Brave new world: Myth and migration in recent Asian-Australian picture books

From Exodus to the American Dream, from Terra Nullius to the Yellow Peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. It engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. It has inspired artists and writers from the time of the Ancient Testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from Greek and Roman times to our era of detention centres and temporary visas. This reading of Asian-Australian picture books will focus on immigrants’ perception of the ‘new worlds’ of America and Australia. The Peasant Prince, a picture-book version of Li Cunxin’s best-selling autobiography Mao’s Last Dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the Chinese story ‘The Frog in the Well’ and the Western fairy-tale of Cinderella, to which Li Cunxin’s own trajectory from poor peasant boy in a Chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing and The Arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. By way of a conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with Roland Barthes’ insistence that myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature

Editorial

Building cultural citizenship: Multiculturalism and children’s literature In his influential book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (1998), Ghassan Hage compares different versions of multiculturalism using an example from a children’s book, The Stew that Grew by Michael and rhonda Gray. the book presents an allegory of Australian cultural diversity: the ‘eureka stew’ which features ingredients brought by all the ethnic groups that make up the Australian nation. According to Hage, it is an allegory fraught with ideological paradox: ‘far from celebrating cultural diversity – or rather, in the process of so doing,’ the book actually embodies ‘a White nation fantasy in which White Australians...enact...their capacity to manage this diversity.’ (p.119) He explains that although the stew is presented as the palatable blend of all the cultural influences which went into its making, it is not a mix where all cultures are equal: the Anglo character Blue is in charge of the cooking throughout; the ‘ethnics’ are reduced to the function of adding flavour

Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing

In the introductory essay to this collection, Wenche Ommundsen offers an account of the recent emergence of Asian Australian writing as a category within Australian literature and Australian literary studies: its relation to other critical categories such as diasporic writing or transnational writing; its debates and theoretical underpinnings; its capacity to redefine the national literature as a whole. The essay concludes with some reflections on the trajectory of Australian literature in the 'Asian century' and the transformative power of transnational and transcultural interaction

The Circus is in Town: Literary Festivals and the Mapping of Cultural Heritage

The article discusses the rise of the literary festival as artistic and commercial exchange

Towards a Multilingual National Literature: The Tung Wah Times and the origins of Chinese Australian Writing

A large and important body of Australian writing has until now remained excluded from histories and anthologies: literature in languages other than English. A new research project entitled 'New transnationalisms: Australia's multilingual literary heritage' traces the history of Australian writing in Chinese Vietnamese, Arabic and Spanish. The case study in this article presents a survey of the earliest Chinese language literary publications in the Sydney newspaper the Tung Wah Times (1898-1936): historical contexts, themes and genres, cultural function within the Chinese Australian community

Introduction

This Introduction contextualises the material collected under the Special Isssue of JASAL focusing on the ASAL 2008 Conference

Asian Australian Writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2)

(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