'When they say that your people do not exist, how does that make you feel?'.

This article focuses on the conference on "'The Cultural Unconscious and the Postcolonising Process," jointly sponsored by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine and the Ashworth Program in Social Theory at the University of Melbourne. Literary uses of language in poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction constitute an imaginative intervention aimed at changing the cultural unconscious. Perhaps the most powerful cultural work poetic language performs is to merge the linguistic, the psychological and the political.