The chapter outlines the mid-twentieth century debate over an Athenian-Boeotian divide in Australian literature, which extended an earlier false dichotomy between city and the bush through distinguishing between the expatriate and the writer who stays at home. Despite a global dispersion of Australian writers, it argues that most scholarship has tended to focus on those in Britain. The chapter discerns that the racialisation underscoring who is generally considered ‘expatriate’ renders the term problematic and that many Australian diasporic poets define themselves through other means. It also finds that many experience feelings of shame, anger, and guilt over the colonial violence shaping Australia. The chapter considers the development of Lola Ridge’s poetics while in Australia before considering Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Yussef (Hi-Jack),” written during a hijacking of her plane by Palestinian militants, and the poetry Oodgeroo wrote in China. The chapter foregrounds the significance of First Nations mobility, engaging with the London writing of Aboriginal activist A. M. Fernando in the 1920s and writing of recent poets like Ellen Van Neerven.

This chapter opens the volume’s investigation of several major questions – What is technology? What is literary technology? Is literature a technology? – by responding to Walter Ong’s opposition of the naturalness of oral speech and the artificiality of “technologized” writing. It presents a historical overview of the consequences of the development of writing in the West. Considering indigenous texts by such Haida authors as Skaay and Ghandl, MacRae pushes against standard scholarly accounts of the teleological triumph of print that have served to provide “an intellectual bulwark for imperialism and colonialism.” MacRae positions orality and oral performance as rich and generative technologies whose complex affordances are impossible to render in other media: Writing and printing, he argues, “impact literature and culture” primarily “by leaving things out: gestures, colors, coughs, shouts, and murmurs, the sound of falling rain: the entire three-dimensional world of human experience.”

Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

This chapter discusses a bilingual poem in Quechua and Spanish by the twentieth-century Peruvian writer, Teodoro Meneses Morales (1915-87). It argues that the poem evinces a loss of solidarity between humanity and the wider cosmos and that this loss is the result of social, cultural, and environmental transitions occurring at the time. By synthesizing Cornejo Polar’s concept of heterogeneity with Westphal’s geocritical approach, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that accounts for how transitions in mid-twentieth-century Peruvian society disrupt normal patterns of relating to the natural environment as reflected in the poem. As humanity becomes ever more fragmented, pulled in opposing directions between traditional Andean and Western ways of relating to the land, so the land itself ceases to be the stable environment that it was before. In Meneses Morales’ poem, the emblem of such transformations is a drought. While far from unprecedented in the Andes, in a context of heterogeneity this natural disaster becomes symbolic of a more fundamental dislocation between the human inhabitant and the wider landscape of which humans form a part.

Across the literary traditions of Spanish America, Indigenous peoples appear as resource materials for non-Indigenous authors and as emblems for national identity, rather than as literary creators themselves. Acclaimed examples from the mid-twentieth-century canon of what Angel Rama termed “transculturated narrative” are no exception: despite overt attempts to create works expressing solidarity with Indigenous peoples, these do not elude the colonial legacies, which have obliged Indigenous peoples to cede control of their words and the contexts that make these words meaningful. However, by working at the intersection of Latin American and Indigenous literary studies, this essay pursues those other contexts beyond the nation frame and returns to Miguel Angel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz and José María Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos. It charts Latin American literature and criticism across two historical transitions: the transition produced by indigenismo toward the horizon of a national identity discourse more centered on “the Indian”; and the transition produced by Indigenous movements away from that emblematic “Indian” and toward the horizon of Indigenous self-determination. To what extent can these Spanish-American novels, product of the first transition, be harnessed to that second transition to offer a window onto native ways of conceiving Latin American space and time?

This chapter traces how queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay) has developed a critique of the “Ecological Indian” trope. While this critique begins most obviously in 2017’s Nature Poem – in which Pico boasts that he “would slap a tree across the face” – I show how he extends and refines this impulse in 2018’s Junk. Junk gestures toward dietary colonization – displacement from ancestral lands and the forced adoption of a Eurowestern diet – as a major force behind Indigenous health problems. But the book also satirizes pervasive trends such as urban “foodiesm” and gay men’s obsession with fitness – developments that, at first glance, seem to offer some corrective to those problems, but which ultimately exacerbate them by imagining eating as a matter of individual choice. Further, Pico resists the utopianism of decolonial dietary discourse, in favor of a perverse celebration of junk food. As I explain, the focus on future generations found in decolonial dietary discourse can be co-opted to pathologize “bad” eating habits and even link them to “bad” parenting. I conclude that Pico believes in the projects of dietary decolonization and Indigenous food sovereignty, but not in the affects or sensibilities they seem to require.

Tracing its roots back to Romanticism and invoking a counter-realism associated with postmodernism, North American magical realism invites a variety of communities to resist inequity and oppressive rhetoric and culture and to revise historical, social and religious traditions. Its canon includes North American writers as diverse as Toni Morrison; Latina authors Cristina García, Ana Castillo and Julia Alvarez; feminist magical realists Laurie Foos and Aimee Bender; Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch; and indigenous authors Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and James Welch. A new wave of writers drawing upon magical realism – including Kelly Link, David Levithan, Micah Dean Hicks, Anna-Marie McLemore and Leslye Walton, and often using young adult literature – continues to redefine 'American-ness'. Magical realism carves out space for developing better understandings of established and new (or newly acknowledged) communities, allowing mainstream and disenfranchised authors alike – bound by geography, race, gender or other collective categorizations of identity – entry into the main discourse.