Writing otherwise: A critical cosmopolitan approach to reflecting on writing and reading practices in fiction and non-fiction

Abstract

In reaction to the opening up or redrawing of the world’s borders – virtual and real, material and ideological –the language of conventional western political communication seems to become increasingly dogmatic and even strident. In this paper, I argue that critical cosmopolitanism provides a framework within which students, teachers, researchers and practitioners can explore contemporary issues represented in the writing of literary fiction as a means of critiquing the limited and limiting vision of such political writing. I outline a critica lcosmopolitan orientation to approaching, practising and reviewing writing practices in the global public domain, primarily an ethical and relational endeavour, alert to writers’ obligations to (often distant and unknown) others, as well as to the complexity and ambivalence of those relationships. The paper then explores how Lloyd Jones novel, Hand me down world, serves to trouble the text of the Australian Government’s ‘No topeople smuggling’ campaign. As a means of disrupting its (non-fiction) other, fiction writing can offer us ethical, political and aesthetic insights into imagining alternative relations between subjects situated within and moving across shifting borders.