Anthropology, Creative Practice and Ethnography

Translations, an autoethnography: Migration, colonial Australia and the creative encounter
Paul Carter, series edited by Sarah Pink, Paul Henley, Andrew Irving, Faye Ginsburg

Translations is an intimate and forthright autoethnography by noted postcolonial scholar, artist and writer, Paul Carter. It describes the highly original creative practice he has developed in Australia, inspired by an examination of early colonial records of cross-cultural encounter and refracted through the precarious host-stranger relationship navigated by contemporary migrants.

Translations seeks to extract migration from the national margins and place it at the heart of contemporary struggles to decolonise social and cultural relations. His discussion of the mirroring myths that hold England and Australia in thrall to each other offers an uncanny insight into the psychology of Brexit. Carter shows that ‘symbolic literacy’, the capacity to mediate between geographically and culturally incommensurable realities, produces new subjects, new senses of belonging and a radically innovative approach to the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty