'1987. The Philippine government fights a total war against insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped.
'With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella, the Fish-Hair Woman, trawls corpses from the water that tastes of lemon grass. She falls in love with the Australian Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son travels to Manilla to find his father.
'From the Philippines to Australia, Hawai'i, to evocations of colonial Spain, this transnational novel spins a dark, epic tale. Its storytelling is expansive, like the heart - How much can the heart accommodate? ... Only four chambers but with infinite space like memory, where there is room for those whom we do not love.' (From the publisher's website.)
'Following Édouard Glissant’s lead, archipelagic thinking challenges neocolonial epistemes and methodologies in imagining alternative relations among difference. It offers productive lines of thought in relation to Southeast Asia, which has historically been marginalized in the global imaginary. This article examines archipelagic thinking’s potential to rewrite this metageography through a reading of Merlinda Bobis’s narratives of the Fish-Hair Woman who trawls the river with her magical hair for victims of the 1980s Philippine communist counter-insurgency in the fictional town of Iraya, Philippines. Recuperating neglected geographies and histories through storytelling and deploying magical realism by way of deconstructing hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies, these narratives subvert centre–periphery dynamics by endowing the Philippines with cultural specificity and mythic significance while positioning it as a zone of cultural exchange and interconnectedness. Through them, Bobis articulates a model for negotiating relations among difference characterized by fluidity and respect, in alignment with Glissant’s relationality.' (Publication abstract)
'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.
'Following Édouard Glissant’s lead, archipelagic thinking challenges neocolonial epistemes and methodologies in imagining alternative relations among difference. It offers productive lines of thought in relation to Southeast Asia, which has historically been marginalized in the global imaginary. This article examines archipelagic thinking’s potential to rewrite this metageography through a reading of Merlinda Bobis’s narratives of the Fish-Hair Woman who trawls the river with her magical hair for victims of the 1980s Philippine communist counter-insurgency in the fictional town of Iraya, Philippines. Recuperating neglected geographies and histories through storytelling and deploying magical realism by way of deconstructing hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies, these narratives subvert centre–periphery dynamics by endowing the Philippines with cultural specificity and mythic significance while positioning it as a zone of cultural exchange and interconnectedness. Through them, Bobis articulates a model for negotiating relations among difference characterized by fluidity and respect, in alignment with Glissant’s relationality.' (Publication abstract)
'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.
