Cirrus@Austlit

'The proposed paper attempts to investigate the nuanced layers of multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, written from the perspective of a student's cooperation with the term 'postcolonial', throws a compulsive doubt on the celebration of multiculturalism. Whereas the novel deals with central 'postcolonial' questions like nationhood, political relation between countries, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, its unabridged and cut-and-dried presentation of the corporate packaging of terms like multicultural and postcolonial or the body of the diasporic student as the product of study and university research invites more critical thoughts on university space, the category of international student or the commodification of feelings like love, emotion and soul. In a way, it seeks the irony and economy of 'affect' in a supposedly 'postcolonial' novel.' (Author's abstract)