Cirrus@Austlit

'Among Chinese-Australian writers, Brian Castro is the most widely recognized pioneer of transnational writing. Birds of Passage and After China are Castro’s two earliest works, both of which describe Chinese migrants’ lives in Australia and reveal the struggle the protagonists experience in the process of transforming from a national identity to a transnational one. Studies of the transnational turn of literature have run parallel with the increasing application of interdisciplinary approaches to transnational literature since the end of the 20 th century. In this context, this article focuses on the relationship between changes of geographical space, disruption of mental space and identity transformation, using the theory of liminality, an analytical framework originally from anthropology, which examines the in-between state during identity transition, and the concept of sensory space—smellscape—from sociology, to explore why the smellscapes in these two works can be treated as liminality and what kind of transnational identity the liminal smellscapes envision with their transgressive power that can dismantle the rigid boundary between race and class, between fantasy and reality, as well as between the sexual and creative desires.' (Publication abstract)