AustLit

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]