The Many Faces of Literary Journalism: In Jail and in Exile, as Resistance and as Crime

Through four presentations, The Many Faces of Literary Journalism explores prison memoirs as tools of dissent (Willa McDonald), the essay as a form of Indigenous resistance (Sue Joseph), the exilic contributions of German-Jewish journalists (Beate Josephi), and the ethical complexities of undercover reporting (Bunty Avieson). Together, these works highlight how literary journalism amplifies marginalised voices, confronts oppressive systems, and shapes cultural memory across diverse global contexts.

Literary journalism in jail
A/Prof Willa McDonald, Honorary Associate, USyd

Imprisonment for political reasons is a potent means for expressing state power and suppressing dissent. This paper explores a recent Korean prison narrative: Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Prisoner: A Memoir (2021). The Prisoner, originally published in two volumes in Korean in 2017, details the author’s many years as a pro-democracy activist and intellectual, including his imprisonment for five years in the Seoul Detention Centre in the 1990s. The work serves as both personal recollection and critical reflection on Korea’s authoritarian and post-war history, recounting Hwang’s individual experiences within larger socio-political structures. This paper, will focus on the ways in which The Prisoner illuminates the role of carceral subjectivity in prison memoir while investigating the potential of literary journalism to use an individual’s recount of their personal history as a tool to resist oppression, foster social justice, and allow marginalized voices and forgotten histories to be remembered and given agency.

Literary journalism as resistance
A/Prof Sue Joseph, Honorary Associate, USyd

The essay as resistance is a long-trodden, weary path of many Australian First Nations writers. Interrogating three literary journalism advocacy essays by First Nations journalists rendering encounters with the Settler Australian dominant culture, I argue that no longer can white Australia say: ‘We didn’t know’. Additionally, I argue that the resistance essay easily nestles within the context of advocacy literary journalism and as such, plays an imperative role in the un-silencing of Australian First Nations voices, despite copious governmental erasure policies throughout the centuries.

Literary journalism in exile
Dr Beate Josephi, Honorary Associate, USyd

Literary journalism has a long tradition of social critical reporting. The achievements of two German-Jewish authors, Gabriele Tergit (1894 - 1982) and public intellectual Hannah Arendt (1906 -1975), both having to flee Germany in the 1930s, highlight the differing circumstances exile forced on them. Tergit, known for her critical court reporting as well as her novels, once in exile became deprived of the environment in which she flourished. Arendt, in line with her belief that communication is not only thinking, speaking and listening, but also acting, confronted the horrors of the holocaust by reporting the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker and completing her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil.

Literary journalism as crime
Dr Bunty Avieson, Senior Lecturer, USyd

In 2020, Valentin Gendrot’s undercover expose of the French police force, titled Flic (Cop), became a global publishing sensation. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in the US, Gendrot’s bestseller revealed brutality, racism and misogyny embedded in the French police force. Le Monde described the work as a ‘public service’. But as the book makes clear, to achieve its social justice aims, the author moved from observer to participant, enabling the crimes he was writing about. This places his work in difficult ethical terrain, one more familiar to police going undercover with crime gangs, than writers seeking to reveal hidden truths. In this paper, I consider Gendrot’s liability, the ethics of undercover policing, and how they may be applied to a writer going undercover in the pursuit of social justice.

Speakers

Associate Professor Willa McDonald teaches and researches literary journalism as an affiliate with the University of Sydney and Macquarie University. A former journalist, her books include Literary Journalism in Colonial Australia (2023) and Social Justice and Literary Journalism (with Robert Alexander 2022). She is currently working on the collection Asian Literary Journalism with Daozhi Xu. Willa is President of the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies, and co-founder and co-editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Journalism Book Series.

Associate Professor Sue Joseph has been a journalist for more than 45 years, and an academic teaching journalism and creative writing, particularly creative non-fiction, at the University of Technology Sydney for 23 years. She is a Senior Research Fellow doctoral supervisor at Adelaide University, as well as at Central Queensland University and the University of Technology Sydney. She has written three books and edited many more. She is current co-editor of the journal Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics and of the Palgrave Literary Journalism Book Series.

Dr Beate Josephi’s research interests include journalism in the Global South and literary journalism. With John Bak, she is the editor of the forthcoming volume, Literary Journalism & War and Conflict in the Asia-Pacific. She is the author of chapters and entries in international handbooks on journalism, and many internationally published articles in high-ranking journals. She is also on the editorial boards of numerous journals, including Literary Journalism Studies, Australian Journalism Review, Brazilian Journalism Research, and International Communication Gazette.

Dr Bunty Avieson’s research interests include the developing media in Bhutan, Wikipedia studies, and literary journalism. She has published two works of literary journalism about Bhutan – Baby in a Backpack to Bhutan and Dragon’s Voice: How modern media found Bhutan – as well as two edited collections on memoir for Routledge, Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir and Still Here: Memoirs of Trauma, Illness and Loss. A former journalist in Australia, Britain and Asia, she has taught a range of writing units at Macquarie University and University of Sydney.

This panel is chaired by Dr Bunty Avieson.

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