AustLit

'Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiancé and Hsu-Ming Teo's Love and Vertigo intercede in a complex discursive field of race and gender particularly in its present-day postcolonial Asian and Australian manifestation. By taking on the power to name their own subjects/characters, both these authors produce narratives that induce hitherto unknown identifications from their readers. This article shows that Love and Vertigo and The Australian Fiancé provide multiple possibilities for critical engagement. When this engagement occurs in the qualified binary of postcolonial globalisation and its literary representations, these texts provide the opportunity to interrogate the absences and complexities that are subsumed and simplified within that term' (57).