Cirrus@Austlit

This paper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the nature of Asian Australian Writing, a debate that started sometime circa 2000s and seems to have gathered some force with the putative rise of global Asia. In its early stages, the referent for this academic debate was Asian-American Studies and whether or not it made sense for such a trans-Atlantic term to be applied to the Antipodean region. In the last decade, Australia’s position within the Asian geo-political region has been increasingly articulated with respect to bilateral exchange with its immediate neighbours, mainly in the arena of trade and security. Writing this essay in 2012, it seems that the two strands, the academic and the geographical, have strategically merged to define the parametres of Asian Australian Writing. [First paragraph of the article]

In this article, after a brief consideration of the limitations revolving around South Asian Australian writers as an under-researched literary category, I use Riane Eisler’s partnership and dominator models to explore the complexities of cultural belonging, seen as a new narrative of unique experience, through which a distinctive transcultural identity is fluidly forged beyond the expectations and ideals of dominant nationalist cultures and traditions. By particularly focusing on Adib Khan’s novel Seasonal Adjustments, this analysis suggests that his migrant identity should be understood as a dialectical ever-growing process, enabling him to link cultural differences as transcultural global constants. [Author's abstract]

The paper investigates the significance of the aporetic presence of Australia in three important works of contemporary fiction that deal with Asian experience: The Hamilton Case (2003) by Michelle de Kretser, the story 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice' from The Boat (2008) by Nam Le, and The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga. Each author has links to Australia. In the case of The White Tiger, the paper considers the different contexts in which it can be read, including specifically Indian English Fiction, and argues that Australia offers a further context, a disappearing point, as 'a moral as well as a narrative alternative'. In the case of Nam Le's story Australia appears as the enabling ground for a 'defining but transitional, diasporic identity'. In The Hamilton Case Australia is an imaginary alternative and site for shape-changing and revenant stories. In considering these works as arguably examples of a new, mobile Asian Australian writing, the paper notes how they relate to and at the same time extend the parameters of Australian literature.

Like the world itself, the textual encounter contains infinite possibilities. But how does language capture the undisclosed? This question is internalised in the process of writing but it is also fundamental to the spiritual quest. My detours as a writer, from silence to rhetoric, constitute a journey that is difficult to name, but which is triggered by discontents of one or another cause, displacing me towards different ways of seeing. The poems in my recent book Vishvarūpa permit me to explore a Hindu culture and heritage lost through the vicissitudes of colonial history. I made several journeys to India to research these poems. But what pitfalls does the poet face as ethnographer? How can myth and memory reconstruct a postcolonial identity?

This article examines the work of Iranian Australian writers Granaz Moussavi and Roshanak Amrein. Moussavi is best known among English-speakers for her film My Tehran For Sale (2009), an Iranian-Australian co-production, and among Persian-speakers for her poetry. Amrein is known for her poetic representations of the experiences of Baha'i refugees in and from Iran, especially her translated volume One Million Flights (2010). In this article I focus on the different transnational and formal contexts in which Moussavi and Amrein write, as well as the different ways their texts represent notions of Iran and Australia. I argue that My Tehran For Sale and One Million Flights, especially when read in juxtaposition, serve to reposition 'Australia', 'Iran' and related narratives around 'freedom' and 'fairness'. [Author's abstract]

This article contributes to the critical commentary on boat narratives through a reading of an early and little-known example of a Vietnamese Australian boat story: 'The Whitish-Grey Dove on the Disorientated Boat', a serialised novella which was published in Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues from 1994 to 1998. Focusing on this novella and the magazine in which it appeared serves two objectives: the first is to make the argument that Vietnamese Australian writing has a longer and more active history than may be commonly recognized or acknowledged and that 'the boat' is a significant figure in this body of writing from its beginnings; the second is to situate the novella in the context of the diverse range of writing found in Integration and to argue that the literary content of this community magazine constitutes a significant body of Vietnamese Australian writing that, for both literary scholars and other interested readers, is well worth exploring. [Author's abstract]

When a Filipina storyteller gives a performance at a writers' festival in Sydney, a mystical white turtle from her native homeland appears in the room, beguiling both audience and storyteller. Merlinda Bobis' 'White Turtle' interrogates the ways in which different cultures react to 'uncanny' narratives - those tales situated between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and unfamiliar. In doing so, the story calls into question our relationships with Self and Other, Self and Self. This paper traces the geographical and mythical trajectories of 'White Turtle', where distinct currents of Asian regionalism and Australian nationalism are linked by a shared, bodily experience of the uncanny, which, in this case, can be categorized as Other. More broadly, the notion of Other (may it be another nation, race, collective unconscious/mythic template, or state of existence) intertwines with the concept of the 'transnational imagination' - a boundless imaginary space where anything becomes possible, including the entrance of a giant white turtle bearing the dreams of dead children. This paper follows Bobis' character, the storyteller Lola Basyon, who travels from the Philippines to Australia, crossing more than geographical borders along the way. Much as the white turtle she conjures totes its shell, Lola inherently carries the myths and traditions of her country into the belief systems and stories of other nations, cultures, minds and bodies - that global flow of the world beyond. [Author's abstract]

This article examines the representation of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian immigrants in popular Australian fiction. In a close analysis of Hsu-Ming Teo's first novel Love and Vertigo (2000), it draws attention both to the potential and the problems of self-irony in what have chiefly been read as autobiographically inspired texts. Parodic elements may constructively rupture common readerly expectations of an 'Asian past' and hence demand a larger rethinking of prevailing conceptuali-sations of diaspora and diasporic writing. Yet the use of parody has also got its limitations and is symptomatically often edited out in the texts' reception. [Author's abstract]

While driving from Sydney to Adelaide on a family holiday, a mother tells her children stories from her life in Malaysia.