Construction of a Multi-ethnic and Multi-generational Australian Story, and Pierre Bourdieu

This paper explores the process and the challenges of writing a contemporary Australian story from a liminal space. “How to Read Shakespeare in the Post-Atomic Age Whilst Duck-sitting in Outer Suburbia” (Sun 2016), a story from my (unpublished) anthology of short fiction, reimagines how members from a multi-generational and multi-ethnic Australian family value different forms of reading. The story examines the cultural value of reading specific texts, and
how the value is negotiated in a specific micro-social space—the outer-suburban backyard. “How to Read Shakespeare …” is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and explores the ways in which entangled generational, ethnic and cultural identities shape and are shaped by individual readers’ different attitudes towards reading. In reflecting on the construction of this story, I discuss the challenges of and opportunities in presenting pluralist Australian narratives from a culturally ambiguous position.

References
Sun, Emily. 2016. “How to Read Shakespeare While Duck-sitting in Outer Suburbia.”
Transnational Literature 8 no. 2.
https://dspace.flinders.edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/36049/How_to_read_Shake
speare.pdf.