Event: Speaking from the South (Opening and Masterclass)
Photo: Speaking from the South committee, The University of Adelaide
Opening Panel Discussion
Date: Fri 31 May 2024, 6pm - 8pm
Location: Bonython Hall
This opening panel explores the profound perspectives emerging from the South on vital issues like inequality, climate change, and colonialism. Panellists include Kim Scott, Intan Paramaditha, Fabián Martínez Siccardi, and Patricia Grace and moderated by Nicholas Jose. This panel was followed by readings by Nobel Laureates John M. Coetzee and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
From Intan’s brief talk:
“How do we build connection by acknowledging gaps and disjuncture within the Global South?
In the past six years, I’ve been involved in a trans-archipelagic feminist collective in Indonesia called Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought). Our mission is to create intervention to forms of knowledge production that are patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist.
In 2021, we organised an international virtual panel on “Settler Colonialism and Transnational Solidarity.” We invited three speakers from West Papua, Australia, and Palestine – this is an effort to see settler colonialism not as a singular case but a larger interconnected system. One of the speakers is West Papuan activist Rode Wanimbo, who talked about the impact of Indonesian settler colonialism on West Papuans identity, land and way of life.
We asked the panelists: What could we do to foster transnational feminist solidarity?
Rode Wanimbo paused for a moment before she finally returned the question. She said:
‘It’s truly important to have global solidarity, but I don’t know. I just want to start with the question that comes to me. I ask myself: Am I really ready to listen?’.
I would like to borrow Wanimbo’s question for all of us here, who are speaking from the south, about the South, and those we are expressing their solidarity with the South. Are we really ready to listen?
This question is humbling. It destabilizes assumptions of readiness: of having the capacity to listen.
I would like to connect this what we’ve been witnessing today—the catastrophe, injustice and inhumanity faced by Palestinians. This has been ongoing since 1948, after so much talk about postcolonialism, decolonisation, the Global South – discourses of intellectual revolution, so to speak. How did we get here? Have we been really listening?
Have we been listening carefully?”
Photo: Speaking from the South committee, The University of Adelaide. Opening panel.
John M. Coetzee
Speaking from the South
May 31, 2024
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Speaking from the South
May 31, 2024
Date: Sun 2 Jun 2024, 10am
Location: Barr Smith South 2040, The University of Adelaide
This two-hour creative writing masterclass features critically acclaimed international and Australian authors sharing the ways in which they write the South as home. The masterclass will focus on the practice of writing, and each author will speak and share practical exercises, before an open discussion and participant Q&A. Speakers include Gail Jones, Fabián Martínez Siccardi, Intan Paramaditha, Jennifer Mills, and Kim Scott.