Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

connections between the literary legacy of the novel To the Islands and the contemporary reality of
colonialism and Aboriginal dispossession in Oombulgurri.
Johan Anker
The nature of gender construction in recent Young Adult Literature in South Africa
This paper discusses the importance and nature of gender construction in recent YAL in South Africa in
relation to Children’s Literature world wide. The paper refers to research and articles by international critics
like Karen Coates, John Stephenson, Roberta Trites, Robyn McCallum, Kokesh and Starnado. The emphasis
will be on the nature of ideological and social construction of gender identity and the response of teenagers
to these texts. Reference will also be made to the use of feminist critical discourse analysis in the research
focussed on YAL. The structure and nature of Young Adult novels and the influence of these literature on
identification patterns will be discussed with reference to the role of the author, focalization and narrator,
the identification with character and setting and the conflict with social institutions like parents, schools and
government. The role of power in this growth of the adolescent, one of the central themes in YAL, will be
part of this discussion.
Laura Lori
The absent father: parents and family relationships in postcolonial Somali novels
The fall of Fascism carried with it Italy’s colonial dreams and in post-war Italy colonial heritage virtually
disappeared from public representation in favour of the myth of Italians as “brava gente”, i.e. good people. If
the latter has characterised the development of Italian republican society, nowadays recent migrations and a
new academic attention to the postcolonial question have forced Italian culture to confront its former
colonial Others and its present postcolonial self. Moving from the literary analysis of postcolonial Somali
novels written in Italian, this paper intends to discuss the life of second generations in contemporary Italy
and their relation with their parents, with a specific focus on the representation of the father figure. This
study will explore the ways in which questions of gender and personal and national identity are inscribed
through the narrative and the storytelling process within the Italian postcolonial discourse.
4C
Affect and End Times (Chair, Matthias Wieser)
Michael Richardson
Climate Trauma, or Affects of a Catastrophe to Come
Once largely the preserve of science fiction, climate catastrophe has become a frequent presence in popular
culture: the fictions of Margaret Atwood, Alexis Wright and Cormac McCarthy, film and television such as
Mad Max: Fury Road and The Walking Dead, and video games such as the Fallout series. At the same time,
climate change is an increasingly inescapable economic and political dilemma. In its micro and macro
manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its upending of entrenched understandings of
the workings of the world, in its injury to particular lives and wider ecologies, global warming is traumatically
affecting. Yet how do the wounding encounters with such a hyperobject (Morton 2013) manifest in visual
and literary texts? This paper traces those variously fleeting, mediated, visceral, ephemeral, atmospheric,
and enduring intensities of climate trauma constitute the affects of a catastrophe to come.
Kyla Allison
Finding Happiness After the Apocalypse: Gameplay, Gaming Culture and “The Last of Us”
In the post-apocalyptic video game The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) happiness emerges as the
problematic rationalisation of a hegemonic “social good.” Throughout the game, it becomes clear that
happiness is restorative of specific social orders in the post-apocalyptic world. In this hegemonic, normative
form, happiness is used as a structure for the creation of the gaming world and its social structure, how it is
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