21 November 2012 | 16.00 | ISCAP
ABSTRACT
Material dealing with events in East Timor and aimed at children of different ages has been scarce. With respect to fiction in English, three novels have been published by the important imprint for children, Puffin, in which events either take place in East Timor or in which East Timor is at the centre of the plot: British author James Watson’s Justice of the Dagger in 1998, Australian Josef Vondra’s No-Name Bird: A Story of East Timor, which appeared in 2000, both set in East Timor, and Australian Libby Gleeson’s Refuge, set in Australia but dealing with East Timorese refugees, which was published in 1998. The novel Crystal Coffin (2001) by Australian Anita Bell is a crossover thriller partly featuring East Timor that attempts to appeal to both teenagers and adults. In Portuguese there appears to be just one novel, and that only published in 2011, albeit in an extremely high profile series: Ana Maria Magalhães and Isabel Alçada’s Uma aventura na Ilha de Timor.
There have also been non-fictional books for children, one produced for libraries in the US, called East Timor: Island in Turmoil (1998), and two others produced for school and public libraries in Australia, one as part of a series called Our Neighbours entitled Papua New Guinea, The Philippines and East Timor (2004), and the much more comprehensive The Long Patrol: Australia and East Timor’s Wars(2008) by Richard Plunkett.
This paper will subject the above texts to critique in terms of their ideological practices, and briefly contextualise them with reference to Herbert Kohl’s Should We Burn Babar? As part of work in progress, it will be seeking for input with respect to Portuguese texts as yet undiscovered.
Bionote
David Callahan, tem-se dedicado ao estudo das culturas e literaturas australiana, americana, canadiana, sul-africana e neozelandesa. Entre as suas publicações recentes contam-se Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital (2009), que em 2011 recebeu ex-aqueo o prémio da Association for the Study of Australian Literature para o melhor livro sobre a literatura australiana dos dois anos anteriores, a edição de Australia-Who Cares? (2007), e artigos sobre o tratamento de Portugal no Lonely Planet Guide to East Timor, sobre a vergonha e a culpa nas representações australianas de Timor-Leste, o teatro australiano que trata a temática de Timor-Leste, a escritora canadiana Jane Urquhart, a modernidade no cinema sul-africano, e «DNA, Bodily Realities and Surveillance in CSI». É coordenador da Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia.