26 research outputs found
(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012)
Get PDFThis 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
Ruth Jhabvala: Generating Heat and Light
Get PDFRuth Prawer Jhabvala, whose Polish roots have penetrated deeply into the Indian soil during the twenty-four years that she has lived and written in Delhi, works chiefly in two genres of fiction: novels and stories set in middle-class Delhi (or, more recently, Bombay) whose characters are chiefly Indian by birth, and whose themes centre upon the conflicts generated in every-day life by such Indian institutions as the joint-family system or the Indian version of such others as the commercial establishment or the bureaucracy; and others that focus on the experiences of foreigners· visiting or living permanently in India. How I Became a Holy Mother includes examples of both genres, while Heat and Dust belongs to the second. The reader who is familiar with Mrs Jhabvala\u27s earlier work will be aware of the immense advances she has made in her art of seemingly artless story-telling, with no sacrifice of subtlety or seriousness and a significant increase in the tolerance and understanding that has always accompanied even her most mordant satire
From a Novel in Progress
Get PDFThe island\u27s single international airport was crowded. This, I soon discovered, was because His Excellency the President was expected to arrive any moment now, from a conference he had been attending in Rome. Half the population of the city, seized, it seemed, with a burning desire to welcome him home, had converged on the airport which was decorated as far as the eye could see with coloured banners and huge posters which carried pictures of His Excellency\u27s smiling face. Flag-waving crowds and cheering school-children lined the approach to the airport. It was impossible to get a taxi -security police had cordoned off the taxi rank, and arriving passengers were ushered into an airÂconditioned lounge where they were politely told they would have to wait until the President was safely on his way to the city, and the Customs and Immigration desks could re-open for business
Why I Write
Get PDFPrimarily, I\u27d say that I write because I enjoy it. The sheer act of writing is a source of great pleasure for me. In the process of writing poetry or fiction I begin to discover what my deepest concerns and desires are, and I have found to my delight (like a secret gift built into the medium I use) that I have the technical ability to explore them. This is not to say that I write in order to \u27express myself\u27 because, frankly, my way of life gives me plenty of opportunity to do that. When I come across \u27self-expression\u27 in a book or an article- it\u27s easy to recognize, it\u27s the literary equivalent of posturing before a mirror - it\u27s an instant tum-off as far as I am concerned. l become extremely suspicious of the author\u27s pretensions and motives. The book becomes boring. I abandon it
