Tony Simoes da Silva

Region of Interest

Africa

Primary Country of Residence

Australia

Title

Professor, Head of School, Humanities

Affiliation

University of Tasmania

Email

tonys@uow.edu.au

Phone/Fax Number(s)

61 3 62261525

Countries of Specialization

South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola

Education

PhD in English Literatures, University of Western Australia, 1997
BA in English Hons (First class; double major, French), Edith Cowan University, Australia

Research Interests

His research focuses on contemporary world literature, notably Afro-diasporic, and particularly southern African and Nigerian writing. This work traces migration flows ranging from the slave trade to the mass displacement of peoples in the present, and their impact on culture and society. It explores issues of self, place and belonging against a background of nationalist struggles, civil conflict, physical and cultural displacement and the haunting presence of history in the individual psyche.

Teaching Interests

African literatures, American literature, Life writing, Postcolonial studies, Postcolonial theory

Publications

Selected Publications:
Books
• 2000 The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: The Fiction of George Lamming. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.
• 2000 Interactions: Essays on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific. Associate Editor, with Dennis Haskell and Ron Shapiro. U of Western Australia Press.
2015 Dissenting Voices, with Anne Collett, London, Routledge.

Journal issues
2012
• Editor, with Brigitta Olubas, “Philosophy, Canonicity, Reading”, JASAL 12.3 (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature)
• Editor, with Gaetano Rando, Lidia Bilbatua and Henri JeanJean La Questione Meridionale (The Southern Question), Vol. 1.3
2011
• Editor, with Anne Collett. “Dissenting Lives”, Life Writing, Vol. 8.3.
• Editor, with Frances Devlin-Glass, “Undead Ghosts: Spectrality and the Transgression of Cultural Norms”, JASAL 11 (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature).
• Editor, with Gaetano Rando, Lidia Bilbatua and Henri JeanJean La Questione Meridionale (The Southern Question), Vol. 1.2.

Contributions to books
• 2013 ‘Representational Waste’: Refugees, Writing and Affect in this ‘restless epoch’. In Vanishing Borders in the Age of Globalism: Australasian Perspectives. Ed. Cynthia Vanden Driesen and T. Vijay Kumar.
• 2012 “Under New Management: Whiteness in Post-Independence Africa”. Locating Life Stories: Beyond East-West Binaries in (Auto)Biographical Studies, ed. Craig Howes and Maureen Perkins, Hawaii University Press. 83-94
• 2012 “Globalised Cartographies of Being: Literature, Refugees and the Australian Nation”. In Liberalism and Displacement: Comparative Research from the Asia Pacific, Ed. Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase, Ashgate.

Refereed articles
• 2012 “Embodied Genealogies and Gendered Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Writing”, African identities.
• 2011 “The Chief Taxidermist has left the Museum”. Wasafiri, 68.3, 63-68
• 2011 “Longing, Belonging and Self-Making in Zimbabwean Life Writing: Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun”, LiNQ, Volume 38, 146-160.
• 2011 “Dissenting Voices”, with Anne Collett; Life Writing, 8.4, 351-359
• 2005 “Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, Race and History”, Third World Quarterly, 26.3, 471-478
• 2004 “Rethinking Marginality: Class, Identity and Desire in Contemporary Australian Writing”, Life Writing, 1.1, 45-68

Keywords

African literatures, Postcolonial theory, Life writing World writing in English