The University of Barcelona’s Centre for Australian Studies has just published The Transnational Story Hub: Between Self and Other (edited by Merlinda Bobis and Belen Martin-Lucas) a multi-stage project that ran from 2010 to 2015 between teams from the University of Vigo and the University of Wollongong, and of which I was so fortunate to be a part.
At the core of the work is the open and ongoing study of how the self and other relate to each other. It uses the discourse of transnationalism to explore this important contemporary issue and the result is a new and exciting blend of literary theory and practice (prose, poetry and papers) which retains a unified focus despite its many fearless nodes willing to go anywhere.
Very much worth a read!
You can find a creative commons digital copy of the work here.
Following is a beautiful take on the self and other I recently found: The other does not exist: this is rational faith, the incurable belief of human reason. Identity = reality, as if, in the end, everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same. But the other refuses to disappear; it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reasons breaks its teeth. Abel Martin, with a poetic faith as human as rational faith, believed in the other, in ‘the essential Heterogeneity of being’, in what might be called the incurable otherness from which oneness must always suffer. Antonio Macado (quoted in The Labrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz)