For an evening of big ideas about race and multiculturalism in Australia, join the award-winning team from Sweatshop Literacy Movement for the official launch of The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism by internationally renowned thinker, Ghassan Hage. This groundbreaking new book includes Ghassan’s major works, White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism. Celebrate the occasion with an evening of conversation and performance with leading writers and thinkers including Paula Abood, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Ghassan Hage, Amani Haydar and Sara M. Saleh. With special guest Tony Birch.
Presented with Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement.
Ghassan Hage (Australian)
Ghassan Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is internationally renowned for his research on migration, on the intersection of racism, nationalism and colonialism, and for his development of critical anthropological theory. Along with the works re-published in The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism (2023), Hage’s sole-authored books include: Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination (2015), Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017) and The Diasporic Condition: Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World (2021).
Amani Haydar (Australian)
Amani Haydar is an esteemed author, visual artist and advocate for women based in Western Sydney. Amani’s debut memoir The Mother Wound was awarded the 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year. She was also the recipient of a NSW Premier’s Woman of the Year Award (local) and is a former Archibald Prize finalist. Amani’s work is featured in Another Australia (Affirm Press), Arab Australian Other (Picador) and Admissions: Voices Within Mental Health (Upswell).
Sara Saleh (Australian)
Sara M. Saleh is an award-winning writer and lawyer with Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage. Her poems and short stories have been published widely and she is co-editor of the ground-breaking 2019 anthology Arab, Australian, Other. Sara is the first and only poet to win both the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the 2020 Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Her first novel is Songs for the Dead and the Living (Affirm Press, 2023). Her first poetry collection is The Flirtation of Girls (UQP, 2023).
Tony Birch (Australian)
Tony Birch, a proud Fitzroy Blak, holds the Boisbouvier Chair in Australian Literature at Melbourne University. He is the author of three novels, five short fiction collections, and two poetry books. In 2022 his most recent book, Dark As Last Night was awarded the Christina Stead Literary Prize and the Steele Rudd Literary Award. The book was also shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction. In 2023 he will release a new novel, Women and Children.
Paula Abood (Australian)
Dr. Paula Abood is a cultural worker, writer and educator. She has engaged communities for over three decades, receiving the Australia Council's Ros Bower Award for lifetime achievement in community cultural practice (2013). Paula has been published in Australian Poetry Journal (2020), Arab Australian Other: Stories on Race and Identity (2019), and Sydney Review of Books (2016). She has written and directed plays (The Cartographer’s Curse, 2016) and blogs (Race and the City, 2010), and is Chair of Arab Theatre Studio.
Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Australian)
Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology After Australia (Affirm Press, 2020). Mohammed is the multi-award-winning author of The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014), The Lebs (Hachette, 2018) and The Other Half of You (Hachette, 2021). He completed his Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University in 2017.
