Editorial: Colloquy, Issue 33, May 2017

Welcome to the 33rd issue of Colloquy. There have been many changes afoot in recent months, including several new additions to the editorial team. After our 32nd issue, Zachary Kendal came on board as co-editor-in-chief. Zachary is a PhD candidate at Monash University, researching ethics and literary representation in science fiction, and works part-time as a librarian at the Monash University Library. We would also like to acknowledge our two new associate editors, Mia Goodwin and Matilda Grogan.

This issue begins with two very different articles on trauma, witnessing and testimony. In “Heritage of Hunger: Famine, Self-Starvation, and Narrative-Building in Eavan Boland’s ‘Anorexic’,” Maggie O’Leary considers the lasting cultural impact of the Famine on Irish poetry, reading Boland’s “Anorexic” as a response to the masculine and nationalistic themes that tend to dominate Famine writing. Then Hailey J. Austin’s “Time Flies: Remnants of Auschwitz in Art Spiegelman’s Maus” draws on the scholarship of Giorgio Agamben and Marianne Hirsch in an insightful reflection on the trauma of the Holocaust on survivors and the second generation in Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus.

In our third article, Alexandra Cain investigates Hannah Arendt’s political theory through a Kantian framework in “Actors, Spectators, and Power in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Political Judgement,” exploring the clash between the judgement of the actor and that of the spectator. Our final article is Rory Dufficy’s “SCUM Without a Subject: Valerie Solanas at the End of the Avant-Garde,” which uses Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto as a lens through which to view and discuss the dissolution of the avant-garde. In the creative writing section, we have Ben Smith’s short story “Night Swimming,” a coming-of-age story which engages with issues of sexuality, friendship and self-realisation. This issue also contains book reviews by Zachary Kendal, Marcos Norris and Vincent Le.