Janna Thompson: Philosopher and Sleuth

Janna Thompson, feminist, social justice advocate, and internationally esteemed professor of philosophy, died on 24 June 2022, as a result of multiple brain tumours. [...]the importance of apologies for past wrongs: she observes that authorised apologies on behalf of communities have a range of notable features, but their main point is to "signal that a nation or organization repudiates injustices of the past and is committed to just dealings with groups that were persecuted or oppressed" (Thompson, "Apologising," 2020: 1041). [...]in accordance with her lifelong commitment to social justice, the novel explores the loss of human rights and the low social status blithely assigned to older people by institutions, governments, and culture. Along with the shocking and disproportionate Covid death rate among aged care residents, the epidemic highlighted the abuse of human rights with respect to residents' loss of liberty: they were locked up in their rooms, locked away from families and friends, and locked down in unsafe environments. In her pivotal essays, Sarah Holland-Batt, an award-winning poet, academic and aged care activist,3 has damned the Federal government's failure to prepare Australia's residential aged care facilities for Covid outbreaks (September, 2020), and has exposed the immorality of current Australian society: "We treat older people as a separate and subhuman class, frequently viewing them as a burden on their families, the community and the state" (May, 2020).

Suspect narratives: “Sinifying” an “Indianized” Japanese story

In 2013, the Malayalam film Drishyam, a suspenseful story of the cover up of an accidental murder, became a huge hit in India that inspired remakes in many regional languages including one in Hindi that, as with other recent Bollywood hits, traveled to China. This time, though, instead of screening the Hindi film in theaters, the narrative reached Chinese audiences with a Chinese language remake, titled Sheep Without A Shepherd《误杀》. The original film has been accused of lifting its story from a popular Japanese detective novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which was also made into films in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This essay traces the many versions of the narrative to explore how comparing the Indian and Chinese films can recenter our understanding of global cinema and film circulation. When considering the many version of Drishyam, instead of focusing on tensions between center and periphery, we can examine both the anxieties and the creative power of cultural borrowing and the retelling of narratives in an increasingly inter-connected Asian film market