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y separately published work icon Locust Girl : A Lovesong single work   novel   fantasy  
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Locust Girl : A Lovesong
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, except across the border. One night, a village is bombed after its men attempt to cross the border. Nine-year old Amedea is buried underground and sleeps to survive. Ten years later, she wakes with a locust embedded in her brow. This political fable is a girl’s magical journey through the border. The border has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locust Girl’s dream, her lovesong—

'For those walking to the border for dear life

'And those guarding the border for dear life'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Exhibitions

8875768
8857854
15866155
15826549

Notes

  • Dedication:

    For those walking to the border for dear life

    And for those guarding the border for dear life.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • North Melbourne, Flemington - North Melbourne area, Melbourne - North, Melbourne, Victoria,: Spinifex Press , 2015 .
      image of person or book cover 6907567510407794161.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 179p.
      Note/s:
      • Published August 2015.
      • Launched at the University of Wollongong, Monday 17 August 2015.
      ISBN: 9781742199597, 9781742199573, 9781742199580
Alternative title: வெட்டுக்கிளிப் பெண்
Transliterated title: Veṭṭukkiḷip peṇ
Language: Tamil
    • Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu,
      c
      India,
      c
      South Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
      :
      Kalachuvadu Publications ,
      2023 .
      image of person or book cover 6339240488790711521.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 302p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 1 July 2023.
      ISBN: 9788119034109

Works about this Work

Veggi-Might Iris Ralph , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides 2020; (p. 67-91)
Post-apocalyptic Specters and Critical Planetarity in Merlinda Bobis' Locust Girl Emily Yu Zong , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Ariel , October vol. 51 no. 4 2020; (p. 99-123)

'Climate change and global ecological crisis demand the reimagining of humanity on a planetary scale, yet planetary ideals risk downplaying human difference and inequality. This article examines Filipina Australian writer Merlinda Bobis' novel Locust Girl (2015) in terms of the development of a critical planetarity that prioritizes an ethics of alterity. The novel links the post-apocalypse with spectrality and alternative futures to suggest that, for one, the planet is already a fragmented concept haunted by uneven geographies of empire and capital, and, for another, the imagination of alternative political life needs to recuperate unrealized historical possibilities of the local. Specifically, the novel draws on the trope of nonhuman metamorphosis to depict its female protagonist, whose nomadic subjectivity unsettles anthropocentric worldviews. Bobis' novel makes a case for placing the ethnic minority writer's response to the Anthropocene at the center of a situated practice of planetarity.' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

‘Kindness Is a Passage Too’ : New Writing by Merlinda Bobis Jo Langdon , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2018;

'Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range. An award-winning transnational, cross-disciplinary writer and scholar, Bobis is the author of prose fiction and poetry, academic discourse, and dramatic works for radio and stage. She writes in Bikol, Filipino and English, demonstrating what the critic Dolores Herrero has described as a ‘defiant willingness’ to engage with her ‘rich bicultural heritage’.'(Introduction)

Post-Apocalypse Literature in the Age of Unrelenting Borders and Refugee Crises: Merlinda Bobis and Australian Fiction M. Dolores Herrero , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , vol. 19 no. 7 2017; (p. 948-961)

'This essay analyses Filipino–Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), winner of the Christina Stead Prize for fiction, in the context of the post-apocalyptic Golden Age we are living in and the much-celebrated dystopian Australian tradition. Bobis’s novel is a futuristic political fable that describes a girl’s magical and nightmarish journey through an indeterminate border in a context of environmental and human apocalypse. It foresees ecological disasters of unprecedented dimensions and warns that the damage done to the planet and the largest part of humanity may end up being irreversible. Moreover, it tackles other truths so far exclusively denounced by realist narratives, namely, the Australian government policy on refugees. Some trauma theories, together with Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, will be used to analysee the ways in which Locust Girl denounces the lethal effects of globalized undeterred capitalism and unitary and exclusive forms of nationalism, which are mainly responsible for the enforcement of unfair border laws and the inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in the so-called “civilized” world, and in particular in Australia as one important member of the Pacific region. On the other hand, this essay also relies on Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “the posthuman” to show that Locust Girl also testifies to the power of women’s agency and transnational relationships in order to offer some hope of rebirth through suffering and love.' (Abstract)

Real-world Truths Exposed in Fantasy Lucy Sussex , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 9 August 2015; (p. 17)

— Review of Locust Girl : A Lovesong Merlinda Bobis , 2015 single work novel
Australian Fiction Ed Wright , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 7-8 November 2015; (p. 23)

— Review of Hope Farm Peggy Frew , 2015 single work novel ; Locust Girl : A Lovesong Merlinda Bobis , 2015 single work novel ; Formaldehyde Jane Rawson , 2015 single work novella ; Going Out Backwards Ross Fitzgerald , Ian McFadyen , 2015 selected work short story
The Plague of Love Emily Yu Zong , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Women’s Book Review , vol. 26 no. 1/2 2014;

— Review of Locust Girl : A Lovesong Merlinda Bobis , 2015 single work novel
'SO questions the Locust Girl, Amedea, after her friend Beenabe’s rejoicing exclamation that she has learned to take love by providing sexual comfort to the Kingdom builders. Representing the converted likes of herself, Beenabe has to make compromises between her refuge in the Kingdoms and the cost that shelter demands, and between her cultivated loyalty to this new home and the numbing of her past memories. But love, as Amedea discovers through her friend’s sacrifice, can be taken without making it, and can be given without receiving it. Love is, indeed, a plague.' (Author's introduction)
Post-Apocalypse Literature in the Age of Unrelenting Borders and Refugee Crises: Merlinda Bobis and Australian Fiction M. Dolores Herrero , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , vol. 19 no. 7 2017; (p. 948-961)

'This essay analyses Filipino–Australian writer Merlinda Bobis’s novel Locust Girl: A Lovesong (2015), winner of the Christina Stead Prize for fiction, in the context of the post-apocalyptic Golden Age we are living in and the much-celebrated dystopian Australian tradition. Bobis’s novel is a futuristic political fable that describes a girl’s magical and nightmarish journey through an indeterminate border in a context of environmental and human apocalypse. It foresees ecological disasters of unprecedented dimensions and warns that the damage done to the planet and the largest part of humanity may end up being irreversible. Moreover, it tackles other truths so far exclusively denounced by realist narratives, namely, the Australian government policy on refugees. Some trauma theories, together with Mbembe’s “necropolitics” and Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, will be used to analysee the ways in which Locust Girl denounces the lethal effects of globalized undeterred capitalism and unitary and exclusive forms of nationalism, which are mainly responsible for the enforcement of unfair border laws and the inhuman treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers in the so-called “civilized” world, and in particular in Australia as one important member of the Pacific region. On the other hand, this essay also relies on Rosi Braidotti’s notion of “the posthuman” to show that Locust Girl also testifies to the power of women’s agency and transnational relationships in order to offer some hope of rebirth through suffering and love.' (Abstract)

‘Kindness Is a Passage Too’ : New Writing by Merlinda Bobis Jo Langdon , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2018;

'Merlinda Bobis is a writer whose work transcends. This choice of adjective risks sounding rapturous or breathless, but it speaks to the visionary and startling qualities of the work of this Filipino-Australian author, as well as her work’s range. An award-winning transnational, cross-disciplinary writer and scholar, Bobis is the author of prose fiction and poetry, academic discourse, and dramatic works for radio and stage. She writes in Bikol, Filipino and English, demonstrating what the critic Dolores Herrero has described as a ‘defiant willingness’ to engage with her ‘rich bicultural heritage’.'(Introduction)

y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Post-apocalyptic Specters and Critical Planetarity in Merlinda Bobis' Locust Girl Emily Yu Zong , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Ariel , October vol. 51 no. 4 2020; (p. 99-123)

'Climate change and global ecological crisis demand the reimagining of humanity on a planetary scale, yet planetary ideals risk downplaying human difference and inequality. This article examines Filipina Australian writer Merlinda Bobis' novel Locust Girl (2015) in terms of the development of a critical planetarity that prioritizes an ethics of alterity. The novel links the post-apocalypse with spectrality and alternative futures to suggest that, for one, the planet is already a fragmented concept haunted by uneven geographies of empire and capital, and, for another, the imagination of alternative political life needs to recuperate unrealized historical possibilities of the local. Specifically, the novel draws on the trope of nonhuman metamorphosis to depict its female protagonist, whose nomadic subjectivity unsettles anthropocentric worldviews. Bobis' novel makes a case for placing the ethnic minority writer's response to the Anthropocene at the center of a situated practice of planetarity.' (Publication abstract)

Veggi-Might Iris Ralph , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides 2020; (p. 67-91)
Last amended 6 Dec 2023 11:45:11
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