This issue goes to print on the cusp of a darkening world… Overland 255 is the second issue in a suite of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. In this issue, Samuel J Cox interviews Kim Scott on his works True Country (1993) and Benang (1995) in ‘Writing from the South’. Elsewhere, Juliet Scott interrogates ‘The Australian Media’s problem with Palestine’ and Sam Ryan looks back at Overland and the state of arts funding in Australia from 1973 to 1975. This issue also features poetry from Yeena Kirkbright, DJ Huppatz, Debbie Lim, among others, and short fiction from Lauren Collee, Madeline Byrne and Jordan Smith.
Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity, decolonisation, settler-colonial societies and political activism. He focuses on the Middle East, particularly Israel-Palestine, and addresses these topics by drawing on continental European philosophy, particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. He has published several articles in the journals Cultural Politics, Subjectivity, Intercultural Education, Deleuze Studies, and Holy Land and Palestine Studies among others, and various books and edited collections: Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Ashgate, 2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and he recently edited a special issue of the Australian journal Settler Colonial Studies under the title Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine.
