Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory

by Leah Jing McIntosh (Editor), Adolfo Aranjuez (Editor)

In this collection of new essays from the Liminal & Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize longlist, First Nations writers and writers of colour bend and shift boundaries, query the past and envision new futures. They ask: How do we write or hold our former selves, our ancestries? How does where we come from connect to where we are headed? How do we tell the stories of those who have been diminished or ignored in the writing of history? How do we do justice to the lives they lived, or to the people they were?

From the intricacies of trans becoming, to violences inflicted on stateless peoples, to complex inheritances and the intertwining of tradition, politics and place, this prescient collection challenges singular narratives about the past, offering testimony and prophecy alike.

ESSAYS BY André Dao, Barry Corr, Brandon K. Liew, Elizabeth Flux, Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun, grace ugamay dulawan, Hannah Wu, Hasib Hourani, Hassan Abul, Jon Tjhia, Kasumi Bocrzyk, Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn, Lou Garcia-Dolnik, Lur Alghurabi, Mykaela Saunders, Ouyang Yu, Ruby-Rose Pivet-Marsh, Ryan Gustafsson, Suneeta Peres da Costa and Veronica Gorrie

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

296 pages, Paperback

Published August 30, 2022

Reviews

[donnalyn ♡]

one of the best collections of essays i've read! really thoughtful and beautiful writing, and each piece was in dialogue with each other, despite being so different in both content and form. this collection features a few of my favourite contemporary australian writers whose works i've mostly read online, so it's very special to have on my shelf <3

[Danial Yazdani]

A solid essay collection by Liminal and the various BIPOC writers they continue to support. I loved how the collection was not about ‘BIPOC’ as a theme, but rather BIPOC writing ABOUT a theme like memory. It’s time we move past the reductionist attitude to BIPOC or diasporic writing and look to alternatives like this that substantiate a specific context.

[lou garciadolnik]

(forgot to put this one on my goodreads for this year)~ look, i'm obviously biased, but there are essays in here that are living in my head long-term

[Bea]

essay collection full of vibrance and weight. that is all you need to know. go and read! this book has rendered me speechless.

[Hari]

First picked this up a few years ago and the book mark got stuck... got inspired to read it again a few months ago and I've loved it. Such incredible creative non-fiction with stories that are both beautiful and devastating and celebratory and honourable. Creative non-fic feels like such a privilege to read, there's a lot of generosity in most of these essays.

The difference and play with form, really made this collection stand out for me. Really talented writers, it was really inspiring to read.

Borrowed from Lilli in Nov 2024, I will give it back to u. I promise.

[stephanie]

tbh it's hard for me to give this an overall rating this, since its a collection of essays by many different authors. for me, some of the essays were a 5⭐️, others were a 1-2⭐️ bc they were simply way too verbose, which made it very difficult to read and understand. it was hard for me to appreciate the meaning they were trying to create when the words themselves were acting as a barrier - u know when authors sometimes use language that's just way too *fancy* / 'sophisticated' for what they're talking about? yeah. but besides that, I loved the diverse range of voices included in this collection, & how the essays took many different forms (some poetic, others structured more like research papers, and others relying images). I really liked a few of the essays! maybe if someone had time to sit & analyse a few of these essays under a literary microscope, they'd be able to appreciate these essays a lot more than I did.

[Zoe Hannay]

nice work to everybody here

[Yige]

words cannot describe how much I loved this anthology

[Izzy]

A fantastic collection of essays. ‘Island Bodies’ by Frankey Chung-Kok-Lun was truly beautiful and emotional end to a great book.

[James Whitmore]

Much like Liminal’s previous outing in short fiction, Against Disappearance is a collection from First Nations writers and writers of colour longlisted for the inaugural Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize. Both identities trouble the whiteness of Australia, a nation founded on the myth of terra nullius and exclusion of people of colour. “The enforced disappearance of cultures is often framed as natural or inevitable,” McIntosh writes, “If nothing was here, then nothing could be murdered — or so the logic loops, bloodied hands wiped clean.” So, Against Disappearance does what it says on the package: it resists the forces that would disappear selves, peoples, cultures. Read more on my blog.

[Tadakatsu Honda]

A beautifully sad collective meditation on the experiences of disparate peoples. Its brutal transparency is juggled nicely alongside what I personally take as an overarching pursuit of love and unity amidst said haze of grief, data and racism. The essays incorporate social modernity and the looming technocracy in their examinations of identity. The prose obviously varies, but it's never jarring.

[Declan Fry]

Dear reader, in recommending books to you, know that I only have 300 words to say whatever it is I wish to, and that part of me thinks maybe today I should just write the following three words 100 times: Read this book.

Against Disappearance comprises all 20 of the longlisted works from the 2021 Liminal and Pantera Press Non-Fiction Prize. There is a remarkable degree of shared imagery and overlapping concerns — especially around the right to maintain silence, to refuse. Pieces serendipitously connect to one another, and these connections make reading the book a pleasure, allowing the reader to wander, and to wonder, too, at how much might be made visible and how much concealed by the complexities of appearance, the violence of knowledge.

grace ugamay dulawan, describing the spectacle of colonisation and racism, writes about men who "took some of us on his arm to his country and put us not on a pedestal but our own arena in which we performed for a CAPTIVE audience […] I want to say I'm not EXQUISITE but merely human". dulawan is describing what it means to just be – neither as miracle nor as tragedy, not a star nor a martyr, not a trauma or a spectacle but something more: something ordinary, something alive and real, something thoroughly unremarkable.

Read on: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-2...

[Natasha (jouljet)]

Twenty essays from twenty writers of colour. A collection of essays of longlisted works from Liminal and Pantera Press Non-Fiction Prize. A challenge to the usual whiteness of prize lists, a volume of own voices from the diversity of Australian society.

A group of essays musing on inheritances and familial lines and connections. Histories and oral storytelling, the presence and absence of archives.

First Nations truth telling of colonisation and Frontier Wars, massacres and stolen generations. Refugee stories of journey and displacement, migrant histories of racism and ostracism. Trans and queer stories of becoming selves.

Some incredible stand outs, just a couple that didn't gell for me. A strong collection of voices of the writers emerging.

[Kin]

cool collection and lots of interesting perspectives - but essay medium can be tricky. It's highly personal writing, which it should be, but that combined with the level of compression means that it doesn't always lead to accessible reading for the outsider

[Kirsty Pleiter]

I loved this book and will be forcing it upon all of my reading friends!

[Elena]

A collection I'll be pressing into the hands of everyone I know.

[Micah Horton hallett]

An incredible collection of essays as diverse as the humans that created them. Every single one shines with wit passion and creativity. This is a book that should immediately become part of the cannon of Australian letters.