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.
Robert Boncardo is a sessional tutor in the International and Global Studies Program at the University of Sydney. He is a member of the NTEU branch committee at the University of Sydney and of the USyd Casuals Network. He is the author of Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), and with Christian R. Gelder of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). He has translated Pierre-François Moreau’s Experience and Eternity in Spinoza (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and has published articles on modern French politics and poetry.
