Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Mixed-Race Corporality in Brian Castro's Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This article explores the representation of mixed-race bodies in Brian Castro's fiction. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert Young demonstrates the deep anxieties caused by the existence of mixed-race individuals in colonial contexts. Miscegenation threatened the clear racial separation required by colonial domination and reveals, as Patrick Wolfe underlines, "the points at which racial classifications most conspicuously come undone" ("Land, Labor, and Difference," 867). All of Brian Castro's novels feature mixed-race characters, and several part-Chinese or part-Indigenous characters are main protagonists. Avoiding the binary distinction between happy and tragic hybrids, his novels engage with colonial and contemporary representations of mixed-race individuals and play with the threat to racial and cultural purity posed by hybridity. Castro's representation of the mixed-race body is characterized by a particular set of images, metaphors, and modes of representation, which underline the essential impact of the white gaze on racialized others and dramatize the racial ambiguity of mixed-race corporality through images of monstrosity and disability. Castro engages with racist discourse by exaggerating and amplifying its postulates, thus denouncing the absurdity of racial classification and the very concept of race.'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Antipodes vol. 34 no. 1 June 2020 22817380 2020 periodical issue

    'Before I wrote my first book, I didn't fully understand how the "editor" really worked. In shepherding that first book to publication, I had the good fortune and excellent guidance of Helen Tartar, longtime humanities editor at Stanford University Press, underappreciated there and in a fit of downsizing, forced to relocate to Fordham University Press, where she was given the means and the opportunity to flourish, especially in her forte, working with young scholars. My book had its particular fits and starts and a bit of a challenge getting past the review board. I'll never forget sitting with Helen at a book exhibit, probably at the American Comparative Literature Association annual convention, a moment of quiet while everyone was in sessions, and figuring out the last revisions to my manuscript. It wasn't a long conversation, or a demanding one, but somehow, she was working her magic. I left that convention knowing exactly what I needed to do, and I marveled at her ability to help me figure that out. At that point, I started to know what an editor could do, to understand when writers talked about "my editor" and all that this relationship implied.' (Brenda Machosky, From the Editor, introduction)

    2020
    pg. 71-84
Last amended 1 Sep 2021 13:37:20
71-84 Mixed-Race Corporality in Brian Castro's Fictionsmall AustLit logo Antipodes
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