This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.

THIS CHAPTER DRAWS ON recent trends in Australian literary criticism to scan new horizons for readings of Kim Scott's novel Benang (1999) and to consider what these readings indicate about the networks that shape various scenes of reading and interpretive communities for the production and reception of Australian Indigenous writing. Scott is devoted to the language and country of the Noongar people and this inspires the generic and linguistic innovation of Benang and That Deadman Dance (2010), as well as the innovative collaborative life writing of Kayang and Me (2005). Benang and its author travel out of country and offshore on the currents of international book festivals and prizes and the transnational scholarly networks of Australian literary studies, postcolonialism, and Indigenous literature. This chapter is, in part, a history of Benang— we are interested in overseas publications and translations, and in pursuing this book and its author in an international literary space beyond the horizon of the nation. It also explores some transnational scenes of reading that produce different communities of interpretation for Benang in venues such as conferences and online sites, where the novel has a distinctive career, and the history of the Noongar people speaks to other histories and “memoryscapes” of dispossession, dispersal, and genocide (Phillips and Reyes, 14).

Transnational associations raise issues of the ethics and politics of reading and translation that follow in the wake of these transits of Benang, and these are germane to thinking about Australian literature in a transnational frame using concepts of “scenes of reading” and “out of country” as they circulate in Australian literary criticism now (Dixon and Rooney).

The first of the trends in Australian criticism that enable an expanded book history of Benang is digital humanities. This field of study has been energized by the development of the AustLit and BlackWords databases that provide access to copious bibliographical information on Australian literature and criticism. Digital humanities in Australian literature has been localized as the practice of a “resourceful reading” that opens the way for projects such as this, particularly in a growing interest in information-driven histories of books, print cultures, and reading, and questions such as who is reading what books, and how did this kind of reading become available?

For many readers, critics and writers, Australian literary biography and autobiography are rich and complex domains. In this chapter the texts themselves will be used as points of departure, and anchors of a series of cross-sections which will stress the importance and energy of this writing from the very beginnings of European settlement, although the focus will remain on contemporary examples. One of the pleasures of these books is their ongoing interrogation of ways of writing about the self and subjectivity; some of the best critiques of biographical and autobiographical writing occur in the primary texts themselves. Another pleasure, and further reason to modify a chronological approach, is that nineteenth-century Australian life-writing remains very much alive, and continues to emerge anew in the present. The past is not settled. Extensive bibliographical and critical work continues to challenge Australian literary history by revealing hitherto “invisible lives” in nineteenth-century materials, so bringing a much larger volume of autobiographical writing into bibliographical records. Furthermore, the recent work of critics who draw on the methods of feminist criticism, deconstruction and/or new historicism has produced rereadings of many nineteenth-century texts. So, for example, in the wake of Paul Carter's The Road to Botany Bay (1987), the writings of explorers like Sturt and Mitchell, or Watkin Tench's journals, previously categorised as “descriptive writing”, may now be read as autobiographical acts, allowing insight into the historical, cultural and social contexts which shape the autobiographic subject. Lucy Frost's A face in the glass. The journal and life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (1992) also uses a nineteenth-century journal as the basis of a biographical study of Annie Baxter, weaving together the autobiographical journal and a contemporary biographical account.