Cirrus@Austlit

'Underlying the desirability and fetishization of Asian women are the objectified representation of Asian femininity and colonial fantasies of power. Represented in polarizing archetypes—the subservient China doll, the ferocious dragon lady, the ingénue schoolgirl—Asian women are marked as either hypersexualized or devoid of sexuality, none of which takes account of the agency of Asian women. Born into a Hmong refugee family, Michele Lee is a Melbourne-based writer, playwright, and emerging theater artist. In her exploration of the Hmong identity, Lee juxtaposes her sexual adventures as a young and modern artist with her recognition of her ethnic and cultural background as a way of understanding her dual identities. Michele Lee’s Banana Girl provides a narrative that does not conform to the sexualized stereotypes or deploy white, mainstream feminist models. Instead, the author transgresses Western stereotypes attributed to Asian women and subverts hierarchical and racialized dichotomy, at the same time rebelling against patriarchal authority and Asian family values, breaking the taboo of writing about her own sexual adventures, questioning the blatant double standard regarding sexual morality, and creating her own narrative of a second-generation Asian Australian woman who seeks to find how interconnections of race, sexuality, and culture have contributed in the constructions of her identity.'  (Publication abstract)

'In Visceral Cosmopolitanism, Mica Nava posits a positive and, by her own admission, utopian alternative to postcolonial readings of the sexualisation of difference: a cosmopolitanism located with the antiracist ‘micro-narratives and encounters of the emotional, gendered and domestic everyday’ (2007: 14). Olivia Khoo, in The Chinese Exotic, defines a new, diasporic Chineseness which ‘conceives of women and femininity, not as the oppressed, but as forming part of the new visibility of Asia’ (2007: 12). My reading of recent fiction by Chinese Australian women writers proposes to test these theories against more established models for understanding East/West intimate encounters such as exoticism, Orientalism and Occidentalism, speculating that they may offer a more nuanced understanding of both the complexity and the normalisation of difference in the affective cultures of the twenty-first century.' (Publication abstract)

'This reading of David Foster's Sons of the Rumour focuses on its frame story, a reworking of the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights. It provides an overview of the impact of One Thousand and One Nights on world literature and goes on to analyse how Foster reimagines One Thousand and One Nights in order to illustrate humanity's struggle between the spiritual and the material world. Foster constructs a parallel dilemma for Al Morrisey, a secular Australian Jew, and the Shah, a Persian Muslim. Differences between them favours Al's secularism over the Shah's Islamic faith, and tends to harden and exaggerate stereotypes, following a typical Orientalist pattern by recreating the structure of One Thousand and One Nights for a Western understanding of and taste for Orientalist material.'  (Publication abstract)

'Multiculturalism, introduced in Australia after the Whitlam Labor Government came to power in 1972, represented a significant shift in government policy. The White Australia policy, introduced on federation in 1901, had effectively barred non-white immigration for the last seventy years of the young nation’s history, and twenty-three years of unbroken conservative rule ensured that the nation retained its cultural identity as British, despite the large numbers of non-British and non-English speaking migrants who arrived after the Second World War. Multiculturalism, initially a policy framework focusing on issues of social justice affecting Australia’s postwar migrant communities, gradually entered other fields, and the 1980s saw vigorous debates about its place in the area of cultural production. In recent decades, the Australian nation has become increasingly diverse both ethnically and linguistically, but we have also seen a backlash against the policy of multiculturalism in some segments of the population. Multicultural literature, generally defined as writing by Australian writers of non-indigenous, ethnic minority background, has often found itself at the center of heated debates about cultural and literary legitimacy, debates that inevitably have affected how literature is studied and taught in Australian schools and universities. Ironically, the very fact that this writing has come to embody so many of the tensions and contradictions in contemporary Australian culture makes it an ideal teaching tool : as a reflection of social and cultural relations, as a catalyst for discussion of how cultural production is framed and received, as a lightning rod for paradoxes surrounding writing from cultural minorities in national and global contexts.’ (Introduction)

'This article examines the first novel written by a Chinese diaspora writer in Australia, The Poison of Polygamy (多妻毒), published in instalments in the Chinese-language newspaper Chinese Times (Melbourne) from 1909 to 1910. Set during the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the novel is nevertheless of its own time, reflecting the pressing concerns of a community in turmoil as the political upheavals of China in the final years of the Qing dynasty competed for attention with the disastrous effects of the White Australia policy. Taking the form of a picaresque and cautionary tale warning against traditional practices such as polygamy, opium smoking and foot-binding, the novel seeks to educate members of the lower classes of the Chinese community while embracing the republican cause against the Manchu rulers. The article argues that the progressive political agenda of the text (democratic, feminist) stands in sharp contrast to the view of the Chinese which prevailed in the white Australian community at the time.' (Publication abstract)

'From Exodus to the American Dream, from Terra Nullius to the Yellow Peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. It engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. It has inspired artists and writers from the time of the Ancient Testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from Greek and Roman times to our era of detention centres and temporary visas.

This reading of Asian-Australian picture books will focus on immigrants' perception of the "new worlds" of America and Australia. The Peasant Prince, a picture-book version of Li Cunxin's best-selling autobiography Mao's Last Dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the Chinese story "The Frog in the Well" and the Western fairy-tale of Cinderella, to which Li Cunxin's own trajectory from poor peasant boy in a Chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing and The Arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. By way of a conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with Roland Barthes' insistence that myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature.' Source: Wenche Ommundsen.