Cirrus@Austlit

'The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.'

Source: Author's summary.

'In her 2015 novel Wave, the Vietnamese Australian writer Hoa Pham creates a world in which fantasy is constitutive of reality. Enshrouded in lyricism and a faint veil of racial melancholia, the novel portrays how a lesbian Asian couple, Midori and Âu Cô, coping on the margins of contemporary Australian society find belonging in an imagined nonhuman identity, as dragons-in-love. Both characters are migrants who embody different subversions of inculcated dragon stories. Midori’s early sexual experiences in Japan involve enacting secret dragon performances with her girlfriend. Âu Cô’s sexual orientation defies the expectations of her Vietnamese name, which means a mythic mountain fairy married to the dragon king. The strategic trope of queering the dragon in the story comes to highlight the couple’s desire to reclaim a functional self in the face of new racial and sexual stereotypes in Australia. In a more radical manner, the Indigenous Australian writer Ellen Van Neerven’s 2014 speculative eco-novella “Water” queers the nonhuman in ways that challenge cultural essentialism and human exceptionalism. At the heart of the novella’s futuristic vision is a newly-discovered species, the plantpeople, who are sentient beings capable of reading, speaking, and, most importantly, adapting to a changing environment. As the novella connects the plantpeople to Indigenous Australian inscriptions of land, the homo-erotic love between the Indigenous protagonist and the leader of the plantpeople dismantles heterosexual norms while exposing colonial claims of history and sovereignty that suppress an Indigenous multispecies ontology.' (Introduction)

'Climate change and global ecological crisis demand the reimagining of humanity on a planetary scale, yet planetary ideals risk downplaying human difference and inequality. This article examines Filipina Australian writer Merlinda Bobis' novel Locust Girl (2015) in terms of the development of a critical planetarity that prioritizes an ethics of alterity. The novel links the post-apocalypse with spectrality and alternative futures to suggest that, for one, the planet is already a fragmented concept haunted by uneven geographies of empire and capital, and, for another, the imagination of alternative political life needs to recuperate unrealized historical possibilities of the local. Specifically, the novel draws on the trope of nonhuman metamorphosis to depict its female protagonist, whose nomadic subjectivity unsettles anthropocentric worldviews. Bobis' novel makes a case for placing the ethnic minority writer's response to the Anthropocene at the center of a situated practice of planetarity.' (Publication abstract)