A tireless campaigner for cultural diversity in the arts,Professor Sneja Gunew was one of Australia’s most innovative literary critics and theorists.
In the 1980s and 1990s,her name became synonymous with the emerging field of migrant,later multicultural literature,and her pioneering work in the promotion,documentation,and analysis of works by Australian authors of non-Anglo-Celtic background has greatly contributed to a more accurate portrayal of Australia globally.
The idea that Australian literature traces its origins to cultures and languages far beyond the Anglophone mainstream is in no small part due to Gunew’s persistent efforts,often in the face of considerable opposition,to bring multiculturalism in from the margins to become a defining feature of Australian literature.
Sneja Gunew was born in Tubingen,Germany,her mother German,her father Bulgarian. The family arrived in Australia as displaced persons under the auspices of the International Refugee Organisation in 1950 and settled in St Albans,then on the outer limits of Melbourne.
She obtained a BA (hons) from the University of Melbourne,and postgraduate degrees from the University of Toronto (MA) and the University of Newcastle,NSW (PhD). Inspired by her own background and experience,she soon became a keen student of the emerging areas of feminist and postcolonial studies.
These interests came together at Deakin University,where she taught from 1979 to 1993 and was part of the first interdisciplinary teams developing course material in women’s and literary studies for distance education students. It was also at this time that she started to question the absence of non-Anglo-Celtic writers from the Australian literary canon and ponder the conditions that gave rise to the ever-increasing discrepancy between the make-up of the nation and what was recognised as the national culture.
She pursued such questions on multiple fronts:edited collections of and on migrant-multicultural and women’s writing,bibliographical work (identifying and recording works written by multicultural writers),as well as critical and theoretical publications. In her early writing,culminating in her first book,Framing Marginality:Multicultural literary studies (1994),she used literary theory (deconstruction,postcolonialism and feminism) to argue for the potential of writers considered as marginal to redefine categories such as that of national literature.
Gunew was also active in arts policy. Between 1988 and 1991,she served as a member of the Australia Council for the Arts and persuaded its chair Donald Horne to establish a Multicultural Advisory Committee (ACMAC),which she chaired with great enthusiasm and commitment,producing major changes in the ways in which the council approached the applications for funding and support by artists from non-English-speaking background. She insisted that each of council’s boards and committees were inclusive of the voices representing ethnic communities.
Wenche Ommundsen,Fazal Rizvi and Sneja Gunew in 2019.Supplied
In 1993,she moved to Canada to take up an appointment as professor of English at Victoria University on Vancouver Island. In 1995,she moved to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,where she remained as professor of English and women’s studies until her retirement in 2014. However,she returned regularly to observe and contribute to cultural debates in Australia,using her new vantage to comment on cultural developments in Australia within comparative and international frameworks and in relation to evolving concepts such as comparative and critical multiculturalism,diaspora,cosmopolitanism,transnationalism,and globalisation.
A prolific writer,she published some 20 books and well over 100 book chapters and journal articles. Notable among these wasHaunted Nations:The colonial dimensions of multiculturalisms (2004) in which she offered a critical scrutiny of the very term multiculturalism in different national settings. Her last book,Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators (2017) sought to salvage elements of multiculturalism that have been forgotten in later debates,chief among which are its multilingual and cosmopolitan dimensions.
Gunew met with personal tragedy at a young age,widowed in her mid-20s when her husband,the gifted physicist Peter Leonard,died of a brain virus. Back in Melbourne,she later met,and eventually married,the British-born artist Terence Greer,with whom she enjoyed a close relationship of mutual respect and support despite (or perhaps because of) their very different personalities for close to 40 years. Although profoundly affected by his death in 2020 she continued to embark on new plans and projects,only cut short by the brutal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in late 2023.
Sneja Gunew leaves behind a vast legacy:pioneering work on feminism and multiculturalism in art and literature together with large numbers of former students,colleagues,research associates and friends who have greatly benefited from her intellectual and personal generosity.
She is survived by brothers Stefan and Marin,nieces Bianca and Sofia,and numerous friends in Australia,Canada and across the world.
Wenche Ommundsen is professor emerita,literary studies,University of Wollongong;Fazal Rizvi is professor emeritus,graduate school of education,University of Melbourne. Both were colleagues of Sneja Gunew at Deakin University in the 1980s and remained life-long friends and sometime research collaborators.