Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.
aj Carruthers is a literary critic and experimental poet, author of Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, a group of studies on Langston Hughes, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and others, two volumes of a lifelong poem AXIS Book 1: Areal and AXIS Book 2, and a sound work Consonata. He has just completed Languages of Invention, a study of Australian avant-garde poetry and the uses of literary history, and writing has commenced on his next project The Critical Exterior, a study of criticism’s “three exteriors” – theory, history, prophecy – and literary exteriority. He is a lecturer at SUIBE.
