Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Agony of Choice in Teo Hsu-Ming’s Love and Vertigo
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

'Teo Hsu-Ming’s Love and Vertigo (2000) follows multiple generations of a family through Singapore and Sydney, as they are racialized in these neoliberal contexts. It also repeatedly explores the dynamics of decision-making, presenting its characters with impossible choices and lose-lose scenarios. This article investigates the relation between choice, neoliberalism, and migrancy in Singapore and Sydney, the main settings of Teo’s novel. It argues that the idea of choice is mobilized here to illustrate structural limitations to decision-making in the context of neoliberalism’s regimes of racialization. By exploring the way choices are circumscribed and then made, the dynamics of neoliberalism and racialization in Sydney and Singapore are examined afresh. In so doing, this article interrogates the degree to which choice is liberating and celebrates the ways in which “decision and domination” (following Jane Elliott) can be resisted.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Antipodes Articulating Southeast Asia and the Antipodes vol. 33 no. 2 2019 21208476 2019 periodical issue 'This issue goes to press ten months into the year of living with COVID-19, which is nearly a full year after the date on the volume’s cover. Part of me wanted to be coy about this delay, simply elide the disjunction between the published date and the actual publication. But to tell the truth, it seems more important to acknowledge where we are and how we are. Antipodes has been running behind schedule for the past few issues, and the patience of our contributors and subscribers has been much appreciated. The delays have yielded some fortuitous timing, such as the publication of Soren Tae Smith’s thoughtful piece on the mosque bombing in Christchurch in the June 2019 issue, apparently just a few months later than the event (although actually a year delayed). “This Is a Difficult Piece to Write” was both a timely and an atemporal reflection on the literal and figurative tragedy of a world that seems increasingly divided at the same time that it finds unity in disasters, naturally and humanly induced. So perhaps it is fitting that Antipodes lags behind time, for now, offering an opportunity to reflect on the present in the past' (Brenda Machosky, Editorial introduction) 2019 pg. 364-377
Last amended 1 Sep 2021 11:10:42
364-377 Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Agony of Choice in Teo Hsu-Ming’s Love and Vertigosmall AustLit logo Antipodes
Subjects:
  • c
    Singapore,
    c
    Southeast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • Sydney, New South Wales,
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X