AustLit

'Transcultural literary studies as advocated by Italo-Australian critic Arianna Dagnino claims to investigate writers who live transnational lives and write out of a border-crossing and transcendent sensibility. But, in arguing for indeterminacy and fuzziness in transcultural novels, it fails to explain how specifically different cultures should be dealt with in this type of writing. In this essay, [the author draws] on Per Aage Brandt’s cognitive semiotic definition of cultural “sedimentation” as opposed to Raymond Williams’ “analysis of culture” to help with a close reading of two Australian travel novels of the 20th century, i.e. Margaret Jones’ The Confucius Enigma and Nicholas Jose’s Avenue of Eternal Peace, with special attention to how the two books handle Chinese culture. Such a reading reveals that, while both novels are set in China, the former remains satisfied with minimum cultural representation, and the latter mainly focuses on certain areas of contemporary Chinese culture instead of others. Although Avenue of Eternal Peace does dig beyond the “iconic meanings” of the Chinese culture to reveal authorial knowledge of its “symbolic meanings”, the novel devotes too much of itself to the overwhelmingly “negative semiosis” of China, reflecting a complacent attitude on the part of the protagonist/narrator/author towards Chinese culture. For this reason, neither novel meets Dagnino’s criteria for transcultural writing. And the two novels start us thinking about Dagnino’s theorization of transcultural writing because her emphasis on “transcending” only implies an aloofness and detachment. Brandt’s definition of culture as sedimented symbolic meanings teaches us that genuine transcultural writers should perhaps be prepared not just to know and understand and stay at a distance from other cultures but to engage and heartily share and even partake of their sedimented symbolic meanings at all levels and learn to feel the same way about them as their native members. This is true of the third world diasporic/migrant writers living and writing in the first and second worlds that Dagnino’s theory of transcultural writing remains focused on, but even more of the first and second worlds writing about their transcultural experiences in the third world countries. I argue that part of the intention of Dagnino’s transcultural literary studies is to move beyond postcolonialism’s concern over cultural unevenness and asymmetry, but this study proves that postcolonialism is not and should not be taken as completely over.'

Source: Abstract.