Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 [Review Essay] Exoticiizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Postcolonial Writing Asian Australian Writing vol. 52 no. 5 December 2016 10768503 2016 periodical issue

    '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)

    2016
    pg. 638-639
Last amended 27 Feb 2017 13:48:32
638-639 [Review Essay] Exoticiizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fictionsmall AustLit logo Journal of Postcolonial Writing
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