity, experience and transculturally mediated expression. Some of these authors have been categorized as diasporic or marginal because they identified with a minority language and culture in the Antipodes, either in the way they wrote in a non-English way, or in the way they showed a preference for writing solely in the Greek language with or without translations.
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