The political imagination: Postcolonialism and diaspora in contemporary Australian poetry

This issue considers the relationship between contemporary poetry and the political imagination. We see the imagination as a means to explore possibility or transformation, but also a vehicle by which to envisage or think otherhow to normative Western forms of social expla - nation (Bhabha 248). Postcolonial studies as a disciplinary field has long investigated the complex cultural and political relationship between self and place. Yet, since its revolutionary inception in the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century, it has been increasingly viewed as an explicitly deterritorialising discourse in something close to the Deleuzian sense - a discourse so fragmented, so hybrid, so as to deny its constituent elements any sustainable specificity at all (Hall - ward 22). While many of the essays collected in this issue chal lenge established modes of postcolonial thinking, they also offer new, even supplementary, ways of imagining a politically and ethically charged contemporary poetics.