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Notes
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Dedication: For J.
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Epigraph: For this image, I ran through darkness from place to place, carrying my own light with me whilst leaving my camera's shutter open (From The Fiance's Twin-Lens Camera Companion, 1948).
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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“One That Returns” : Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Literary Studies , vol. 36 no. 1 2020; (p. 112-124)'The Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.' (Publication summary)
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Preoccupations of Some Asian Australian Women’s Fiction at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Etropic , vol. 16 no. 2 2017;'This paper offers a look back over the rise of the visibility, and the rise as a category, of Asian Australian fiction from the beginning of the 1990s, and especially in the twenty-first century, and some of the main questions that have been asked of it by its producers, and its readers, critics, commentators and the awarders of prizes. It focuses upon women writers. The trope of “border crossings”—both actual and in the mind, was central in the late-twentieth century to much feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race-cognisant cultural commentary and critique, and the concepts of hybridity, diaspora, whiteness, the exotic, postcolonising and (gendered) cultural identities were examined and deployed. In the “paranoid nation” of the twenty-first century, there is a new orientation on the part of governments towards ideas of—if not quite an imminent Yellow Peril—a “fortress Australia,” that turns back to where they came from all boats that are not cruise liners, containerships or warships (of allies). In the sphere of cultural critique, notions of a post-multiculturality that smugly declares that anything resembling identity politics is “so twentieth-century,” are challenged by a rising creative output in Australia of diverse literary representations of and by people with Asian connections and backgrounds. The paper discusses aspects of some works by many of the most prominent of these writers. In its mediation, through similar-but-different travelling women’s eyes, of the past and present histories of different national contexts, Asian Australian fictional writing is a significant and challenging component of the “national” culture, and is continuing to extend its audiences within, and beyond Australia.' (Publication abstract)
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A "Bay of Whispers" : Seascape in Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiancé
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 29 no. 1 2015; (p. 163-173) 'The ocean as a border in Australia has been gaining increasing attention, not only with the arrival of asylum seekers by boat and the relentless government policies to prevent this, but also the connections with Asia that Australia's part of Oceania suggests. Recent scholarship by critics such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Suvendrini Perera, and Elizabeth McMahon explore the way representations of oceans can evoke, on the one hand, this doubled sense of insularity and threat, but on the other possibility and connection. Despite the ocean's dominant presence and the way it frames conflict and intimate moments, scholarship on Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiance has frequently focused on the way the novel deals with racism in Australia via the Eurasian woman's experience of the White Australia Policy. Here, McFarlane examines the depiction of the sea in Lazaroo's novel as it engages with a kind of insularity with reflection and connective possibility in relation to globalization.' (Publication abstract) -
The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Interventions : International Journal of Postcolonial , January vol. 17 no. 6 2015; (p. 853-865) 'While the realities of the global city would seem to render the century-old, modernist figure of the flâneur (and the disputed flâneuse) obsolete, embodied citizens and narrators have stubbornly survived the change in urban environments and their imaginaries, continuing to populate novels and mediate creation and writing. These postcolonial, post-diasporic pedestrians, however, necessarily occupy a different place in the real and fictive worlds, and must be conceptualized and named differently, in keeping with modified urban discourses and genres. Looking at a selection of novels written by women in the early years of the twenty-first century (set in Toronto, Sydney, Singapore and London), this essay contends that contemporary urban, post-diasporic texts create embodied, located pedestrians, rather than detached flâneurs; such figures, exceeding the resistant walkers imagined by Michel de Certeau, are closer to what the visual critic Marsha Meskimmon proposed as ‘an aesthetics of pedestrianism’, a poetics involving the body as a site of learning and border negotiation, through which the stranger fetishism described by Sara Ahmed may be destabilized and contested.' (Publication abstract) -
The Ghost and the Host: ‘Hauntologising’ Diasporic Difference in Simone Lazaroo’s Fiction
2013
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , June vol. 58 no. 1 2013; (p. 148-166)Explores the use of demonology in Asian Australian women’s fiction as a way of approaching Simone Lazaroo’s oeuvre through the prism of what Jacques Derrida described as ‘hauntology’.
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Untitled
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: Asia Society AustralAsia Centre Newsletter , Winter 2000; (p. 6)
— Review of Swallowing Clouds 1997 single work novel ; On the Goddess Rock 1998 single work novel ; The Australian Fiance 2000 single work novel ; If the Moon Smiled 2000 single work novel ; Wind and Water 1997 single work novel ; Representing the Other: Chinese in Australian Fiction: 1888-1988 2000 single work criticism -
The Vital Shore
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: The Bulletin , 22 August vol. 118 no. 6238 2000; (p. 94-95)
— Review of Vixen 2000 single work novel ; The Arch-Traitor's Lament 2000 single work novel ; The Storyteller 2000 single work novel ; The Australian Fiance 2000 single work novel ; Family Album : A Novel of Secrets and Memories 2000 single work novel ; Playing Madame Mao 2000 single work novel ; Conditions of Faith 2000 single work novel ; The Company : The Story of a Murderer 2000 single work novel -
Journeys of Love and Loss
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 6 August 2000; (p. 11)
— Review of Love and Vertigo 2000 single work novel ; Under the Same Sun 2000 single work novel ; The Australian Fiance 2000 single work novel -
Paperbacks
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times Sunday Times , 13 August 2000; (p. 55)
— Review of Love and Vertigo 2000 single work novel ; The Australian Fiance 2000 single work novel -
A Tale of Two Singapores
2000
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 26 August 2000; (p. 7)
— Review of Love and Vertigo 2000 single work novel ; The Australian Fiance 2000 single work novel -
The Insuperable Longing to Forget: 'Love and Vertigo' and 'The Australian Fiance'
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Island , Autumn no. 92 2003; (p. 25-30) -
Re-Thinking Marginality : Class, Identity and Desire in Contemporary Australian Writing
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 1 no. 1 2004; (p. 45-68) -
Where are you from? : New Imaginings of Identity in Chinese-Australian Writing
2005
single work
essay
— Appears in: Culture, Identity, Commodity : Diasporic Chinese Literature in English 2005; (p. 107-128) -
'Blood Gashed and Running Like Rain' : A Diasporic Poetics in Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here and Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiance
2005
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Canadian Studies , vol. 23 no. 2 2005; (p. 39-54) Comparative discussion of works by Lazaroo and Canadian author Dionne Brand. -
Cross-Cultural Alliances : Exploring Aboriginal Asian Literary and Cultural Production
2003
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Lost in the Whitewash : Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901-2001 2003; (p. 143-162) Peta Stephenson surveys Aboriginal-Asian cross-cultural production, considering representations of Aboriginal-Asian relations, influences on the construction of contemporary Aboriginality, and Aboriginal perceptions of Asian identity.
Awards
- 2000 finalist Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize — Fiction
- 2000 winner Western Australian Premier's Book Awards — Fiction
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cAustralia,c
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cSingapore,cSoutheast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
- Broome, Kimberley area, North Western Australia, Western Australia,
- 1940s