Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Investigating diversity, racism and cultural appropriation with the thrilling pace of a Twitter meltdown, Rebecca F. Kuang’s 2023 novel Yellowfacehas captivated readers across literary and BookTok communities alike.
At her only Melbourne event, Kuang discussed her successful career, plagiarism, privilege, and the state of the publishing industry with host Beverley Wang.
Investigating diversity, racism and cultural appropriation with the thrilling pace of a Twitter meltdown, Rebecca F. Kuang’s 2023 novel Yellowfacehas captivated readers across literary and BookTok communities alike.
At her only Melbourne event, Kuang discussed her successful career, plagiarism, privilege, and the state of the publishing industry with host Beverley Wang.








![Language Under Occupation
Evelyn Araluen reflected, I had all the theory in the world to explain the logics of our erasure, the violence of our replacements, and our more palatable Others. [...] But no one ever asked how we were both colonised by and inheritors of these words – from ‘To the Poets’, Dropbear (2021).
They traced the contours of language, sought out its limits, and pushed against them. Histories were cut up, struck through, misplaced, and misremembered. Evelyn Araluen, Hasib Hourani, and Mykaela Saunders engaged in a conversation about the careful craft of ripping the empire’s language to shreds. In their work, these brilliant writers shifted form in myriad ways; they rendered nonlinear temporalities and introduced new vocabularies. They wielded opacities while sharing the dearest of intimacies. Thinking through poetry and prose, language and craft, these three writers shared the shape of a language unsettled. Language Under Occupation](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E1Yx7W2M4Pw/mqdefault.jpg)

