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.
Jumana Bayeh is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University. She is the author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and Transnational Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2015), several articles on the Arab diaspora fiction and co-editor of a special issue on ‘Arabs in Australia.’ She is currently working on two ARC projects, one that examines the representation of the nation-state in Arab diaspora literature from writers based in Australia, North America and the United Kingdom, and another, with Professors Groth (UNSW) and Murphet (Adelaide), looking at the global resurgence of riots.
