Associate Professor Ben Etherington

Ben Etherington is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. Broadly, he works in postcolonial and world literary studies; his areas of specialisation are primitivism in literature and theory, and Caribbean poetry and poetics. He holds honours in Musicology and English from the University of Western Australia and an MPhil and PhD in English from the University of Cambridge. He is a past president of the Australian Association for Caribbean Studies, and has recently held fellowships at at the Heyman Center, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham, and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. He was a Chief Investigator of the ARC Discovery Project, Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature (2017-2022), alongside J. M. Coetzee, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, Anthony Uhlmann and Alexis Wright. He is currently the Chief Investigator of another Discovery Project, 'Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation', for which he is working with the Sydney-based Jamaican novelist Sienna Brown. Publications include Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018), The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (edited with Jarad Zimbler, Cambridge UP, 2018), and an essay on world literature as a 'speculative literary totality' with Modern Language Quarterly (2021). His current project is a history of poetry in Anglophone Caribbean creole languages in the period between the abolition of slavery and decolonisation.

The central concern of my research is with literature and decolonisation. My current project, which is supported by three-year ARC Discovery Project funding, is a historical poetics of poetry in Anglophone Caribbean creole languages in the period between the abolition of slavery and political independence. The grant also involves a collaboration with the Sydney-based Jamaican novelist Sienna Brown on a series of documentary podcasts on the history of Caribbean people in Australia. The first, Caribbean Convicts in Australia, was broadcast by ABC Radio National in 2021. My first large research project considered primitivism within a materialist and global purview. It led to the monograph Literary Primitivism (Stanford UP, 2018), which argues that primitivism arose in reaction to the zenith of European imperial expansion and that the most intensively primitivist works were produced by colonised subjects. This research has continued in collaborative forms. Emily Taylor convened an online symposium on the book with Syndicate, and I have convened symposia with Alberto Toscano and Samuel Spinner at Goldsmiths and Johns Hopkins, respectively, on new directions in primitivism research with a focus on primitivist aesthetics beyond the 'West'. The latter led to a special issue, Primitivism Now, Primitivism Again, with Comparative Literature.

With Jarad Zimbler, I have conducted a longterm research collaboration, Crafts of World Literature, which looks at the locality and specificity of literary form and technique. This has involved conferences and symposia at the University of Oxford, Western Sydney's Writing and Society Research Centre, the University Cape Town, and the University of Birmingham, and has produced journal issues with the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri, and The Cambridge Quarterly, and the co-edited volume The Cambridge Companion to World Literature. In my contributions, I have developed a non-positivist conception of world literature as a 'speculative literary totality' and explored the idea of 'literary meridians' to think about the affinities between unconnected and localized literary practices.

A related project is the ARC Discovery Project Other Worlds, for which I collaborated with J. M. Coetzee, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, Anthony Uhlmann, and Alexis Wright to explore world literature from the vantage of practicing writers. With Wright, I produced Nothing but the Truth (2019) for ABC RN on the life of the Gangalidda leader, Clarence Walden.

I have also written occasional essays on Australian literary criticism and higher education for the Sydney Review of Books and other venues (see 'Media').