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This article offers an overview of the range of Asian-Australian writers, within the context of changing historical and political conditions, as well as the complexity of defining a single category of literature written by Australians of Asian heritage. Such a category is difficult to define in strictly nationalistic terms as 'Asian Australian literature': where Australian literature is the controlling noun and 'Asian' functions as an adjective. Some Asian Australian writers are Australian-born, others trace their Asian heritage through several generations; some write in English, others do not. For reasons of space, this essay deals only with anglophone Asian Australian writers. The 'Asia' encompassed by Asian Australian writers is protean, changing as patterns of Asian immigration to Australia changes. 'Asia' in an Australian context is generally taken to refer to the Far East or to Southeast Asia but increasingly migration from South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) has broadened that image. Ethnic Chinese accounts for the largest Asian immigrant group in Australia but 'ethnic Chinese' is not a simple category. Some migrants of Chinese heritage come to Australia direct from the mainland (this is particularly true of the post-1989 generation of migrants) but others migrate out of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora and come to Australia via such countries as Singapore, Malaysia, or Indonesia. For these diasporic writers, 'Chineseness' can be a term to which they relate with difficulty. Despite the dominance of Chinese migrants within the Australian understanding of Asia, this essay takes a broad view of what kinds of ethnic background constitute Asianness. The ascription of 'Asianness', regardless of individual background or national inheritance, is an expression of Australia's enduring anti-Asian racism, and we should be keenly aware of this problem when approaching Australian writers of Asian heritage.

This book explores the political and poetic paradigms of reconciliation represented in Australian writing from the 1990s to the present, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians entered a new conversation on race relations. Writing served as an outlet for understanding sovereignty, colonial history and the future of society.

This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation's colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors' often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.

German interest in, and reception of, Indigenous Australian cultures have a long and also burdened history. With the emergence of German translations of Indigenous literature in the 1980s – that is, literature not about, but penned by, Indigenous authors – one-sided politics of representations and thus also stigmatised images started to change. Yet, the translation of literature per se does not simply entail a representation free of clichés and prejudices. Cultural knowledge cannot be simply rendered 'correct' according to the regimes of the source culture, but need to be adapted to the regimes of the target cultures. This article focuses on the ways the manifold concepts of race have been translated into three German audiobooks. Important aspects of race, it shows, have been lost in translation, while the racial history of the target culture poses new challenges for a literature that is intricately enmeshed with race and that seeks to rebut racism.