Avant-Garde Austalgia

Abstract

The Australian avant-garde raises all the contradictions of avant-garde studies in the present time. Antipodal vanguards in the 20th and 21st centuries would grapple with various aspects of Australian national history, being in various ways and times between East and West, the aligned and non-aligned, the political and geopolitical in poetics. The word “Australia,” from the Latin auster, contains meanings for “East.” Most importantly, the Antipodal vanguard exposes the contradictions of Australia’s imperial-colonial past and the struggle to overcome it. In this essay, I begin with the example of a “Dada” poem that comes from an Aboriginal rain dance, as well as the emergence of Dada poetics from the 1950s to the 1970s. Throughout I keep complexities of history and time at the forefront: what is the worth of a “marginal” national literary history of the avant-garde? What does the avant-garde mean outside Europe or the Euro-US? What can Australian Dadaism tell us about the future of avant-garde studies? Does the avant-garde always lead to nostalgia, or “Austalgia,” a hearkening after the past, as much as a striving toward the future?