Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 “One That Returns” : Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.' (Publication summary)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 3 Jun 2020 10:44:23
112-124 “One That Returns” : Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)small AustLit logo Journal of Literary Studies
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X