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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'After 40 years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," António seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, António heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. ' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Author note: 'Shanghai Dancing is a fictional autobiography. Told from an Australian perspective and loosely based on my family's life in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau from the 1930s to the 1960s.'
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Epigraph: We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. (Franz Kafka)
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Dedication: For B. B.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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A Minor Australian Literature
2024
single work
essay
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2024;'What is the relationship between writing—so often a lonely pursuit—and the nation, that slippery idea that is supposed to contain us all? And isn’t there something missing here, something between writing and the nation?' (Introduction)
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The Wound That Does Not Heal : Brian Castro's Literary Career
2022
single work
essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , December vol. 81 no. 4 2022; (p. 188-195)'Brian Castro dramatises and even valorises forms of literary and artistic failure throughout his fiction, but his body of work is a raging success by mortal standards. None of his novels disappoint on close inspection. Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing are endlessly rewarding; The Swan Book is gorgeously written and deeply moving; After China is conceptually neat, seductive and stylish. Others, such as Drift and The Bath Fugues, appeal to select readers but are dazzlingly rich and structurally brilliant. Even Stepper—which Castro sees as a relatively conventional spy novel—is a satisfying and affecting Nabokovian game. Every novel is stamped by a talent that induces envy as much as gratitude. You want to know what it feels like to write that way.' (Publication abstract)
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Reading Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing at the Bottom of the Sea
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 34 no. 1 2020; (p. 101-112)'In the book H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, Jacques Derrida implores us to "imagine a reading at the bottom of the elemental sea" (29). Following on from Derrida, this essay shows how such a reading might be possible through an analysis of Brian Castro's novel Shanghai Dancing. To a large extent, the current critical literature on Castro's novel highlights how it resists traditional reading methods and practices but fails to think through how this impacts the way the critic should write about the novel. To do this, I argue that Castro's tropes and metaphors for writing—dancing, doppelgängers, phantom brothers, ghosts, the sea, typhoons, and flowers—are also metaphors and tropes for reading, which in turn demand a figurative response from the critic. The novel demands to be read as if from the bottom of the sea, which emphasizes Harold Bloom's idea that "every good reader properly desires to drown" (Anxiety of Influence, 29).' (Publication abstract)
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y
Reckoning with the Past : Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature
Abingdon
:
Routledge
,
2018
17218286
2018
single work
criticism
'This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation's colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors' often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies. An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers. '
Source: Publisher's blurb.
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Contesting Identity and Forming 'Cosmopolitan Memory' in Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing
2015
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 29 no. 2 2015; (p. 269-280) 'This article examines how 'cosmopolitan memory' workds in Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing as a way of challenging a notion of identity confined within nation-state and community...' (269)
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Author Behind the Writer
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 29-30 March 2003; (p. 12)
— Review of Shanghai Dancing 2003 single work novel -
A Blend of Elegant Leaps
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 19-20 April 2003; (p. 12)
— Review of Shanghai Dancing 2003 single work novel -
Dancing to a Tune of Displacement
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: The Age , 26 April 2003; (p. 5)
— Review of Shanghai Dancing 2003 single work novel -
Blend of Myth and Home Truths
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: The Canberra Times , 3 May 2003; (p. 2a)
— Review of Shanghai Dancing 2003 single work novel -
No Promised Land
2003
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 251 2003; (p. 44)
— Review of Shanghai Dancing 2003 single work novel -
Castro and the Friction of Fiction
2003
single work
column
— Appears in: The Age , 22 March 2003; (p. 3) -
Shanghai Surprise Tweaks Book Trade Bean Counters
2004
single work
column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 18 May 2004; (p. 3) -
Dressing up Facts has Writer in the Famil's Way
2004
single work
column
— Appears in: The Australian , 18 May 2004; (p. 4) -
Picturing the Story : Image and Narrative in Brian Castro and W.G. Sebald
2004
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , April vol. 8 no. 1 2004; The author looks at the 'ways in which the text and the image are being used in tandem in the practice of contemporary literary fiction' through the works of Brian Castro and the German writer W. G. Sebald. -
Reading Groups and Creative Writing Courses : The Year's Work in Fiction
2004
single work
review
— Appears in: Westerly , November vol. 49 no. 2004; (p. 164-175)
Awards
- 2005 longlisted International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
- 2004 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Book of the Year
- 2004 winner New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
- 2004 shortlisted Festival Awards for Literature (SA) Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature South Australian Literary Awards — Award for Innovation in Writing
- 2003 winner Victorian Premier's Literary Awards — Prize for Fiction
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Shanghai,
cChina,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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Macao,
cChina,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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Hong Kong,
cChina,cEast Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
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cAustralia,c
- 1930-1969