Associate Professor Ben Etherington

Associate Professor - Research Lectureship, Literature,
Humanities (Arts)

Biography
Contact
Publications
Projects
Supervision
Media

Biography

Ben Etherington is an associate professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and is 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, and 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.

This information has been contributed by Associate Professor Etherington.

Qualifications

PhD University of Cambridge (UK)
MPh Eng University of Cambridge (UK)

Awards

Edward W. Said Fellowship, Heyman Center, Columbia University 2018-05-01
Australian Heads of University English Prize for Literary Scholarship 2018-12-26
Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP 170101002) with Alexis Wright, Anthony Uhlmann, Nicholas Jose, Gail Jones, J. M. Coetzee 2017-01-02
SoHCA Researcher of the Year Award (shared with Alison Moore) 2019-11-01
Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP220101256) Creole Voices 2022-03-01
Vanguard Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham 2022-02-01
Eccles Centre Fellow, British Library 2022-04-28

Organisational Unit (School / Division)

Humanities (Arts)

Committees

Board of Trustees
SoHCA
Sydney Review of Books
Australian Association for Caribbean Studies
English Teaching Group

Contact

Email:	B.Etherington@westernsydney.edu.au
Phone:	(02) 9685 9357
Mobile:
Location:	EQ.1.27 Parramatta

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Publications

Books

Etherington, B. (2018), 'Literary Primitivism', : Stanford University Press 9781503602366.
Etherington, B. and Zimbler, J. (2018), 'The Cambridge Companion to World Literature', : Cambridge University Press 9781108471374.

Chapters in Books

Etherington, B. (2022), 'Creolization', The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, Oxford University Press 9780190699604.
Etherington, B. (2021), 'Daily decolonization : poetry periodicals and newspaper publishing', Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1920-1970. Volume 2, Cambridge University Press 9781108495523.
Etherington, B. (2020), 'Worlds, world-making, and Southern horizons', The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetze, Cambridge University Press 9781108475341.
Etherington, B. and Zimbler, J. (2018), 'Introduction', The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, Cambridge University Press 9781108471374.
Etherington, B. (2018), 'Scales, systems, and meridians', The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, Cambridge University Press 9781108457842.
Etherington, B. (2016), 'How to read a big book : the critical reception of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites in the context of contemporary trade book marketing', The Return of Print?: Contemporary Australian Publishing, Monash University Publishing 9781925495294.
Etherington, B. (2007), 'Said, Grainger and the Ethics of Polyphony', Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, Melbourne University Press 9780522853568.

Journal Articles

Etherington, B. (2024), 'Edward Said and the dialectic of the "imperialized" intellectual', Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol 11, no 1 , pp 87 - 94.
Etherington, B. (2023), 'Writing the Caribbean in Magazine Time [Book review]', New West Indian Guide, vol 97, no 3-4 , pp 402 - 403.
Etherington, B. (2022), 'The birth of "Quow" : Michael McTurk and the minstrel origins of the civic tradition of Creole verse', Small Axe, vol 26, no 3 , pp 31 - 51.
Etherington, B. (2021), 'World literature as a speculative literary totality : Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the critical-humanist tradition', Modern Language Quarterly, vol 82, no 2 , pp 225 - 251.
Etherington, B. and Zimbler, J. (2021), 'Decolonize practical criticism?', English: Journal of the English Association, vol 70, no 270 , pp 227 - 236.
Etherington, B. and Pryor, S. (2019), 'Historical poetics and the problem of exemplarity', Critical Quarterly, vol 61, no 1 , pp 3 - 17.
Etherington, B. (2019), 'Against network thinking', Affirmations: of the modern, vol 6, no 1 , pp 30 - 44.
Etherington, B. (2019), 'Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher (review)', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol 20, no 3 .
Etherington, B. (2017), 'Ben Etherington reviews Borrowed Light', Critical Inquiry, vol 43, no 4 , pp 897 - 899.
Etherington, B. (2016), 'An answer to the question : what is decolonization? : Frantz Fanon's The wretched of the earth and Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of dialectical reason', Modern Intellectual History, .
Etherington, B. (2016), 'An interview with Ali Cobby Eckermann', Wasafiri, vol 31, no 2 , pp 13 - 17.
Etherington, B. (2016), 'Unsettled poetics : contemporary Australian and South African poetry', Wasafiri, vol 31, no 2 , pp 1 - 4.
Etherington, B. (2015), 'On scanning Louise Bennett seriously', Journal of West Indian Literature, vol 23, no 1-2 , pp 19 - 34.
Etherington, B. and Zimbler, J. (2014), 'Field, material, technique : on renewing postcolonial literary criticism', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol 49, no 3 , pp 279 - 297.
Zimbler, J., Etherington, B. and Bower, R. (2014), 'Crafts of world literature : field, material and translation', Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol 49, no 3 , pp 273 - 278.
Etherington, B. (2013), 'Cellular scansion : creolization as poetic practice in Brathwaite's Rights of passage', Thinking Verse, vol 3 , pp 188 - 210.
Etherington, B. (2012), 'What is materialism's material? : thoughts toward (actually against) a materialism for "world literature"', Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol 48, no 5 , pp 539 - 551.
Etherington, B. (2010), 'Sound Gazes? (Response to William Fitzgerald)', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol 135, no sp1 , pp 39 - 43.
Etherington, B. (2010), 'Deafness and insight : on the seductions of the music/language analogy', Paragraph, vol 33, no 1 , pp 20 - 36.
Etherington, B. (2007), 'Instrumentalising Musical Ethics: Edward Said and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra', Australian Music Research, vol 9 , pp 121 - 129.

Other Publications

2021, 'Caribbean Convicts in Australia', Recorded Work
2019, 'Nothing but the Truth', Recorded Work
2019, 'Nothing but the Truth', Recorded Work
2016, 'Roast or Fry: Dancehall in the Yards of Kingston', Recorded Work

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 November 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'.

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').