AustLit

This article sketches shifts from postcolonial to diasporic/transnational frameworks and then considers some interactions with ecocriticism. Postcolonial analysis inspects relations between Asia and the Pacific hidden in labels such as 'the Asia Pacific region. Malaysia's investment in oil palm an logging is one keyt component, and colonial attitudes to nature and natives in Hugh Clifford's writing are compared to the environmentalist theme in Sharmini Flint's detective fiction. [from Kunapipi 32,1-2, Abstracts, pp. 245]

Simone Lazaroo's fiction is important in discussions of Australian identity formation for its exploration of acculturated representations of both Asianness and Indigeneity. Her body of work brings to visibility issues of representation, especially the way race and gender are intertwined as artificial constructs of difference within Australian cultural and historical discourse. This article examines how Lazaroo's novels engage in a triangulated contemporary representational politics through the articulation of 'relations of difference' in which characters of Asian, Indigenous and Anglo ancestry interact and react to racialised and gendered inscriptions of otherness. This article explores how Lazaroo critiques the hyper-visuality and sexualising of the Asian female body by the dominant white Anglo Australian society and the concomitant erasure of the Indigenous body and culture in stories of nation in The World Waiting to be Made (1994), The Australian Fiancé (2000), and The Travel Writer (2006). These works signal Lazaroo's ongoing interrogation of the politics of both relations of difference and looking relations. [from Kunapipi 32,1-2, Abstracts, p. 245]

In recent years, Vietnamese-Australian experiences and stories have had greater opportunity to reach Australian readers and viewers, with a growing number of works in English now circulating, including autobiographies, films, anthologies and exhibitions. Literary work in Vietnamese produced by writers in Australia, however, rarely has the chance to move beyond the Vietnamese-reading community. As the most populous of all the Southeast Asian diasporic or migrant groups in Australia, it is not surprising that novels, short stories, essays, poetry and autobiographies are written in Vietnamese and circulate amongst readers of Vietnamese across Australia. Yet this literary activity has gone almost unrecognised by Australian literary scholars writing in English. In this article I draw on research for the AustLit database conducted by myself and Boitran Huynh-Beattie to bring a part of Australia's Vietnamese writing into focus. In particular, the poetry of Uyên Nguyên and Trần Đình Lương provide a basis for commentary upon experiences of displacement and loss experienced by Vietnamese-Australians, as well as raising questions regarding the relationship between diasporic writing and the literature of the host nation. [from Kunapipi 32,1-2, Abstracts, p. 244]

Banana Heart Summer (2005) is a truly original novel. What at first seems to be a collection of exotic recipes turns out to be a touching, funny and elegiac story. The myth of the banana heart inspires twelve-year-old Nenita, who will try to find the perfect balance between love and anger, to appease her family's hunger and, which is even more important, to win her violent mother's love. As she cooks and eats, or dreams of cooking and eating, other love stories unravel in Remedios Street, the street she lives in, significantly placed between an active volcano and a Catholic church. In this paper I analyse the way in which the different symbols that the novel uses, food being one of the most important, contribute to giving it a most original and coherent structure, and also draw the reader's attention towards some of the most outstanding messages that the novel seems to put forward, namely, the need for love and dialogue between different individuals and cultures, and for a multicultural and rather more cohesive model to be advocated in contemporary societies. [from Kunapipi 32,1-2, Abstracts, pp. 242-243]

The Philippines was colonised by Spain for nearly four hundred years (1521-1898), then by America for forty years (1901-1945). As a writer primarily in English, Merlinda Bobis has always 'sensed' that her sensibility has greater affinity with literatures of Hispanic/Latin-American rather than of English/American origins. Is this literary affinity a late ripple of colonisation? On reading Bobis's short stories for the first time, Herrero sensed them as 'so familiar', evoking Spanish writers. This recognition may well reinforce that late ripple, now a liminal space for productive-subversive cultural production, where the creative arc is both disruptive and expansive. Bobis and Herrero explore this liminal space by collaboratively examining and translating (from English to Spanish) Bobis's short story 'Fish-Hair Woman', while referencing its writing as, in fact, the earlier process of 'translation' of a Philippine story of militarism into an English text. They argue that these processes not only employ decolonising strategies, but also extend beyond the postcolonial into a transnational enterprise. [from Kunapipi 32,1-2, Abstracts, pp. 245]