Cirrus@Austlit

'The female protagonist in The Garden Book is the site of both imaginary and symbolic fantasy, as well as the melancholic real. In this article, I explore how a Chinese-Australian woman comes to inhabit a melancholic position of racial and gendered difference, and how Brian Castro, through his portrayal, deconstructs identity markers such as race, gender and nation. Born and raised in Australia, Swan is a legitimate Australian citizen. However, her Asian appearance and gender identity compromise her legitimacy as a subject of the Australian nation-state. The Chinese-Australian woman as image and fantasy of Oriental femininity becomes a spectre, an “Other” haunting the history and memory of white Australia. Castro’s writing shows how racial and sexual difference constructs and deconstructs identity, individual as well as national. In Swan’s case, gendered racialisation derived from imperialism disrupts the coherence of national citizenship. Reading the character of Swan as presented through the eyes of the men in her life, this article provides an alternative site where what is excluded, disavowed and lost in white Australia becomes visible. Swan’s racial and gendered melancholia allows us to see imperial violence and colonial eroticism at the heart of cultural essentialism and nationalism.' (Introduction) 

'Why focus on transcultural novels? Because, historically, the novel represents one of the earliest examples of a global cultural literary product related to the modern age. In its planetary travels, it has become a literary mutant in the transnational arena of world literature or, as Eileen Julien would say, it has become a creole form, 'a global forma franca, the privileged and prestigious form beyond the nation's border...' (Introduction)

'In Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Arianna Dagnino analyzes a new type of literature emerging from artists’ increased movement and cultural flows spawned by globalization. This "transcultural" literature is produced by authors who write across cultural and national boundaries and who transcend in their lives and creative production the borders of a single culture. Dagnino's book contains a creative rendition of interviews conducted with five internationally renowned writers—Inez Baranay, Brian Castro, Alberto Manguel, Tim Parks, and Ilija Trojanow—and a critical exegesis reflecting on thematical, critical, and stylistical aspects.

'By studying the selected authors’ corpus of work, life experiences, and cultural orientations, Dagnino explores the implicit, often subconscious, process of cultural and imaginative metamorphosis that leads transcultural writers and their fictionalized characters beyond ethnic, national, racial, or religious loci of identity and identity formation. Drawing on the theoretical framework of comparative cultural studies, she offers insight into transcultural writing related to belonging, hybridity, cultural errancy, the "Other," worldviews, translingualism, deterritorialization, neonomadism, as well as genre, thematic patterns, and narrative techniques. Dagnino also outlines the implications of transcultural writing within the wider context of world literature(s) and identifies some of the main traits that characterize “transcultural novels.”' (Publication summary)

'If you open a collection by a contemporary Australian poet, you’re likely to find poems in forms derived from various Asian literary traditions: haiku, ghazal, tanka and other verse forms that originate in the swathe of cultures from the Arabian Gulf in the West to Japan in the North and Indonesia in the South. This is not new, of course. Nineteenth-century French poets, including Baudelaire, were attracted by the pantoum (pantun), a traditional Malay verse form. John Ashbery and other Americans followed suit in the twentieth-century. Contemporary Australian poet Mike Ladd acknowledges this lineage in ‘Pantuns in the Orchard’ (Island, Spring 2011), a recent essay about his experiments with the form during a residency at Rimbun Dahan in Malaysia.' (Author's introduction)