Cirrus@Austlit

'This article considers the link between consumption, cuisine and agency in fiction by Asian Australian writers, Hsu-Ming Teo, Simone Lazaroo and Lillian Ng. It argues that the issue of whether these writers employ an oppositional poetics during the process of textualising or fictionalisng their experience and reactions to racialised and gendered practices can be addressed through an evaluation of their deployment of the food metaphor. In other words, do these writers challenge the assumption of a monolithic national identity in which Australian multiculturalism is equated with eating or tasting but disavowing the other?' (499)

'This essay considers the "phantom presences" that shadow attempts by novelists in contemporary Australia to communicate within and across cultures. Cross-cultural communication is haunted by "phantom limbs" in all sorts of ways: the phantom limb of the revenant white nation, the phantom limbs of various cultures migrants left behind, and the phantom limb of "home" - of "landscapes [which] ache in all places of departures". The essay explores technical issues of cultural representation - a process which ultimately cannot avoid problematic constructions of self-orientalising ethnicity. I explain the personal context through which my novels Love and Vertigo (2000) and Behind the Monn (2005) were produced and the historical context of the novels' publication. I then consider the content of multicultural/ethnic Australian fiction within the broader context of Australian history, looking at how this legacy - a legacy of phantom presences - shapes cross-cultural writing as well as responses to this genre of fiction.' (521)