Scenes of reading: Australia-Canada-Australia

panel presentatio

(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012)

This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging

Hsu-Ming Teo’s Post-Multicultural Affective Improvisations on Love

This essay juxtaposes the academic writings of the Chinese Malaysian Australian writer Hsu-Ming Teo with two or her novels. The essay traces how the cultural politics of multiculturalism have changed over the past decades in Australia. Using the framework of Jean-François Lyotard’s future anterior, in which post-multiculturalism is imagined as going back to find elements left out of the current historicizing of multiculturalism, Gunew situates Teo’s work in a critically astute “uncomfortable cosmopolitanism” pervaded by her interest in the affective charge contained in contemporary popular romance writing that deals with intercultural relationships

Feminist cultural literacy: translating differences, cannibal options

In trying to write this paper over several months last year for a collection of essays examining the current state of feminism and women’s studies I was mystified by my internal resistance to the project. After all, feminism and Women’s Studies have been part of my life for over two decades

[[alternative]]Beyond European Categories in Affect Theory

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From White Australia to the Asian Century: Literature and migration in Australia

While Australia is a settler-colonial nation built on immigration, the category \u27migrant literature\u27 ( or, more commonly, \u27multicultural literature\u27) has largely been reserved for writers of non-Anglo-Celtic background, and its integration into Australian literature has been slow and contested. This chapter traces the history of multicultural writing in English in relation to the cultural politics of Australia over the last four decades, along with its critical reception and theoretical framing. Virtually invisible within the canon of Australian literature until the 1980s, multicultural writers have gradually re­ceived greater recognition and some are now regarded as part of the mainstream liter­ary tradition. However, while the critical focus on Australian literature has shifted from national to transnational, multicultural writing in global languages other than English has barely been analysed. We argue that residual resistance to cultural diversity still prevents many writers from receiving the critical recognition they deserve