This chapter considers the ways in which Rushdie’s fiction engages with globalization, a process that intensified in the 1990s and which became a central theme in his fiction from The Moor’s Last Sigh onwards. This is especially pressing in Rushdie’s work in considerations of the global circulation of peoples, goods, and cultural productions, most pertinently explored in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. Focusing both on the aesthetics of these novels and their wider cultural contexts, I argue that Rushdie’s post-fatwa novels showcase a shift in his view of the transglobal world, which can be traced on three levels: the portrayal of space, the role attributed to creativity, and the emotional response globalization elicits.

This chapter considers how Rushdie engages with wider contexts of nationalism and transnationalism in his works. Tracing the evolution from national epics that investigate the immediate postcolonial aftermath of the partition of British India into the separate nation states of India and Pakistan and the later secession of East Pakistan to form independent Bangladesh, Rushdie’s work has also considered the crisis of nationalism in Britain in the wake of decolonization. Starting with The Satanic Verses and coming to a close with Quichotte, the chapter looks at a set of novels that are largely preoccupied with processes of global migration. The chapter, then, seeks to explore how the concept of transnationalism serves as a productive contextual category to track the motifs and movements of Rushdie’s migrant characters in Bombay, London, and New York, as they reconfigure their sense of self.

In this chapter, I address cross-cultural encounters of two (or more) sets of sensory scripts. These encounters are evident in the wider literature on colonialism, migration and other local–foreign interfaces. In doing so, it serves as an important reminder for one to take heed of multiple axes of sensory similarities and differences, in addition to a merely the East–West core axis of difference. I also turn the lens around by showing how local populations on the reverse, discern colonial or foreign communities through their sensory faculties as a counterpoint. The focus lies in demonstrating how sensory interfaces arising from these processes and movements of people are theorised using the notion of sensory transnationalism. I map this notion onto colonial–local sensory encounters and propose four modes of sensory engagement: reception, rejection, regulation, and reproduction. These modes collectively show how sensory encounters, stemming from contrasting power positions, lend a different understanding of empire and its everyday lived constructions, including how colonial impositions of modernity through sensory regulatory schemes are also met with resistance. Consequently, categories of colonisers and colonised are unsettled instead of being deployed as inherently asymmetrical categories.

Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.

This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.

From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of significant preoccupations and developments in the Australian novel. It begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees; in between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler colonial fiction by women through to literary attempts to imagine the Anthropocene, sexuality in the novels of Patrick White, and Waanyi writer Alexis Wright’s call for a sovereign First Nations literature. Chapters survey fundamental and emerging issues in the Australian novel, offer historical, critical, and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in action. This book is an invitation to students and researchers alike to expand and deepen their knowledge of the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.

Using French, German, and British examples, this chapter provides an overview of the lively world of pre-war and wartime literary magazines and periodicals in Europe, with an emphasis on transnational connections. It also touches on the resumption of transnational magazine culture after the end of the war. Literary magazines in this period were characterised by close transnational ties and cross-border collaboration and exchange, disrupted but not always stopped by the outbreak of war. The chapter reflects in particular on the magazines’ understanding of poetry as a means of gauging the state of the nation in crisis, and their recognition of poetry as an indicator of the national psyche and of national cultural identity.

Chapter 1 explores the campaigns of Cecilia John, Meredith Atkinson and the Save the Children Fund, which in Australia was formed in 1919. John established an Australian branch after attending the Women’s International Peace Congress in Zurich in 1919 with feminist Vida Goldstein, where she witnessed the horror of images of starving children in Europe, which left an indelible impact on her. A biographical study of John provides a framework through which to bring together disparate parts of her life that have been studied in isolation. Previously, her national and international efforts have been discussed separately. Integrating these studies has revealed, I argue, not a continuum of political ideals but contradictions. During the First World War, John critiqued the British Empire for draining the blood of Australia’s men on the battlefields of Europe, but after the war, she eulogised the Empire for rescuing starving and destitute children through Save the Children. She appears not to bring these politics into Save the Children, however, focusing instead on the desperate plight of starving children in an apolitical framework. The emotive, apolitical appeal of rescuing starving children seemingly sat without the complications of her earlier proclamations. Privileging sentimentality in the cause of destitute children, void of political or critical analysis, was a challenge the journalist and educator Meredith Atkinson encountered too, as he attempted to promote the cause of Russian children caught in the civil war.

The evacuation of Jewish children from Europe to Palestine through the Youth Aliyah programme drew global attention. Chapter 4 considers the fundraising activities in the Australian and Jewish community around the organisation of Youth Aliyah, which attracted leading humanitarians such as Aileen Fitzpatrick, Jessie Street, Ruby Rich and Camilla Wedgewood. Youth Aliyah was founded in Germany in 1932 by Recha Freier, a committed Zionist, who was also active during the 1930s in Women’s International Zionist Organisation. At the time, there was resistance to the idea of uprooting children and taking them to Palestine to receive an agrarian, socialist education. As it became clear the Nazi resolve was to eradicate the Jewish population, Youth Aliyah became a fully fledged child rescue effort. From 1933 to 1945, it evacuated 11,000 Jewish children, relocating them to Palestine. There has been little work on the global dimension of this campaign. By focusing on these fundraising efforts and other attempts to support Jewish children in Australia, Chapter 4 explores Youth Aliyah as a transnational global movement.

This chapter discusses the changing local and global contexts in which Chinese (i.e., one or more Chinese languages or dialects) is being learned by multilingual youth and adults. Case studies of heritage- and non-heritage transnational learners of Mandarin in Canada, the United States, Australia and China illustrate the multi-scalar influences and enactments of larger geopolitical initiatives, ideologies, investments, and power relations in Chinese education and the many forms of Chinese-involved multilingualism(s) that can result. The chapter then explores how these and other factors shape learners’ identities, forms of agency, and linguistic histories as well as their trajectories and (sometimes fraught) subjectivities as multilingual Sinophones. The chapter concludes with a call for additional research representing a wider range of multilingualisms, raciolinguistic identities (especially among non-Anglophone learners), and migration histories and trajectories in Chinese language learning.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) parodies the North American Free Trade Agreement, but it characterizes the fight over free trade in the same terms as NAFTA’s liberal supporters, who represent this fight as a struggle between “zero-sum nationalism” and an emerging network of transnational “enterprise-webs.” Just as NAFTA’s supporters imagine a global free market comprised solely of “human capital,” Yamashita imagines an "expanding symphony" comprised solely of "conductors" attuned to transnational complexity -- a vision which depends on a disavowal of the structural differences that make such collectives possible. Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005), meanwhile, suggests that framing the conflicts faced by Mexican migrants as epistemic conflicts is a mistake. His novel imagines an alternative history in which the “Aztex” defeated the Spanish and non-Western cultural and epistemic values have triumphed, but the violence of exploitation remains. At the same, Foster’s novel ultimately suggests that migrant workers can create the possibility of an “alternative future” by embracing a vision of a world defined by class antagonisms rather than by epistemic conflicts.

The point of this book is not to press for a paradigm shift, replacing one master narrative with another: from nation state to transnational networks; from national to global German history; from a focus on state-sponsored violence in the last three centuries to economically formidable and inclusive diasporic communities. Rather, the goal is to open up space for multiple narratives that we can harness as analytical tools to help us better understand people’s actions and motivations in particular historical situations. That requires greater integration of mobilities, migration flows, and pluralities of belonging into our narratives of Germans’ histories.

In this chapter we argue that a predominant concern in many contemporary European crime novels is the consolidation of a democratic culture that protects the rights of citizens and upholds the rule of law. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts from across the continent, we analyse this overall ambition via three of its major manifestations: democratization as seen most clearly in post-dictatorial transitional societies, the treatment of immigrants as an indicator of inclusiveness and social equality and the honest discussion of the national past as the foundation for a healthy democratic culture. What these three themes have in common is that they embody our greatest social aspirations while at the same time being vulnerable to horrific criminal aberrations, which is why crime fiction is a particularly apt medium for analysing and understanding them. This duality forms the basis of one of the master narratives of European crime fiction: the story of how the unsettling and often dangerous process of uncovering crime is the precondition for a more perfect democratic society.