y separately published work icon Journal of Postcolonial Writing periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Alternative title: Asian Australian Writing
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... vol. 52 no. 5 December 2016 of Journal of Postcolonial Writing est. 2005- Journal of Postcolonial Writing
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness, and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridized works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, and debates on alterity representational inequality, and conscious of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012 Ommundsen, Wenche. 2012. “Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 12 (2): 1–8.

, 2).' (Introduction)

Notes

  • Contents indexed selectively.

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2016 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Introduction : Realigning the Margins : Asian Australian Writing, Janet Wilson , Chandani Lokuge , single work criticism (p. 527-532)
Poison, Polygamy and Postcolonial Politics : The First Chinese Australian Novel, Zhong Huang , Wenche Ommundsen , single work criticism

'This article examines the first novel written by a Chinese diaspora writer in Australia, The Poison of Polygamy (多妻毒), published in instalments in the Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Times (Melbourne) from 1909 to 1910. Set during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the novel is nevertheless of its own time, reflecting the pressing concerns of a community in turmoil as the political upheavals of China in the final years of the Qing dynasty competed for attention with the disastrous effects of the White Australia policy. Taking the form of a picaresque and cautionary tale warning against traditional practices such as polygamy, opium smoking and foot-binding, the novel seeks to educate members of the lower classes of the Chinese community while embracing the republican cause against the Manchu rulers. The article argues that the progressive political agenda of the text (democratic, feminist) stands in sharp contrast to the view of the Chinese which prevailed in the white Australian community at the time.' (Publication abstract)

 (p. 533-544)
(Not) Being at Home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012), Janet Wilson , single work criticism
'This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second-generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging.' (Publication summary)
 (p. 545-558)
Mediating Literary Borders : Sri Lankan Writing in Australia, Chandani Lokuge , single work criticism
'Australia is “home” to over 150 ethnic minorities. However, although Australian public culture is becoming less Anglocentric and more cosmopolitan with the acceleration of migrant, refugee and asylum flows in recent years, monoculturalism continues to flourish, inciting racism leading to hostility and violence. This article is set at this controversial juncture of Australian multiculturalism.' (Introduction)
 (p. 559-571)
Tourists, Travellers, Refugees : An Interview with Michelle De Kretser, Alexandra Watkins (interviewer), single work interview
'Michelle De Kretser was born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and moved to Australia in 1972. From 1989 to 1992 she was a founding editor of the Australian Women’s Book Review. She is the author of several novels, including The Rose Grower (1999), The Hamilton Case (2003 – winner of the Tasmania Pacific Prize, the Encore Award [UK] and the Commonwealth Writers Prize [Southeast Asia and Pacific]) and The Lost Dog (2007). Her most recent novel, Questions of Travel, won the 2013 Miles Franklin Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal and the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for fiction. In this conversation, which took place by telephone call from Melbourne to Sydney in August 2015, De Kretser discusses Questions of Travel in relation to travel and tourism, the Sri Lankan diaspora, and postcolonial and neocolonial politics.' (Introduction)
 (p. 572-580)
The Diasporic Slide : Representations of Second-generation Diasporas in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) and in Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011), Alexandra Watkins , single work criticism
'The novels by Yasmine Gooneratne, A Change of Skies (1991), and Chandani Lokugé, If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Softly as I Leave You (2011), show the challenge of diaspora as sliding from parents to children. These fictions portray second-generation immigrants as “caught between two cultures”: the Sri Lankan culture of their parents and the Australian culture with which they engage at school and university. In Gooneratne’s comedy this cultural negotiation creates comic ambivalence in the second-generation character Veena, who is set to repeat the actions of her forebears. Gooneratne’s playful outcome contrasts with Lokugé’s tragic vision in her novels If the Moon Smiled and Softly as I Leave You, which position the “model minority” stereotype and racism in Australia, respectively, as significant challenges for second-generation characters. This article aims to counterbalance the dominant critical focus on first-generation diaspora in fiction. It examines relationships between parent and child characters in the novels in the context of social studies on second-generation diaspora, the South Asian diaspora, and multiculturalism in Australia.' (Introduction)
 (p. 581-594)
“The Root of All Evil”? Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlinda Bobis, Paul Giffard-Foret , single work criticism
This article exposes the contradictions of cosmopolitan citizenship and world peace in novels by three Southeast Asian Australian women authors. Their fiction questions the viability of transnational sisterhood in an age of humanitarian intervention where women and children have become pawns for renewed western imperialist ventures. This article asks in turn whether the incommensurable space opened up by the failures of various forms of what Stuart Hall calls cosmopolitanism “from above” can be reinvested through “reading up the ladder of privilege”, as proposed by Chandra T. Mohanty. Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) and Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) build “grass-roots” forms of cosmopolitanism and touristic hospitality designed to redress the many evils of contemporary postcolonial societies. The Root of all Evil (1987) by Dewi Anggraeni objects to the Spivakian native informant and upwardly mobile migrant woman’s imperious desire to help her homeland’s subaltern female underclass, in light of the latter’s lack of agency and the harm such intervention may cause. (Publication abstract)
 (p. 595-609)
Merlinda Bobis’s Fish-Hair Woman : Showcasing Asian Australianness, Putting the Question of Justice in Its Place, M. Dolores Herrero , single work criticism
'Fish-Hair Woman took 17 years to write and was rejected by six publishers – the “gatekeepers” of the Australian publishing industry, according to Bobis. One of main problems when trying to locate the novel as Asian Australian is that it is set in a militarized village in the Philippines, and therefore Australia and the Australian story occupy only a marginal position. This article will study the novel’s attempt to dilute and reverse this centrality by immersing white Australian characters in foreign and dangerous Asian settings. Some theories put forward by trauma and memory studies will also be used to show how Fish-Hair Woman manages to dig up individual traumatic memories from their ruins so that the painful collective past can somehow be reconstructed and brought to the surface, the memory of the disappeared can finally be honoured, and resilience can pave the way for hope in a better future.' (Publication abstract)
 (p. 610-621)
Re-storying the Past, Re-imagining the Future in Adib Khan’s Homecoming and Spiral Road, Stefano Mercanti , single work criticism
'This article argues that Adib Khan’s fiction challenges the orthodoxies of rigid cultural boundaries and dominator systems by creatively reconfiguring histories, landscapes and identities into forms of transcultural dialogue. Both Homecoming (2003) and Spiral Road (2007) tell the story of the disquieted lives of their protagonists, Martin and Masud, who struggle to inhabit an empathetic consciousness in a world ranked and measured by labels, points of origin, skin colour and religion. Their sense of displacement and yearning to belong – a feature in all Khan’s novels – enable them to move beyond the anxieties of finding a fitting place within the culture around them and embrace new ways of overcoming disconnection, violence and other forms of cultural stereotyping common to all cultures, thus rethinking their past and recreating a more equitable future.' (Publication abstract)
 (p. 622-633)
[Review Essay] : Postcolonial Traumas: Memory, Narrative, Resistance, Paul Sharrad , single work criticism
'This essay collection covers film and prose narrative from diverse locations. The overall intent is to reassess the psychologizing of trauma (after Stef Craps) and extend its literary bounds beyond the Holocaust. Those chapters that engage with the key terms of trauma and the postcolonial and their critical archive are the most impressive. Lucy Brisley’s careful framing of her discussion of Assia Djebar’s fiction with a reworking via Derrida of the Freudian melancholia-mourning dichotomy according to contradictory functions of memory is a standout chapter.' (Publication abstract)
 (p. 634-636)
[Review Essay] Exoticiizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction, Dougal McNeill , single work criticism
'Is postcolonial studies becoming historical? The thrilling victories of the anti-colonial movement’s triumphant period are now all but gone from common living memory. From the French defeat in Algeria to Kwame Nkrumah’s early years in Ghana and Vietnam’s victory against the US in the American War, the post in the postcolonial is becoming a matter of the archive and public memory. If one phase of canonical postcolonial novels, including Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), negotiated historical legacies through the problems of the Bildungsroman, more recent works, such as Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age (2007), draw on the resources of the historical novel tradition itself. Colonial history, meanwhile, all the way from Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey to the compulsive commemoration of World War One, enjoys lavish and ongoing treatment in the popular and literary fields.' (Publication abstract)
 (p. 638-639)
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Related Works

y separately published work icon Mediating Literary Borders : Asian Australian Writing Janet Wilson (editor), Chandani Lokuge (editor), London : Routledge , 2018 21139239 2018 anthology criticism 'Engaging with Asian Australian writing, this book focuses on an influential area of cultural production defined by its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness. In addressing the demanding new transnational and transcultural critical frameworks of such syncretic writing, the contributors collectively examine how the varied and diverse body of Asian Australian literary work intervenes into contemporary representational politics and culture. The book questions, for instance, the ideology of Australian multiculturalism; the core/periphery hierarchy; the perpetuation of Orientalist attitudes and stereotypes; and white Australian claims to belong as seen in its myths of cultural authenticity and authority. Ranging in critical analyses from the historic first Chinese-Australian novel to contemporary award winning Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Filipino Australian novels, the book provides an inside view of the ways in which Asian Australian literary work is reshaping Australian mainstream literature, politics and culture, and in the wider context, the world literary scene. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.' (Publication summary)
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Works about this Work

Introduction : Realigning the Margins : Asian Australian Writing Janet Wilson , Chandani Lokuge , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , December vol. 52 no. 5 2016; (p. 527-532) Mediating Literary Borders : Asian Australian Writing 2018; (p. 1-6)
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