Paul Giffard-Foret Paul Giffard-Foret i(A125814 works by)
Gender: Male
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.

Works By

Preview all
1 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews Anam by André Dao Paul Giffard-Foret , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , no. 29 2023;

— Review of Anam André Dao , 2023 single work novel

'André Dao’s debut novel Anam is like a house with many rooms and windows, to use an image employed by its author. Its multiple locales account for the shattering, scattering, and smattering of Vietnamese people across the globe, and their resettlement in outer migrant suburbs, in Paris’ Boissy-Saint-Léger or Melbourne’s Footscray. Alongside a distinctly cosmopolitan, diasporic feel, the novel opens up a thought-provoking cultural conversation on Vietnam’s colonial and postcolonial histories – and in so doing, digs up a lot of mud. This endeavour may have been facilitated by Dao’s outsider perspective as a Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) born and having grown up in Australia, which provides him with sufficient hindsight. It is no surprise, then, that the names excavated from Vietnam’s past ought to be figures of exile, beginning with Dao’s grandfather. While a Penguin review noted how this “work of autofiction, this part-memoir, part-novel is twelve years in the making”, Dao’s grandfather spent ten years throughout the 1980s at the infamous Chi Hoa jail located in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a political prisoner of conscience under the Communist regime, before being sent away on a plane to France upon release. The narrator compares his grandfather to those decimated Angolan antelopes who are the victims of inter-imperialist rivalry and proxy wars in Africa – “he, a colonial subject of an empire that no longer exists, a forgotten ghost of an already embarrassing past”.' (Introduction)

1 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews My Van Gogh by Chandani Lokuge Paul Giffard-Foret , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , August no. 25 2020;

— Review of My Van Gogh : A Novel Chandani Lokuge , 2019 single work novel

'Chandani Lokugé’s fifth novel My Van Gogh takes the reader on a romantic and artistic journey across borders, from the rural farming lands of Victoria in Australia, where part of her characters’ family on their father’s side is from, to some of France’s touristic hotspots, including scenic areas of Le Loire Valley, the southeast region of Provence, or its capital city Paris. The metropolitan provenance of the novel is made evident by the design of the book cover. It shows a snapshot of what is reminiscent of the Tuileries Garden, which is located in the vicinity of Le Louvre Museum. This is despite the fact that Lokugé actually writes from the periphery of what constitutes her Sri Lankan Australian background. The terms of “periphery” and “metropolitan” are used here with a postcolonial agenda in mind, to refer to the ways in which the old structures of Empire and European colonialism still play out in our contemporary era. Lokugé is aware of such lingering structures insofar as her oeuvre as a novelist may easily fall under the loose category of “postcolonial fiction”. As an illustration, Lokugé’s second novel Turtle Nest, published in 2003, dealt with the issue of sex tourism and trafficking of local children for Western customers in a small fishing village in Sri Lanka.' (Introduction)

1 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews The Red Pearl by Beth Yahp Paul Giffard-Foret , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , March no. 23 2019;

— Review of The Red Pearl Beth Yahp , 1990 single work short story

'Australian, Malaysian-born writer Beth Yahp’s short story collection The Red Pearl and Other Stories (2017) navigates between different locations and time periods. It is resolutely transnational and transhistorical in nature. At times, the collection veers towards the metaphysical and abstract. Yahp also experiments with different forms, styles, modes and genres of writing. The title story draws its suggestive force from what a specialist in Asian Australian fiction, Tseen Khoo, had defined as “Oriental grunge” in her analysis of Lillian Ng’s novel Swallowing Clouds. As often in Asian Australian women’s writing, the “sexotic” is deployed as a strategic (al)lure. The cultural politics of the collection’s cover page is relevant in this matter. A young Orientalised woman appears dressed in a crimson cheongsam, looking passive, her lips closed, with the top of her face cropped out from the cover frame. In so doing the Orient comes to be marketed and packaged as a desired object of fantasy deprived of the basic attributes of subjecthood, such as the power to think and reflect, as well as to see and develop a critical worldview, or speak of its own volition. “The Red Pearl” is a love tale between a sailor and a dancer met at the Shanghai Bar. Located in an unnamed Asian port city (most likely Singapore), the story bears “the promise of anonymity, abandonment, delirium, dream,” (Yahp 43) as well as poetic grace. Counter to what might be expected from the book cover, the lover clearly has an agency and power of her own, as proven by the fact that “when she agrees to dance, the sailor lies mesmerised.” (44)' (Introduction)

1 Settling Scores : Albert Namatjira's Legacy Paul Giffard-Foret , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 41 no. 1 2018; (p. 31-42)

'Aboriginal Australian artist Albert Namatjira resists identification. Was Namatjira a product of Australia's assimilation, a "mimic man" who adopted a Western referential frame, or was his trajectory the product of a "split identity," as alleged during his lifetime? Can Namatjira's watercolours be viewed as a critique of Eurocentrism? This article seeks to revisit the nature of Namatjira's legacy in light of the recent retrocession of the artist's copyright.' (Publication abstract)

1 “The Root of All Evil”? Transnational Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction of Dewi Anggraeni, Simone Lazaroo and Merlinda Bobis Paul Giffard-Foret , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , December vol. 52 no. 5 2016; (p. 595-609) Mediating Literary Borders : Asian Australian Writing 2018; (p. 69-83)
This article exposes the contradictions of cosmopolitan citizenship and world peace in novels by three Southeast Asian Australian women authors. Their fiction questions the viability of transnational sisterhood in an age of humanitarian intervention where women and children have become pawns for renewed western imperialist ventures. This article asks in turn whether the incommensurable space opened up by the failures of various forms of what Stuart Hall calls cosmopolitanism “from above” can be reinvested through “reading up the ladder of privilege”, as proposed by Chandra T. Mohanty. Simone Lazaroo’s Sustenance (2010) and Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker (2008) build “grass-roots” forms of cosmopolitanism and touristic hospitality designed to redress the many evils of contemporary postcolonial societies. The Root of all Evil (1987) by Dewi Anggraeni objects to the Spivakian native informant and upwardly mobile migrant woman’s imperious desire to help her homeland’s subaltern female underclass, in light of the latter’s lack of agency and the harm such intervention may cause. (Publication abstract)
1 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews The Other Shore by Hoa Pham Paul Giffard-Foret , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , April no. 17 2015;

— Review of The Other Shore Hoa Pham , 2014 single work novella
1 Southeast Asian Australian Women’s Fiction and the Globalization of “Magic” Paul Giffard-Foret , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 50 no. 6 2014; (p. 675-687)
'This article discusses the evolution of magical realism in relation to the postcolonial by looking at three contemporary Australian women authors originating from Southeast Asia. Besides extending magical realism to the Australian and Southeast Asian regions, these authors show the contours of the literary mode to be flexible, as magical realism has moved from being a localized Latin American trend to assuming a significant status on the international market. Concomitantly, their fiction develops various forms of a postcolonial aesthetics of “home” – forms that are neither pure nor authentic, but always-already partial and complicit with orientalist practices, in particular in light of new fault lines opened up in the wake of decolonization. This is one reason why their fiction embraces magical realist modes of representation: as an ambivalent literary mode, straddling the “actual” and the “imaginary”, and situated in-between resistance to, and collaboration with, Eurocentric modes of representation, magical realism retains a strong political relevance in a globalized, postcolonial era.' (Publication abstract)
1 Paul Giffard-Foret Reviews Toyo by Lily Chan Paul Giffard-Foret , 2013 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , December no. 14 2013;

— Review of Toyo : A Memoir Lily Chan , 2012 single work biography
1 The Ghost and the Host: ‘Hauntologising’ Diasporic Difference in Simone Lazaroo’s Fiction Paul Giffard-Foret , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , June vol. 58 no. 1 2013; (p. 148-166)

Explores the use of demonology in Asian Australian women’s fiction as a way of approaching Simone Lazaroo’s oeuvre through the prism of what Jacques Derrida described as ‘hauntology’.

1 Silencing Voice, Voicing Silence : A Review of Fish-Hair Woman Paul Giffard-Foret , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , June no. 11 2012;

— Review of Fish-Hair Woman Merlinda Bobis , 2012 single work novel
1 Politics of Desire and the Colonial Machine Paul Giffard-Foret , 2011 single work review
— Appears in: Mascara Literary Review , October no. 10 2011;

— Review of The Monsoon Bride Michelle Aung Thin , 2011 single work novel
1 Interview with Simone Lazaroo Paul Giffard-Foret (interviewer), 2008 single work interview
— Appears in: Peril : An Asian-Australian Journal , July no. 5 2008;
X