Sweatshop acquires Hage book, establishes $10,000 First Nations fellowship
Sweatshop Literacy Movement Inc. has acquired world rights to The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism by anthropologist, public intellectual and cultural critic Ghassan Hage.
The book will include new editions of Hage’s publications White Nation and Against Paranoid Nationalism, which will be celebrating their 25th and 20th anniversaries respectively. The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism will also feature Hage’s later writings, ‘providing a definitive collection on the complexities of racial diversity’, according to Sweatshop.
Hage is professor of anthropology and social theory at the University of Melbourne and a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology in Germany. He is the author and editor of many works, including most recently The Diasporic Condition (University of Chicago Press). Hage said of Sweatshop acquiring his latest book, ‘I can’t really think of any publishing house more suited for the republication of these texts. At Sweatshop there is a whole generation of people who appreciate White Nation as an inheritance and I appreciate how traces of it are present in their work.’
As part of the agreement with Sweatshop, Hage has donated his fee to establish a fellowship for First Nations writers, which will be initiated in June 2023. The fellowship, valued at $10,000, will provide two emerging First Nations writers with funding, mentors and resources to develop a debut nonfiction manuscript while in residence at Sweatshop. Hage said donating his author fee was ‘a way of forging lasting relations that begin to counteract the continual harm caused by our ongoing colonial inhabitance of this land’. His decision ties into a broader solidarity movement with First Nations communities that Hage describes as a ‘reparative mode of existence’.
Founding director of Sweatshop Michael Mohammed Ahmad described the publication of The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism as ‘necessary and urgent’.
‘In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, the global Black Lives Matter movement, and the rise of anti-Asian violence as a result of Covid-19, Ghassan Hage’s writings on racism, white supremacy and nationalism have become more relevant and essential than ever. As the publisher, we consider it a tremendous responsibility and honour to ensure that some of Ghassan’s most important and iconic works will be available and affordable for generations to come.’
The publication of Hage’s book and the subsequent First Nations fellowship are supported by Diversity Arts Australia, while Sweatshop has also engaged a team of Arab-Australian artists, scholars, editors and organisers, including Randa Abdel-Fattah, Paula Abood, Jumana Bayeh, Sarah Ayoub, Amani Haydar, Kawsar Ali and Lena Nahlous to support the project.
On behalf of the collective, Abdel-Fattah expressed the importance of preserving and celebrating Hage’s work: ‘Take intellectually exciting and searingly insightful, scholarly but grounded in community, daringly thought-provoking but generous, groundbreaking and yet still timely, and you have an idea why Ghassan Hage remains one of the most treasured scholars of our time.’
The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism will be published in April 2023 and distributed in print and digital formats through NewSouth Books.
Category: Local news Rights and acquisitions
